Jahilia’s state of gender segregation

Jahilia’s state of gender segregation is a consequence of Submission’s effort to regulate relations between men and women. The narrative presents it not as a settled consensus but as a contested order: its restrictions are defended as protection and political necessity, challenged as unhealthy, and accompanied by forms of sexual commerce that the authorities ultimately seek to eliminate.

Formation and Debate

Salman the Persian objects to the sexual segregation established under Submission, regarding it as unhealthy and warning that it will bring no good. In conversation with Baal, he also recounts a report that Mahound received divine authorization for multiple marriages after entering a trance. Baal, unexpectedly, argues for Mahound’s position: political alliances may make refusal of proposed marriages costly, he reasons, and a special man may receive special dispensations. He also presents the confinement of women as a means of protecting their honor. His argument draws a distinction between Mahound’s exceptional status and the narrower freedoms he considers suitable for ordinary people, while Salman rejects that distinction rather than accepting it as a consistent principle.

Enforcement and Closure

The restrictions did not end sexual commerce in Jahilia. During the two years in which Submission imposed sexual segregation, the number of prostitutes and pimps grew considerably, and the new immorality laws exposed them to prosecution. After arrests, the jail filled with sex workers and pimps; men gathered outside to serenade the imprisoned women, despite the risk of legal consequences. The women, however, gave their admirers no encouragement, revealing a divide between the men’s public courtship and the women’s response.

Mahound’s return to Jahilia brought an immediate order to close the brothels. The Madam of The Curtain secured an hour for clients to leave, then sent her eunuchs to escort them out through a back door and instructed them to waive payment. The closure thus made the new moral order an administrative reality, while the earlier growth of the trade and the arrests showed how little segregation alone had resolved the tensions it was meant to govern.

The Limits of Religious Authority

The narrative makes the religious warrant for exceptional marital permission uncertain by presenting it through Salman the Persian’s account to Baal: Salman repeats a rumor about Mahound receiving divine authorization during a trance, rather than witnessing the revelation himself. Within that reported story, Ayesha challenges the claim as an accommodation that arrives when Mahound needs it. Her objection gives voice to the suspicion that religious authority can serve a ruler’s personal interests, but the account reaches the reader through Salman, whose hostility toward Mahound shapes the telling.

That mediation complicates the defense Baal offers. He can explain the exception as a response to political obligations and cast restrictions on ordinary people as protective, yet Salman’s account makes the boundary between sacred instruction and practical advantage the very point at issue. Gender segregation therefore appears not only as a system imposed through law and confinement, but as an order whose legitimacy depends on contested interpretations of authority—and whose exceptions are easier to justify when those subject to the rules do not control the account of them.

Revelation as an Unstable Ground

The narrative’s account of revelation further unsettles the authority behind Jahilia’s religious rules. Mahound understands his listening as a process in which Gibreel Farishta seems to come from within his deepest self; in the dream, Gibreel experiences their identities as bound together, with neither clearly the dreamer of the other. When Mahound later struggles over what to recite, Gibreel remains silent. This inward, uncertain exchange does not establish the source of any particular law, but it makes the distinction between divine instruction and human interpretation difficult to treat as self-evident. Gender segregation consequently appears within a religious order whose authority is powerful yet mediated through contested acts of listening and interpretation.