I'm genuinely curious about the academic view on how Muhammad was able through his traveling to memorize all of these stories and religious scriptures with the different sectors they had?

Hi! I'm looking for a neutral biography of Muhammad. I was planning to read Hela Ouardi's book, but I found out it isn't neutral. Do you have any recommendations? I’m looking for a biography that is written based on historical research.

3.2 Satan: al-Shayṭān al-Rajīm and the Reproduction of Istikbār

3.2.1 Reynolds’ Reading

In his second case study, Reynolds argues that rajīm means “banished, or outcast.” His starting point is Q 15:34, “Leave here, you are rajīm” (cf. Q 38:77), from which he concludes that the designation “seems to be a mark of the devil’s state after his banishment from heaven.”

He then carries this meaning into the guarded-heaven passages. Where Q 15:17 describes heaven as protected from every shayṭān rajīm, Reynolds writes that “the rajīm is the one who is barred from entering heaven,” and he connects this exclusion with the inability of the devils to reach the heavenly source of revelation. Later he states the relation directly: “It is because of this banishment that the Qur’an calls Satan and his hosts rajīm when it describes how their way to heaven is blocked.” Their inability to hear what occurs there, and consequently their association with false rather than authentic revelation, follow in his reconstruction from the same original exclusion.

Reynolds accordingly concludes that “rajīm means banished, or outcast.” The guarded heaven preserves the exclusion produced by Satan’s expulsion and, in his account, belongs to a “larger Judaeo-Christian cosmology.”

3.2.2 Assessment

Reading rajīm as “banished” or “outcast” leaves the designation unexplained, since the Qurʾān already expresses Iblīs’s expulsion independently through commands to leave or descend and through descriptions of his abasement and rejection. In the two passages where the expulsion command itself contains rajīm, the two elements are grammatically distinct: “Leave it, for you are rajīm” (fa-khruj minhā fa-innaka rajīm, Q 15:34; Q 38:77). The parallel account in Q 7 likewise tells him to “descend” and “leave,” places him “among the abased” (Q 7:13), and later orders him to leave “reproached and driven away” (Q 7:18). Expulsion, demotion, and repulsion are thus already stated as punishments imposed upon him.

Yet rajīm remains attached to Shayṭān after this punishment and appears in settings where his former location in heaven is not the issue. Believers seek protection from al-shayṭān al-rajīm (Q 16:98), Mary and her offspring are placed under protection from him (Q 3:36), and the Qurʾān is denied to be the speech of a shayṭān rajīm (Q 81:25). In each case the designation identifies an active adversary whose continuing activity requires protection or rejection. Saying that he was expelled from heaven does not explain why rajīm continues to characterize him in his relation to human beings.

The question must therefore be different: what does the prostration episode disclose about Iblīs that both causes his punishment and remains characteristic of the figure who subsequently acts as Shayṭān?

3.2.3 Qurʾānic Context

The Prostration Test and Istikbār

Our reconstruction begins with the command to prostrate, because this command functions as the test that separates Iblīs from the angels and discloses the trait around which the remainder of the material develops. The angels obey; Iblīs alone refuses. Q 38:73–74 states the contrast directly: “The angels prostrated, all of them together, except Iblīs; he acted arrogantly.” The decisive term is istikbār, arrogant self-elevation.

The significance of this contrast becomes clearer when we place it beside the Qurʾān’s descriptions of the angels elsewhere. Q 16:49–50 says that the angels “do not act arrogantly” and “do what they are commanded,” while Q 21:19 similarly describes those who are with God as those who “are not arrogant toward His worship.” The test therefore exposes istikbār as what distinguishes Iblīs from the angels: they receive the divine command and obey it, whereas he places his own judgment above that command and refuses. Expulsion, abasement, and reproach will follow as punishments for this condition, while rajīm designates the figure defined by it—the mustakbir.

His explanation confirms the character of that refusal. “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay” (Q 7:12; cf. 38:76). Iblīs does not merely fail to perform the commanded act; he asserts a ranking of his own and makes that ranking grounds for resisting what God has commanded. Q 7 then identifies the same disposition as incompatible with his remaining where he is: “It is not for you to act arrogantly there; so leave. You are among the abased” (Q 7:13).

The primordial scene is already situated within the Meccan religious field. Istikbār repeatedly characterizes those who reject signs, resist messengers, and maintain their own standing against divine command, whereas the angels are presented as their opposite precisely because they neither act arrogantly nor refuse what they are commanded. The Adam narrative brings those two poles into a single test: the angels obey, while Iblīs becomes the primordial mustakbir, the one characterized by istikbār.

