Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

62 t CHAPTER THREE
“exalted cranes”—the phrase may have been part of a pagan
prayer—is difficult for us, but its main point was not lost on the
Quraysh: if the divinity of the so-called daughters of Allah was not
explicitly confirmed, they were certainly intermediaries, powerful
intercessors with God. On hearing this revelation, the Quraysh
prostrated themselves on the spot and worshiped at the side of
Muhammad.
This happy solution disappeared as abruptly as it had appeared.
Muhammad, the story continues, immediately began to doubt the
provenance of the apparent revelation, and God responded with a
new and authentic one to replace the old. After “the third, the
other,” the Quran says, “Do you have male (children) and He female?
That indeed would be unfair. They [the goddesses in question]
are but names that you have named, you and your fathers,
for which God has revealed no warrant” (53:21–23). This was not
the end of this curious business. The Quran felt some need to explain,
hence Quran 22:52–53 about God’s practice of permitting
such a thing as a test of faith. Had not God himself done the same
in the Bible’s story of Abraham, where the Lord commanded the
binding of Isaac for sacrifice and then canceled his own command?
It was apparently a telling point, and one of the earliest Jewish
scholars of the Islamic era, Saadya Gaon (d. 942), took some pains
to make clear to his fellow Jews that God had not commanded the
actual sacrifice of Isaac but merely that the child be “reserved” for
such.
Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension
On the Quran’s own testimony, Muhammad stoutly refused to perform—or
have God perform—miracles on his behalf, despite the
fact that the Quraysh demanded such as verification of the truth of
his message. At one point he did relent, and in the face of charges
of being misguided or misled, he did refer, very obliquely and enigmatically,
to certain supernatural visions he had experienced
(Quran 53:1–18). There is another verse, however—Quran 17:1—
that suggested to later Muslims that some other, more circumstan-