By Shireen Qudosi


Any creative work on Islam that skews the lens, like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, will struggle to be understood given that Islam itself isn’t understood. Most Muslims haven't even read the Quran in their native language, let alone read a book critical of Islam. Islamic mysticism observes that it takes a lifetime (roughly 40 years) to understand the depth and mystery of the Quran. In my own 22-year journey, the Quran has been a spiritual mirror in which what I see is a reflection of where I am at in my own evolutionary journey. Like all that is sacred, the Quran requires another eye to see beyond the veil of language. She requires the eye of the heart. Absent of that, Islam is a belief system vulnerable to a mercurial landscape that even after 1400 years isn’t settled within itself. The landscape is pockmarked with the aftermath of religion at war with itself, and with those who venture into its territory without bending the knee. Refuge can be found but refuge isn’t at the heart of this war zone.

The war is a symptom of the curse, a frequency of distortion with a jarring impact on the landscape of faith — a landscape that isn’t territory in the conventional sense but a wave frequency of reality, a twisting, bending, rising and falling sheet of song — a musical plane. A playful evolutionary journey of a vibrating universe pulsing with the chorus of all life. The curse is the distortion of that song into the entombment of life, of the mysteries, severing the possibility of a world rich with revelation that is our human birthright.

As it stands, the mainstream Muslim view of Islam and the Quran is polluted by the jarring noise of a ruling class that mocks the song no less than a satirical book that jests at belief. The ruling class is a self-appointed authority benefiting from controlling the masses through the voodoo of religious identity. Instead of faith, we have fundamentalists pushing buttons that drive the confusion around what is and isn't Islam. We also have generations upon generations believing whatever they're told, abandoning one of the greatest spiritual gifts Islam offers — that there is no master between you and God. But there is mastery, and that is turning the ear to listen for the songs that are of God.

Two generations apart or 56 generations apart, Islam is suspended in a distortion under the spell of the illusion of timelessness. The illusion of timelessness is the certainty among followers that religion hasn’t changed. It has, many times. There is another kind of timelessness at play in Islam, but this isn’t it.

Translations of the Quran shift according to the agenda of its translator and/or publisher. In the five copies of the Quran I have from various publishers and translators over the years, there are about an average of three different translations for any given passage. The slightest shift in a word can change its meaning.

Many self-appointed gurus, imams, and other charlatan mediums of divinity also change the meaning of the Quran based on their own myopic agenda. In sermons given at mosques, in gatherings, or online, “scholars” and imams with minimal knowledge (or more importantly, direct experience with the mystery of the diving), offer dull and flattened takes on religion. Given that Prophet Muhammad’s revelations were first compiled following an oral tradition hundreds of years before the first Quran was compiled, and given that the faith is often still understood through oral traditions (especially in a digitized age), what is spoken matters

They have treated Islam as a prostitute, abusing the religion to suit the needs of the hour whenever certain groups find it advantageous to market the religion. For example, the question of whether Islam is a feminist faith (that has in recent years been paraded by some groups) is completely out of context with what the faith actually says or suggests. Across a broader spectrum of the Muslim population, there’s also the practice of casting out ‘undesirable’ Muslims. Another example: the standard practice of our generation is to push Muslims who are seen as being bad for the brand, so to speak, from the faith. Instead of exorcising within us what stirs a sense of supremacy, creating a fantasy that we can control who belongs in the religion, the promise of Islam degrades into little more than another exclusive club. All of these practices also change the religion.

What is and what isn’t from one minute to the next was a legacy set up through the account of the Satanic verses. Whether it was intentionally done or not so we would have this very future conversation, no one will ever know.

Central to the idea of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is the sermon by the same name that the Prophet Muhammad allegedly gave in which he honored three pagan goddesses: Al-‘Uzza, Al-Lat, and Manat.

"Have you thought of al-Lāt and al-'Uzzá? And about the third deity, al-Manāt?”
(The Star, Quran 53:19–20)

The next line, removed from modern Quran editions, is said to be Satan in an attempt to derail the message:

"These are the exalted gharāniq [cranes], whose intercession is hoped for."

The whole question of the verses puts into null and void the assertion that the Quran as a text is infallible because it hasn’t changed. The story, its inclusion or removal even in the oral tradition before the Quran was compiled proves that there was an edit.

Whether the question of the Satanic verses (the Story of the Cranes) even ever existed is a gift of vulnerability. It forces the religion to remain vulnerable, and that vulnerability is an invitation into faith.

