Qur’an

The Qur’an is the novel’s contested text of revelation: it is spoken by Mahound, heard and recorded by others, publicly revised, and later secretly altered by Salman the Persian. Its authority is never separated from the uncertain circumstances of its transmission. The novel’s central tension is not simply what the verses say, but who speaks them, who recognizes them, and who has the power to preserve or erase them.

Recitation in the poetry tent

At a gathering of Jahilia’s poets, Mahound arrives to jeers with his followers. He walks to the stage with his eyes closed, while scribes press forward to record his words. Abu Simbel’s public welcome quiets the crowd and gives Mahound room to speak. Mahound says that he is not a poet but a Messenger bearing verses from a greater source, then calls for The Star and begins reciting.

The sequence moves from verses about the Pleiades and Mahound’s vision of the lote-tree to lines concerning Lat, Uzza, and Manat. When Mahound recites that these goddesses are exalted and their intercession desired, Hind rises; the crowd erupts in cheers, scandal, and devotion to Al-Lat. Abu Simbel and Hind then perform a public act of Submission. In this scene the text is not a written object first encountered in private: it becomes an event, carried by a voice, taken down by scribes, and answered by a crowd whose reaction has immediate political and religious force.

Repudiation and the uncertainty of the voice

After a struggle with the Archangel Gibreel, Mahound wakes and concludes that the speaker behind the earlier verses was the Devil, not an angel. He returns to Jahilia and, at the House of the Black Stone, declares the verses abrogated and banishes them from the true recitation. He replaces them with verses denying authority to the three goddesses. The change makes the Qur’an’s standing in the narrative depend on an act of public correction: what had been recited and recorded is now identified as false and removed from the authorized text.

Yet Gibreel’s account unsettles Mahound’s explanation. From his watching vantage, Gibreel says that he was the voice on both occasions: the voice of the initial verses and of their repudiation. The narrative therefore places Mahound’s certainty beside a competing account that makes the source of both revelation and correction ambiguous. It does not resolve that contradiction into a stable account of supernatural authorship; instead, the same channel of speech can appear to deliver opposed claims.

Salman’s alterations

Years later, Salman the Persian recounts how a dream of Mahound at the cave on Mount Cone brought back the earlier episode. He wonders whether he had imagined himself not as Gibreel but as Shaitan, and turns that possibility into a test. While serving as Mahound’s scribe, he begins making small changes to the dictated verses. He substitutes all-wise for all-hearing, all-knowing; later, he writes Jew where Mahound has said Christian.

Salman expects Mahound to catch the changes, but Mahound accepts them without noticing. Salman’s account makes the act of writing a second site of uncertainty: a scribe can alter what is presented as revelation, while the Messenger’s failure to detect the changes leaves Salman unsure what that says about the divine poetry. He is shaken, afraid, and unable to stop. When Mahound finally frowns at a further alteration before slowly approving it with some doubt, Salman takes the moment as a warning that the next change may expose him. He chooses life over the possibility of destroying Mahound along with himself and leaves Yathrib before dawn for Jahilia.

Textual construction and significance

The novel’s treatment of the Qur’an repeatedly separates revelation into stages: Mahound speaks, Gibreel is represented as the voice, scribes record, listeners respond, and later authorities distinguish accepted verses from abrogated ones. Salman’s intervention exposes how fragile the written record can become when its custodian can change a word and the speaker does not notice. The episode makes textual authority a matter of contested transmission rather than an uncontested object.

The acknowledgements also specify that the Qur’an quotations in the book are composites of the English versions by N. J. Dawood and Maulana Muhammad Ali, with some touches by the author. This note identifies the novel’s passages as literary constructions drawn from particular translations; it does not erase the story’s deliberate uncertainty about the source and authority of the words within its fictional world.