Monotheism and polytheism

Monotheism and polytheism in The Satanic Verses are not merely opposing lists of beliefs. In Jahilia, worship of many gods is bound to pilgrimage, commerce, political authority, and social custom; Mahound’s insistence on one God challenges that entire arrangement. The conflict becomes most acute when Abu Simbel offers to recognize three goddesses in exchange for toleration and political inclusion. Across the novel, the question returns in altered forms: whether revelation has one authoritative source, how a community decides what counts as divine speech, and what happens when religious certainty becomes a program of power.

Jahilia’s religious landscape

Jahilia’s sanctuary gathers a crowded pantheon around the Black Stone. The city’s religious landscape includes Hubal, Kain, He-Of-Shara, Astarte, Nakruh, Manaf, Nasr, and Quzah, among other deities. Their variety is presented as an attraction for pilgrims from different places, making the sanctuary resemble an international gathering as well as a sacred center. Polytheism here is not a private collection of beliefs: the gods draw visitors, and the pilgrimage helps sustain the city’s prosperity.

Allah is acknowledged as possessing a kind of overall authority, but the Jahilians give less attention to him than to the more specialized figures represented by statues. The contrast makes monotheism seem, within this established order, less like a natural culmination than a challenge to its arrangement of religious attention. The central issue is not whether the people have heard of one God, but whether that God should displace the many deities around whom their practices and institutions have formed.

This order is also supported by the city’s material interests. Abu Simbel’s household, or more precisely Hind’s family, controls the temple of Al-Lat at the southern gate and receives revenues from the temples of Manat and Uzza at the other gates. Their religious concessions are foundations of the Grandee’s wealth. Abu Simbel’s political position and the pantheon are therefore joined: an alteration in worship would also unsettle the institutions that sustain his power.

The proposed compromise and Mahound’s crisis

Abu Simbel’s offer turns this conflict into a direct test. He proposes that Allah approve Al-Lat, Uzza, and Manat, promising in return that Mahound’s followers will be tolerated and officially recognized, and that Mahound will receive a place on Jahilia’s council. The offer is framed as a limited concession within a much larger pantheon, but its political terms make clear what is at stake: recognition for the new faith comes at the price of admitting other objects of worship.

Mahound’s followers react from sharply different positions. Khalid urges immediate refusal; Bilal and the others reaffirm the exclusive claim of one God. Salman the Persian warns that acceptance would expose Mahound to the charge that he had contrived a revelation to fit Abu Simbel’s bargain, and that compromising the creed would strip the movement of its seriousness. Their objections bring together two kinds of danger: theological betrayal and public discredit.

Mahound, however, is exhausted and does not dismiss the proposal without inward struggle. He wonders whether the three goddesses might be called angels, whether accepting them could bring the souls of Jahilia within reach, and whether the offer tempts him with power and a seat on the council. He also recalls earlier signs that failed to turn the people away from the idols, including the cleansing of his heart at Zamzam and his journey to Jerusalem. His distress is sharpened by the possibility that the divine demand may not be as simple to interpret as his followers assume.

The narrative makes that uncertainty formal as well as theological. During Mahound’s listening, Gibreel Farishta feels bound to him through a shining cord, but cannot tell which of them is dreaming the other. Mahound’s questions seem to come from within the Prophet, while Gibreel experiences himself as both present and unable to provide an answer. Revelation is therefore connected to a contested inward process, not presented only as a message whose human reception is transparent. The episode leaves the source of speech unsettled even as the community insists on the singularity of its creed.

Belief, authority, and political order

The novel later gives monotheistic exclusivity a different political form through the Imam. In his campaign against Empress Ayesha, the Imam presents history, knowledge, and progress as deviations from a completed divine revelation. Bilal X transmits the Imam’s call over surreptitious radio waves, his trained voice carrying the message from Kensington toward Desh. The declaration of revolt against history turns religious authority into a program for remaking society: one completed truth is set against the claims of historical change and competing knowledge.

This episode echoes Jahilia without simply repeating it. Mahound’s one-God message unsettles a city organized around multiple shrines; the Imam’s monotheistic certainty repudiates history and the ideas associated with it. In both cases, religious claims are inseparable from political power and from attempts to define which voices and forms of knowledge count. The contrast also cautions against treating monotheism as automatically liberating: its challenge to an existing order can become a new, uncompromising order of its own.

The continuing dispute over divine speech

The question of religious authority persists in the account of Ayesha’s pilgrimage. After disappearing for seven days, Ayesha returns to Titlipur and tells the village council that Gibreel has given her a command: the villagers are to walk to Mecca, where the sea will part and they will cross its floor. The council votes unanimously to obey. Their preparations follow the command closely: almost everyone must walk, infants are to be carried in rotation, and provisions are pooled and divided among the pilgrims. The instruction is treated not as a private vision but as a rule governing the whole community.

The pilgrimage makes the consequences of accepting a religious claim concrete. It advances slowly, at about two miles a day, with illness, official harassment, and practical delays; Khadija dies on the journey. As the march attracts national attention, visitors and journalists become spectators, while religious extremists contest the pilgrims’ claim to the foot-pilgrimage tradition. At the mosque, Mirza Saeed asks Ayesha why she offers interpretations rather than the angel’s precise words. Her answer does not settle the problem of verification, and the villagers’ eventual refusal to continue follows the stoning of a foundling baby.

At the Arabian Sea, the promised passage remains the decisive test. Ayesha, Mishal Akhtar, and the villagers walk into the water and disappear; Mirza Saeed and other rescuers enter after them, but are brought back alive. The episode does not resolve the divide between belief and skepticism with a simple proof. Instead, the same tension that shaped Mahound’s encounter with Abu Simbel reappears as a question about how a command is heard, interpreted, and obeyed—and about the human cost when a community commits itself to an unverifiable promise.