Baal and the twelve prostitutes are tried and executed in a dream of Baal’s death that Gibreel Farishta experiences. The episode brings the women’s assumed identities and Baal’s satirical defiance into a public court, where laughter briefly unsettles the authority of Mahound’s judgment before the sentences are carried out. Its stakes extend beyond punishment: the trial stages a conflict over sexual regulation, poetic speech, and the power to define an offence against religious authority.

Background and Arrest

The trial follows the women’s arrest and exposes how thoroughly performance has overtaken identity. The twelve women have grown so accustomed to their adopted names that they cannot remember their former ones. Afraid to give their jailers the titles they used while impersonating Mahound’s wives, they provide no names at all; the authorities register them as Curtain No. 1, Curtain No. 2, and so on. Their names are not simply concealed from the court: the women themselves have become unable to retrieve them.

Their former clients also keep silent, fearful of the consequences of revealing what happened at The Curtain. The secret might have remained undiscovered if Baal had not begun posting poems on the jail walls. Meanwhile, the prison fills with prostitutes and pimps. The account links that increase to the two years in which Submission has imposed sexual segregation in Jahilia, while new immorality laws make the men’s public attention to the prisoners risky as well as disreputable.

At first, men gather beneath the jail windows to serenade the imprisoned women. The women do not encourage their admirers. Baal arrives among the suitors in a turban and pantaloons, his appearance prompting sniggers from passers-by; when he begins to sing, however, the listeners fall silent. His poems draw people to the jail and bring the women to its windows. After each recital he nails his verses to the wall, and even the guards, moved by the performance, do not stop him.

The Poems and the Public Revelation

Baal returns every evening with a new poem. Over twelve evenings he delivers twelve sets of verses, each dedicated to a different woman. Their beauty gathers an audience, but the poems also carry a concealed provocation: the names of Baal’s twelve supposed wives are the same as those of another group of twelve, Mahound’s wives. The parallel turns his poetry into a public act of mockery, though the crowd does not recognize its full meaning until the final evening.

When the resemblance is noticed, admiration gives way to outrage. Men surround Baal and demand an explanation. He removes his turban and identifies himself, claiming allegiance to his poetic inspiration rather than the jurisdiction brought against him. The guards seize him. His act has made the hidden joke legible, transforming a sequence of love poems into an open challenge to the Prophet’s household and the authority that protects it.

Trial and Sentences

Khalid wants Baal executed immediately, but Mahound orders that the poet be tried directly after the twelve women. The women, who had divorced their former husbands to marry Baal, are sentenced to death by stoning for the immorality of their lives. Baal then stands before Mahound, with Khalid seated at the Prophet’s right hand. The arrangement makes the poet’s trial a direct encounter between the ruler of the new religious order and the satirist who had once attacked the Recitation.

Given a final chance to explain himself, Baal tells the story of his time at The Curtain in plain language and conceals nothing, including his earlier cowardice. He presents his subsequent actions as an attempt to make amends. The account does not make that explanation an acquittal: Mahound recalls Baal’s former mockery and the laughter it drew, then treats the new insult as a continuation of that offence. Baal accepts that the decision is no longer his to make. He is sentenced to be beheaded within the hour and taken toward the killing ground; the episode records his execution alongside the women’s death sentences.

Laughter, Authority, and the Dream Frame

The courtroom’s most disruptive response is laughter. Jahilia’s people had known Baal as a satirist, and his candid account of marrying the twelve women makes the assembled crowd laugh despite the soldiers’ threats. The scene reverses the expected balance of power for a moment: Mahound has the authority to sentence, but Baal’s words command the room’s attention and make the judgment look absurd to those gathered there. The laughter does not prevent the sentences. Its suppression is part of the episode’s bleak reversal, in which public recognition of the joke ends not in release but in punishment.

The final exchange between Mahound and Baal sharpens the link between sexual transgression and writing. Baal’s last words group prostitutes and writers among those Mahound cannot forgive; Mahound answers by refusing to distinguish between them. The response makes the poet’s fate more than a penalty for one deception. In the trial, writing and sexual performance are both treated as forms of insolence when they parody the Prophet’s authority.

The dream’s wider context makes that conflict especially charged. Earlier, Mahound recites verses that appear to affirm the intercession of Lat, Uzza, and Manat, provoking astonishment and a dramatic response from Abu Simbel and Hind. He later concludes that the verses came from the Devil and hurries to erase them from the record. Yet Gibreel Farishta’s account unsettles that explanation: Gibreel says that he supplied both the original declaration and its repudiation. Elsewhere, Salman’s recollection of changing words while transcribing Mahound’s recitations raises a related question about how revelation is heard, recorded, and authenticated. Against this background, Baal’s trial places poetic invention beside disputed sacred speech, without resolving the uncertainty over who controls a text or determines its source. The execution closes the immediate case, but the dream leaves the authority of both judgment and narration under pressure.