Review of Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam by Shahab Ahmed

Shahab Ahmed was, quite simply, the greatest Islamic studies scholar of my generation. I first learned of his work in about 1998, when he was writing his dissertation at Princeton University on the historical incident of the Satanic verses, and I was writing my dissertation at the University of Toronto on contemporary Muslim reactions to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. On my bookshelf is an autographed photocopy of his dissertation, “The Satanic Verses Incident in the Memory of the Early Muslim Community: A Study of the Earliest riwāyahs and Their isnāds,” completed in 1999 under the direction of Michael Cook. I first met Shahab a few years later at McGill University at the Institute for Islamic Studies, which was established by my mentor, Wilfred Cantwell Smith. I was struck by the softness and politeness of his speech, and over the years learned about his incredible linguistic abilities. He spoke and worked in over a dozen languages, as did Wilfred. Shahab’s death from leukemia in 2015 was sudden and unexpected; he was only 48 years old. The first of his books to be published posthumously was What Is Islam? The book under review, Before Orthodoxy, is a tour de force, a magnificent piece of scholarship and a painful reminder of what we have lost.