Among some Islamic historians and academics, the belief is that Islam is what Muslims do. If that’s the case, Islam is not a monolith by any means; it is a swarm, the murmurations of starlings cascading through the sky. This is both beautiful and terrible; which it is, at any given point, up to us. Beautiful because Islam as the murmuration of starlings restores Islam as something organic and breathing, a song of ebb and flow.

And yet terrible because without the sacred eye of the heart to see beyond the rigidity of identity and agenda, it makes Islam more vulnerable. Yet, vulnerability is exactly what we need.

Becoming vulnerable requires a devotion to faith and courage. The vulnerability to stay with the song through its entirety without looking for the finality of arrival. The vulnerability to allow dissolution: the dissolution of our ideas, our preconceptions, our pride, our certainty. Vulnerability is the initiation into the Mystery of God — the highest sacred ground for believers.

We need vulnerability to look at a thing truthfully with patience while the song dances across the realms of possibility. How would vulnerability reshape Islam? How would critics respond to Rushdie when they held their identity with vulnerability, rather than seeing vulnerability as a weakness that needs a show of force to hide behind? How would Islam’s earliest followers, its leaders, and theologians hold lightly the question of faith? How can we hold it lightly today?

Vulnerability didn’t come naturally to me. Like a stone softened over time with repeated exposure to the sea, time and tide brought a relentless storm of challenges to my own illusions. What triggers you, what challenges you, and what forces you to evolve and adapt, are all gifts if we allow them to be. Even the idea of a Salman Rushdie and the controversy of his book, and more specifically the controversy over the existence of Satanic verses, are all invitations to fall into a vulnerability. To be vulnerable is to be in flow with the divine rhythm beyond the tinkering and plotting of the mind. That which triggers us the most as Muslims is an invitation into shifting as a collective into a new form. Islam is always changing but by force of direction. Instead, I invite us to let go and allow the beauty of the faith to unfold without coercion or manipulation. An Islam that is responsive and vulnerable, is a wonder like a murmuration of starlings. Each starling in a murmuration is suspended in vulnerability, part of the mystical kite in the sky. Instead of the murmuration, we have the noise of a thousand voices with no unified song, no unified compass.

What if the Prophet Muhammad held the Story of the Cranes lightly? How would that have changed Islam? We would have had a softer faith but would that faith have survived time and the brutality of a desert culture?

Did Prophet Muhammad recognize the three pagan goddesses initially, referring to them as cranes into the original revelation, only to later renounce the verse as being influenced by the Devil?

The entire pulse of the question of Islam hinges on this question. Our understanding of Islam in the greater breadth of the sacred feminine hinges on our understanding. The first step in reclaiming our faith is to reclaim this story — the heart of the controversy, the site where the symbol of the divine feminine aspect of God is concealed by the very faith that was meant to birth it as the crowning of human spirituality. Through its reclamation, we strip the conversation of the taboo that wards people away from the intimacy the conversation calls for.

The verses were only later titled “satanic.” In the early years, Muslim scholars referred to the question as “The Story of the Cranes.” Later, Orientalists turned the story of the cranes into what it’s known as now: The Satanic Verses. In 1858, an Orientalist (a person who studies the Eastern world) by the name of Sir William Muir first used the term ‘satanic verses’ in his book Life of Mahomet (Muhammad). Despite all our protests against Orientalism and the British upper-crust elite not understanding the mysteries of the East, today the dominant narrative about the most contested story in Islam is told by a British aristocrat. The foundation of the Islamic faith is still a largely unexcavated archeological site that deserves our eyes, for a new generation of voices to dig into the soil and unearth a faith that is of their own.

The most thorough and articulate understanding of the Story of the Cranes through the faculty of mind was delivered by Shahab Ahmed, a Pakistani scholar of Islam at Harvard University (May his memory be a blessing). In his book Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam, Ahmed wrote:

"The facticity and historicity of the Satanic verses incident are today (with a few maverick exceptions) universally rejected by Muslims of all sects and interpretative movements ...routinely on pain of heresy (kufr)—that is, on pain of being deemed not a Muslim."

