These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired

These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired is a disputed expression in The Satanic Verses, attached to verses that Mahound recites and later rejects as the Devil’s words. Its repetitions connect a public revelation in Jahilia with Gibreel Farishta’s troubled dreams and a later vision of Uzza. Across those appearances, the novel leaves the source of the words unsettled: the crucial question is not only what was said, but how speech becomes scripture and who can determine its authority.

The First Recitation

In the poetry tent, Mahound announces that he is the Messenger and brings verses from a greater source than the poets assembled there. Abu Simbel answers that if Mahound’s God has spoken, the world must hear. Mahound begins with The Star, and the scribes write down his recitation. After verses describing a vision of the lote-tree and signs of the Lord, he recites the lines concerning Lat, Uzza, and Manat, followed by the statement that their intercession is desired.

The words produce an immediate public response. Hind rises, and Abu Simbel places his hands beside his ears, proclaims his submission, and kneels. Hind follows his lead. The scene gives the disputed expression consequences beyond its wording: spoken before an audience, it accompanies a sudden religious and political reversal in which Jahilia’s Grandee and his wife turn toward Mahound.

Repudiation and Uncertain Agency

After wrestling with the Archangel Gibreel, Mahound wakes in the wilderness and concludes that the earlier verses were spoken by the Devil in the archangel’s guise. He returns to Jahilia to expunge them from the record. Yet Gibreel’s account unsettles this explanation: he says that he was the speaker both when the verses were first delivered and when Mahound later repudiated them. The narrative therefore places Mahound’s certainty about having been deceived beside Gibreel’s claim that the same voice supplied both the recitation and its denial.

The episode makes the expression a focal point for uncertainty about revelation and its transmission. Mahound hears, memorizes, and recites; scribes record; later interpreters try to remove the verses from the accepted account. None of these steps settles the source of the speech within the novel. The disputed words persist as an episode remembered through conflicting claims, rather than as a question the narrative conclusively resolves.

Repetition in Dreams and Rewriting

The expression returns in Gibreel’s continuing dreams and sleeptalk. During his treatment at Maudsley Hospital, he speaks Arabic verses at night, although he does not know the language. Alleluia Cone writes down the sounds phonetically and takes them to the Brickhall mosque, where a mullah identifies their meaning as These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired. For a time, Gibreel and his doctors regard the night speech as separate from his waking self, and this apparent division seems to mark a recovery. The narrative later presents that separation as bound up with his attempt to treat his angelic self as someone other than himself.

The words also return in Salman the Persian’s account of a dream. Seeing Mahound at the cave on Mount Cone from the archangel’s point of view brings back the earlier episode and the possibility that the speaker was Shaitan. Salman then begins altering what he writes down as Mahound dictates: at first, small substitutions, followed by larger changes. Mahound fails to notice the initial revisions. Salman’s actions turn the problem of spoken revelation into a problem of recording: the written text can be changed by its scribe without the Messenger detecting the difference.

The Temple Vision and the Text’s Framing

When Mahound’s forces approach Jahilia, Khalid is sent to cleanse the Temple of Uzza. After the guardian tests the goddess and the idol remains still, Khalid breaks the temple and returns to Mahound. Mahound sends him back to complete the task. There Khalid encounters a supernatural woman who recites the lines about Lat, Manat, and Uzza as the Exalted Birds. Khalid identifies them as the Devil’s verses and rejects Uzza as a goddess; after he kills her, Mahound permits the army to enter Jahilia.

This scene returns the disputed formulation in a different narrative setting: the earlier public recitation becomes the speech of a figure associated with the goddess and the demonic. It reinforces the association between the phrase and the repudiation while also preserving the novel’s broader uncertainty about how voices and visions acquire authority. The acknowledgments state that the book’s Quran quotations are composites of English versions by N. J. Dawood and Maulana Muhammad Ali, with additions by the author. That note frames the novel’s scriptural language as a literary construction; it does not resolve the story’s competing accounts of who speaks the disputed verses.