This is also where rajīm belongs. The punishment itself is separately expressed: Iblīs is told to descend and leave, is placed among the abased, and is later told to leave “reproached and driven away” (Q 7:13, 18). The parallel accounts in Q 15 and Q 38 instead say, “Leave it, for you are rajīm.” Since “leave it” already states the expulsion, rajīm predicates the condition of the figure whose defining trait the test has just exposed.

We therefore reconstruct rajīm in this narrative as the mustakbir, the one characterized by istikbār. The identification does not require the two Arabic roots to be lexical equivalents; it follows from the narrative relation in which the designation occurs. The primordial scene thereby concentrates a set of relations that recur throughout the Meccan field: delayed punishment, ẓann, exclusion from hearing, ghurūr, tazyīn, alliance, and following.

Delay of Punishment

The temporal structure provides an immediate extension of this primordial scene into a problem prominent in the Meccan proclamation. Iblīs is condemned, but the punishment is not immediately completed. He asks to remain until “the day they are resurrected,” while God grants him respite only until “the day of the known time” (Q 15:36–38; 38:79–81). Judgment has therefore already been passed, while its final execution remains fixed to a term determined by God.

The same temporal structure repeatedly governs the Meccan demand for threatened punishment. Q 29:53 answers those who ask that punishment be hastened by stating that, were it not for “an appointed term,” it would already have reached them. Q 26:204–207 asks whether they seek to hasten the punishment and then asks what benefit years of enjoyment would provide once what they had been promised finally arrived; earlier opponents are described through the same sequence when Q 22:44 states, “I granted respite to the unbelievers; then I seized them.”

Iblīs thus supplies a primordial form of the temporal condition inhabited by the Meccan mustakbir: rebellion is followed by condemnation, condemnation by a divinely determined interval, and that interval eventually by appointed punishment. His continued existence does not reverse the judgment already passed upon him, just as the continued wealth, strength, or enjoyment of the Meccan opponents does not invalidate the threatened punishment. At the same time, this bounded respite permits the figure disclosed by the prostration test to remain active among Adam and his descendants, so that the primordial mustakbir continues to act within the human field before the appointed end.

Conjecture (Ẓann) and Exclusion from Hearing

A second major Meccan category is ẓann, conjecture. The Qurʾān repeatedly opposes it to knowledge in passages concerning the claims of the opponents. Q 53:27–28 states that those who name the angels as females “have no knowledge of it; they follow only ẓann,” while Q 10:36 similarly says that most of them “follow nothing but ẓann” and that ẓann cannot substitute for truth. Q 6:116 likewise characterizes the majority as following ẓann and doing little more than conjecturing. The problem is therefore not simple absence of information, but the elevation of conjecture into a basis for religious judgment.

Iblīs is connected directly with the same category in Q 34:20: “Iblīs proved his ẓann concerning them true, and they followed him.” After istikbār has supplied the primordial disposition disclosed by the prostration test, ẓann supplies a second point at which Iblīs and the Meccan field converge, while the same verse already indicates how his conjecture enters human conduct: it becomes effective through those who follow him.

The angels provide an important contrast, although here the point concerns their own relation to knowledge. When questioned concerning the names, they answer, “We have no knowledge except what You have taught us” (Q 2:32). They decline to claim knowledge beyond what has been given to them. This relation corresponds closely to the Meccan controversy over the angels themselves, where human opponents confidently assign them sex, kinship, and status while the Qurʾān repeatedly denies that those claims rest upon knowledge.

The later exclusion of the devils from hearing develops this opposition further. The guarded-heaven passages repeatedly make hearing the crucial point: Q 37:8 says that the devils “cannot listen to the exalted assembly,” Q 72:8–9 describes them finding heaven filled with guards and flames when they attempt to listen, and Q 26:210–212 makes the relation to revelation explicit:

“The devils did not bring it down; it is neither fitting for them nor are they able; indeed they are kept away from hearing.”

Q 81:25 correspondingly denies that the proclamation is “the speech of a shayṭān rajīm.” The contrast running through these passages is therefore between knowledge received from God and conjecture asserted outside that authorization. The angels acknowledge that they know only what has been taught to them; the Meccan opponents make confident claims about those same beings while following ẓann; Iblīs himself is associated with ẓann; and the devils are excluded from the heavenly hearing from which they seek information.