Ahmed isn’t saying it didn’t happen. He’s saying a culture of forced exclusion tends to yield consensus. Nobody wants to be kicked out of the club, so to speak. The popular belief now is that The Story of the Cranes didn’t take place. Yet, it wasn’t always rejected as never having happened, as Ahmed explains. Across the first 200 years of Islam's origin story, Muslims believed that the event did exist:

"This Islamic orthodoxy of the rejection of the facticity of the Satanic verses incident has not always obtained. The fundamental finding of the present volume is that in the first two centuries of Islam, Muslim attitudes to the Satanic verses incident were effectively the direct opposite of what they are today. This volume studies no less than fifty historical reports that narrate the Satanic verses incident and that were transmitted by the first generations of Muslims. This study of the Satanic verses incident in the historical memory of the early Muslim community will demonstrate in detail that the incident constituted an absolutely standard element in the memory of early Muslims of the life of their Prophet. In other words, the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact. As far as the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community in the first two hundred years was concerned, the Messenger of God did indeed, on at least one occasion, mistake words of Satanic suggestion as being of Divine inspiration. For the early Muslims, the Satanic verses incident was something entirely thinkable.”

Continuing to speak on the trajectory of Muslim belief in the “Satanic verses,” in Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses, Ahmed notes that by the 14th-15th century, the scholarly Muslim consensus was that the event never took place. Reputable scholars as early as the 6th century had already begun refuting the story. However, Ibn Taymiyyah’s conclusion along with his weight in the conversation at large is of immeasurable importance. Considered one of the most influential medieval Islamic theologians, Ibn Taymiyyah held an Aristotelian view in that everything had a function. Speaking to Ibn Taymiyyah’s verdict on the question of the Satanic verses, Ahmed explains how after weighing all the arguments and facts.

“Ibn Taymiyyah, then, accepted the historicity of the Satanic verses incident as something wholly consonant with Muhammad’s mission, and identified this position as being that of the Quran and of the early Muslims. The essence of his [Ibn Taymiyyah’s] argument is that the incident [of the “Satanic verses”] cannot be rejected on the basis of weak isnād [tradition established through a chain of human report] because the transmission of the reports is sound; and that the incident does not undermine the concept of ‘ismah [incorruptible innocence or fallibility] because Prophets are not infallible in the transmission of the Divine Revelation but are rather Protected only from any error coming to be permanently established in Divine Revelation. Indeed for Ibn Taymiyyah, the incident presents the strongest evidence of Muhammad’s veracity and reliability as it demonstrates the Prophet’s willingness to faithfully transmit Divine Revelations, even at risk of incriminating himself by admitting to error.”

Most importantly, Taymiyyah invokes the possibility that prophets are not infallible, and makes the distinction between prophet and message. It’s a stunning proposal and one that I’ve attempted to make in my time, in my small contribution to the conversation on a public forum.

The Message is separate from the vessel who delivers it.
What is of God is distinct from what is of Man.

There is God’s Islam, the Islam of the al-Lah —

and then there’s Man’s islam, the Islam of the vessels, the believers.

The two are not the same.

Perhaps if that message had been delivered in a beard and robe — and I been a man in the costume of religion with an accent — it would have been seen as oriental enough, religious enough, authoritative enough to be heard. In its own way that has been a gift; it’s forced me to keep forging myself, to go deeper into receiving revelations, to become very comfortable in being apart from the world of men, to be (as the saying goes) in the world but not of it. Studying the question of the Satanic verses (The Story of the Cranes), in tandem with deep reflections and opening up to dreams and revelations summoned a greater conversation of what it means to shed the skin of what is older to arrive at what is beautiful.

And what is beautiful? What would have been the most elegant way to integrate paganism without equivocating Islam with paganism? If the birds are seen as messengers in Islamic culture, and cross the mythology of faith, then that acknowledgment of cranes as emissaries is neither a power conflict nor an undermining of divine authority. Acknowledging the verses as they stood and reinforcing the message through the example of other instances in faith and history where birds served God, would have been a real first olive branch of peace toward interfaith. It would have helped dissolve the tones of supremacy that spurred a culture of violence that we see today held by the worst of believers.  Integrating the Story of the Cranes would have created a culture of cooperation — a distinctly feminine trait.

Instead, what the goddesses represented of the divine feminine was killed off in tandem with the worldwide history of oppression against the sacred feminine. It’s a curse that still touches us today but as an infant faith just 1400 years old, it haunts women and minority faith groups in that religion more than anyone else. This is why elegance in prophethood matters. This is why elegance is important. Elegance is a mirror of the divine harmony of God. The duty of a prophet is not just to recite or reveal the Message, but to use the unique skill and talent of the human vessel to deliver the message in the most refined and beautiful way possible. And if that cannot be done, then you’re either not the right vessel or the time isn’t right to reveal the Message in a way that is incomplete to the detriment of followers but also (perhaps even more importantly) to those outside the label Islam — to those who are more vulnerable because they’re not afforded the same protection those under the brand receive.

