Satanic Verses Satanic Verses The Satanic Verses incident, known as "qissat al-gharaniq" ("Story of the Cranes"), is the name given to the occasion on which the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, is said to have mistaken the words of "satanic suggestion" for divine revelation. Narratives involving the alleged verses (or verse) can be read in, among other places, the biographies of Muhammad by al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa'd (who was a scribe of Waqidi) and Ibn Ishaq (as reconstructed by Alfred Guillaume), as well as the tafsir of al-Tabarī. The majority of Muslim scholars have rejected the historicity of the incident on the basis of the
The Satanic Verses controversy in January 1989 when some of its members organised a public book-burning of "The Satanic Verses", evoking as the journalist Robert Winder recalled "images of medieval (not to mention Nazi) intolerance". In February, when the US edition was published, a new round of reviews and criticism began. March 1989 saw it banned in Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore. The last nation to ban the book was Venezuela, in June 1989. In the United States, the FBI was notified of 78 threats to bookstores in early March 1989, thought to be a small proportion of the total number of threats.