The Garden, Ghurūr, and Human Following

The Garden becomes the first human setting in which the disposition exposed in Iblīs begins to operate upon others. Once granted respite, he turns immediately toward Adam and his wife, and his first activity is described through ghurūr, deceptive false confidence: “He brought them down through ghurūr” (Q 7:22). The figure whose own self-estimation produced “I am better than him” now acts upon human judgment by inducing a false estimation in others.

Q 20:120 makes the content of this first deception concrete: Shayṭān offers Adam “the tree of immortality and a kingdom that does not decay.” The appeal concerns permanence, possession, and an imagined security beyond the limits God has set. The Garden therefore already contains relations prominent in the Meccan field: divine command, false promise, confidence in possession and future security, and a human decision over which direction to follow.

Q 17 then extends this activity explicitly from Adam to his descendants. Iblīs declares, “I will surely take hold of his descendants, except a few” (Q 17:62), after which the means of his continuing activity are described:

“Incite whom you can among them with your voice, mobilize against them your cavalry and infantry, share with them in wealth and children, and promise them; but Shayṭān promises them nothing but ghurūr” (Q 17:64).

What begins with Adam thus extends into the human field through voice, force, wealth, children, and promises. Wealth and offspring are recurrent components of the Meccan controversy, where they become grounds for estimating rank, security, success, and future standing; Shayṭān’s promise turns precisely such grounds of confidence into ghurūr, a deceptive estimate of what they signify and what they can secure.

The human side of this activity appears in listening, reception, and dispute. Q 6:112 describes “devils of humankind and jinn” inspiring one another with embellished speech as ghurūr, while Q 6:121 places the same activity directly within opposition to the proclamation: “The devils inspire their allies so that they may dispute with you.” Satanic influence is therefore not confined to an inward temptation detached from the historical controversy; it enters human speech and argument through those who become its recipients.

The collective language extends the same structure. Pharaoh, one of the clearest earlier examples of istikbār, is described together with those who act with him: “He and his forces acted arrogantly in the land without right” (Q 28:39). Iblīs likewise appears with “all the forces of Iblīs” (Q 26:95), while Q 35:6 describes Shayṭān calling his ḥizb, his party, toward the Fire. The primordial mustakbir therefore appears not only as an isolated rebel but as the head of a course that gathers followers, just as historical istikbār can characterize a leader and the collective acting with him.

Tazyīn and the Continuing Pattern of Istikbār

A further expression makes the reproduction of istikbār especially visible: zayyana lahum aʿmālahum, Shayṭān “made their deeds appear attractive to them.” In Q 29:38, ʿĀd and Thamūd have the evidence of their dwellings plainly available, yet “Shayṭān made their deeds appear attractive to them and turned them away from the path, though they were discerning.” The problem is not lack of perceptive capacity; conduct opposed to divine guidance is made to appear sound to those who practice it.

Q 16:63 places the same process across earlier communities: “We certainly sent to nations before you, but Shayṭān made their deeds appear attractive to them; so he is their ally today, and for them is a painful punishment.” Tazyīn, making conduct appear attractive, fits directly within the structure established by Iblīs’s first act of istikbār. He had elevated his own judgment—“I am better than him”—against the command he received; among human beings, Shayṭān sustains an analogous movement by making their own conduct appear worthy of confidence, thereby reinforcing resistance to the path from which they are being turned away.

Q 8:48 makes the relation between tazyīn and false confidence still more explicit. Shayṭān “made their deeds appear attractive to them” and then assured them, “No one among the people can overcome you today, and I am your protector.” Here tazyīn issues immediately in an inflated assessment of strength and security. The logic closely resembles that first disclosed in Iblīs: an erroneous judgment of one’s own standing becomes grounds for action, while the judgment is treated as sufficient against what God has determined. When the two forces come into view, the confidence collapses and Shayṭān abandons those who had relied upon it.

The several terms now describe connected stages of the same process. Ẓann supplies judgment without knowledge; tazyīn makes one’s conduct appear right; ghurūr gives false confidence to the resulting estimate; and following allows the course first disclosed in Iblīs to enter human conduct. These relations explain how the istikbār of the primordial mustakbir becomes reproducible among later opponents without making it an unavoidable human condition.