Some might now say, “Well, what’s done is done. You can’t undo it.” Of course we can. The entire scholarly debate among a history of respected Muslim theologians is signaling the flow of how faith was interpreted in one way or another across time, but also through varying perspectives at the same time. There is no one iron-clad way to see any of the religion, despite how much that narrative is pushed onto us now from those within and outside of Islam.

How truth is arrived at, whether early Muslims believed the Satanic verses (The Story of the Cranes) occurred or didn’t, tells a story how a swarm of earlier Muslims respond to a change in direction one way or the other. There is so much richness in that dialogue. There's a difference of opinion, a debate among the earliest theologians before the term theology even existed in the way it does now. Then, the scholar was a person of devoted interest and commitment with integrity. There wasn’t always consensus and at large there was respect for the back and forth that we see diminishing in today’s dialogues — all notes in a song, a song that is systematically crust so it is just one note, one dulcet, wailing, lifeless tone. But in the Story of the Cranes we have a song that invites a swarm.

In the murmuration of starlings, the movement of the entire body of the flock is directed by the relational movement of the individual birds. Starlings are small black birds that fly in coordination create spectacular dance in the sky, moving like a large body of rising and descending, spiraling and separating in forms over and over again with poetic freedom. To see it is to believe magic exists in the world. Like a spider’s body that feels the movement of the entire web as an extension of itself, so does the movement of a nearby starling navigate the next one, and so on and so on, creating the symphony of song.

If we can imagine, the question for us is how have the same relational shifts without deviations in belief creating two entirely different strains of religion. For those who want the older islam as long as it isn’t violating free will, there’s the old order of Man’s Islam. But for those who want something more, something alive, there is Allah's Islam — an Allah inclusive of the nature of the divine feminine within its celestial realm alongside angels and jinns. What a magical faith that could be, a new song, a medicine to Islamic orthodoxy. Orthodoxy leaves no room for wilderness It leaves no room for wonderment.

Wonder requires curiosity, including curiosity for what is beyond ourselves. There could have been a curiosity for pagans. Through the accounts surrounding the Story of the Cranes, the pagans at the time of the revelation didn't respond to the original verse by putting the goddesses on equal footing with the one God. Instead, they recognized God as supreme and were content that the goddesses were given some small recognition to be added messengers of prayers to God. For that, they were happy to follow prophet Muhammad.

To then later attribute the passage to demonic influence is to demonize an entire set of believers. To later act like the incident never happened is to gaslight all those who believe that there is more to the world than just one God and all this prophets, in what is a very simplistic way of communicating the realm of Spirit. The world of spirit works in ways even the best of us cannot possibly have mapped out. Yet, time and time again we see what happens to people (men or women) who don't believe the realm of spirit is as linear and categorical as we've made the world of man. Such people are called heretic, the devil, witch, sorcerer, mischief maker, madman.

Man or woman, outliers are always going to called heretics and ill magicians. That's the nature of the human behavior when the reptilian part of our brain takes over, the part that sees novelty as a threat. Even prophets are no exception to this patterning. In Surah 51 of the Quran, Scattering [Winds], we read of how the Pharaoh called Moses a sorcerer or maybe a madman:

“There is another sign in Moses:
We sent him to Pharaoh with clear authority.
Pharaoh turned away with his supporters, saying,
‘This is a sorcerer, or maybe a madman.’”
(Quran 51:38)

Truth stands; the Lie will not. The rest of the passage speaks to an elemental faith, a natural world that served the Lord of All to destroy that which cannot stand:

“…so We seized him and his forces
and threw them into the sea: he was to blame.
There is another sign…
We sent the life-destroying wind against them
and it reduced everything it came up against to shreds.”
(Quran 51:40-42)

The world is no different today; we only perceive it with less magic because of the illusion of our cleverness. In just the winter of this New Year of 2023, a red rose blossomed in the sky. — the symbol in the heavens of the blossoming of the sacred feminine. A red rose is a well-established symbol for the sacred feminine, and something that I believe Islam intended to also slip through the door when the culture refers to women as flowers that deserve to be protected. The red rose of the Virgin Mother (the most revered woman in Islam) and of Mary Magdalene (one of the most revered women in the tradition of the sacred feminine), is still very much part of our live today through mysterious working.

As scientists explained the formation of a rose-colored cloud in the Bursa province of Turkey, when “strong winds blow across complex terrains, causing the water vapor in the air mass to alternatively compress, then decompress, and thus condense into shapes which roughly mirror the terrain beneath.”