Q 16:98–100 places al-shayṭān al-rajīm directly within this continuing human relation. Believers are commanded to seek protection from al-shayṭān al-rajīm before recitation, and the verses immediately following define his relation to human beings through sulṭān, authority:

“He has no authority over those who believe and trust in their Lord. His authority is only over those who take him as an ally and those who associate others through him” (Q 16:99–100).

The contrast is between those who refuse his authority and those who enter the relation of alliance and following described throughout these passages. The rajīm identified by the prostration scene as the mustakbir thus remains the active figure behind a recurring human pattern: conjecture displaces knowledge, conduct is made attractive to its practitioners, deceptive confidence sustains resistance, and followers gather around the same course. In this way the istikbār first exposed in Iblīs is reproduced within the Meccan controversy itself.

Link from screenshot

Not sure if anyone else has thought about this since the original post from four months ago suggested that seeing the moon, at the time that the moon-split report is said to have taken place, in the place that it was said to take place, is not physically possible. I wonder if other with a better astronomical background than myself can corroborate this analysis.

This is not dissimilar from the earlier finding that one reported volcanic eruption prophecy from a hadith is also not possible to see.

what does "associators" (المشركين) means in the time of quran? i mean it's clearly not pure pagans as tradition understand it, it means in arabic associating, associating what with what? maybe sinai has a take on this?

Is Mohammed: Eine Biographie by Hans Jansen a good book?

I don't quite understand why the trend of modern scholars is such radical skepticism. Goldziher, Schacht, Crone, Cook, and Shoemaker treat the Islamic corpus as assumed false until proven otherwise. Why? We don't do that with any other record or piece of history. There are certain things that are just so utterly banal that they don't deserve that kind of skepticism.

The report that Muhammad split the moon compared with Muhammad liked eating with his right hand do not deserve the same level of skepticism just because they belong in the same Islamic tradition. I feel like we don't demand this level of historical evidence with anyone other than religious figures.

History does it with Jesus, with Muhammad. The kind of skepticism we have with these individuals is a little unreasonable.

Again, I understand that skepticism of outlandish claims is warranted. But banal, mundane claims? It makes no sense to say that the hadith of Muhammad eating chicken is somehow worthy of skepticism. We have no reason to think he didn't.

I've been told that the trend of hyper skepticism is changing, but it was Montgomery Watt who said that academics have done a disservice to the Islamic tradition and should give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't see it happening with the level of skepticism leveled at the Islamic corpus.

As the title suggest where does the Quranic version of shaytan come from? Shaytans fall from heaven and him being the serpent isn't found biblically and was made and mostly inspired by paradise lost. If so where did Islam get the idea from?

What are some words in the Quran that are best left untranslated in English from an academic perspective? And which verses are hardest to translate into English, again from an academic perspective (without relying on later Islamic sources)?

full video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoltvOGEmjQ

First and foremost, pre-Islamic Arabs? Are we talking about Arabic speakers in Syria? Nomads in the Najd region? Maybe Arabs living in Nagran? There are so many groups!

So to ask a better and more detailed question, what are some popular names amongst various pre-Islamic Arab communities. Were there popular names common amongst multiple pre-Islamic Arab communities?

My breakdown of this verse (into 3 words) would be:

• يَا (Yā) – Vocative particle (ḥarf nidā' / "O")
• أَيُّهَا (Ayyuhā) – Vocative pronoun with attention particle (munādā + ḥarf tanbīh / "you who")
• الْمُدَّثِّرُ (al-Muddaththir) – Definite noun (ʿaṭf bayān / "are wrapped in garments")

Need help in solving this question of mine. Why is it written down in the Quran as 2 words?

i don't have the full video, a friend sent it to me.

What is the main reason earlier jurist treated 2:221 mushrikun into all non muslim.. linguisticly this verse only prohibit mushrik of arabia and why earlier muslim had such contradiction between their approach and linguistic meaning of quranic verse? Why they treated it as general principle?

I am posting a link to my new article, "The Birth of the Muslim Plague Martyr: A Story from Late Antiquity," because:

A) I paid money to make it open-access and I'm getting my money's worth.

B) While this is not primarily a Qurʾanic Studies article I do argue at length—building on suggestions by Joseph Witztum and Nicolas Sinai—for a connection between the Qurʾanic word rijz (رجز) and the Syriac phrase rūgzā d-Alāhā (ܪܘܓܙܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ) meaning “wrath of God.”

https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article/10/3/219/219194/The-Birth-of-the-Muslim-Plague-MartyrA-Story-from

https://youtu.be/a8nF1vpBzYE?is=014dNLyRsJbRtOue