A rising and falling song of a strong wind
held a mirror through a cloud, the expression of the terrain below,
the blossoming of the sacred heart in the vessel of the sacred feminine —
the Red Rose of Mary.
Mary — not a name, but a title: Priestess.
The red rose is the sacred eye of the divine feminine, the eye of the heart.
Even the heavens are singing of the song of the blooming winter rose,
the return of magic in the hearts of women.
The sacred eye that returns to the world in its darkest hour.
To ease the wound of a complex terrain called the Earth.

At any other time in history, I would have been killed for saying any of this — all of this. The message of the sacred heart, the completion of faith, could only be revealed when the Earth was shifting into another form. We are here as doulas to help birth another world that is finally ready to shed the skin of the old story. In the old story, women weren’t the only ones who when piercing the veil were condemned as witches or sorcerers. It happened to prophets too. If even prophets are condemned, so will others across life’s most mundane moments, let alone when the narrative of illusion is challenged. 

In times past before the world of magic was masked with a thick primer coat of rationalism that reduced a wild and beautiful world into a series of causes and effects — a rose blooming in the sky in the midst of winter would be both a miracle and an omen. As much as the world of people is coated with the stain of primer (or a primed story), the other world still exists for those who see its magic where it blooms, even in the garden of the celestial realm like the sky.

The omen is of change. But change in this world will not come about without our cooperation. We are called to cooperate. to usher a new world through raising our states of consciousness, by becoming more aware of our true selves and our true home in the God-heart. In the God-heart our identities from the old world dissolve and we become like messengers between realms, carriers of a message. We deliver that message through our entire being. Our entire lives can be a pilgrimage, a holy journey. That dissolution is the ritual of sacred love — a love that isn’t segmented and transactional but a love that is of service. A love that illuminates the golden heart, bringing our entire being into alignment.

In alignment, we wear the crown of the divine message and stand as kings, queens, and masters of a celestial territory serving the Lord of All Realms. We bow to no one except the One God, a god who doesn’t command us to bend the knee but invites us to flow in the Divine River called The Mystery, a channel beyond time and all across space.

We are invited to become alchemists, magicians of elemental change who transform the world with their wand, whether that wand is a pen, a brush, a staff, or a sword. A writer’s pen is a wand, and so is an artist’s brush. The sword of a warrior can act as a wand, as can the staff of a wizard. Moses’ walking stick was a wand. A child’s perennial pointer finger drawing in the air to conjure the imagination is also a wand. The exact shape of a wand is of far less important than the intention of the alchemist and his or her mastery over the art of transformation that can turn the mundane or the profane into the sacred. This is alchemy.

Crowned through divine love and anointed by an alchemical change, many will rise a knight in the ceremony of the chorus of voices that sing the Song of the human heart, a majestic note in the Song of God. If we have done the work, if our faith has been met with metal, we follow a higher law that will never bend the knee to the whims of men. We are carriers of the divine message. They cannot distort a Message that arrives on the wings of a swarm. They cannot kill us this time. We are sure of our faith, we enter the war over human control — a war that began long before remembered time. We enter it as a legion that is the Holy Night. What is of the trickster, of illusion, control, and deception, has no power over the Dark. We are the Dark, and we’re Awakening.

There are no two sides.
There is only absolute freedom or there is control.

It’s time to become the fall of Night, to become the hunter that sees sharply in the dark. It’s time to go in for the kill. It’s time to stir from sleep the erotic power of death and become of Death so we may discern what needs to be killed and where it hides. It’s time to become a huntress.

If reading these words has ushered a stillness in your being,
If silence falls over you as if you entered solemn ground,
If you feel the rush of blood coursing through your body and crashing against every threshold,
If you can feel your heart beating in your chest,
If your heart carries the memory of hundreds of brothers drumming swords to shield,
If you feel your breath deepen, slow and paced while your eyes focus, narrowing on the mark like an arrow being drawn in to bow, like the animal that recoils before it strikes,
If your entire life feels the passion and silence of that moment before an attack,
Then you’re here to hunt. You were always there to hunt It — The Distortion.

Your ceremony is now, standing in the presence of the drumbeat of your human heart. You bow to the temple of the heart. Your oath is to the memory of the sacred, thick in the marrow of your bones. It’s time to sink into the Dark and dissolve what isn’t yours, to cut every tie that binds you and rise as a knight.

Rise as Night.