Submission

Submission is Mahound’s monotheistic religious movement in the Jahilia episodes of The Satanic Verses. Its path from a handful of listeners to a victorious faith is also a test of religious authority: revelation is received through Gibreel Farishta, written down and interpreted by human beings, and repeatedly entangled with political advantage, law, and doubt. The movement’s history does not resolve those tensions; its rise makes them harder to ignore.

Origins, revelation, and doubt

Submission emerges in opposition to Jahilia’s polytheistic order. Its central creed is that there is no god but Allah, but the story makes the source and interpretation of its revelations uncertain from the outset. Mahound describes listening to Gibreel as an inward experience, as though the angel speaks from the depths of his own heart. Gibreel, meanwhile, experiences a disturbing intimacy with the Prophet: their identities seem to flow into one another, and he cannot tell which is dreaming the other. Revelation is therefore presented not as a simple message passing between separate, secure figures, but as an encounter whose agency remains unsettled.

That uncertainty becomes a political crisis when Abu Simbel offers recognition for Submission in exchange for Mahound’s approval of Lat, Uzza, and Manat. The proposal includes a seat for Mahound on Jahilia’s council. Salman the Persian warns that accepting it would make the faith look like a convenient invention and weaken its claim to seriousness. Mahound, however, is also conscious that his listeners are few and that the movement is widely mocked. In a later moment of anguish, he asks whether the three goddesses could be angels and whether accepting them might save the people of the city. He recalls the Night Journey and the reduction of the faithful’s prayer burden from forty prayers a day to five, yet wonders why miracles and divine accommodation have not persuaded Jahilia to abandon its idols.

The public recitation of the surah called The Star marks the crisis in a gathering initially assembled for poetry and entertainment. Mahound presents himself as a messenger rather than a poet, and the crowd falls silent to hear him. The account later states that he repudiates the Satanic verses. The sequence binds the movement’s authority to a painful distinction: what is spoken in a moment of spiritual and political pressure may be taken for revelation, but it can also be withdrawn. After the repudiation, Mahound is bereaved and withdraws into silence, leaving the faithful to face the consequences of the conflict.

Persecution, migration, and communal survival

Abu Simbel responds to Submission by confining its adherents to Jahilia’s poorest quarter, imposing a curfew and barring them from employment. The policy is accompanied by assaults, intimidation, and attacks on homes. Hind wants the persecution to proceed more quickly, while the number of believers grows despite worsening conditions. The movement’s expansion is thus tied not only to preaching but to the solidarity and heightened commitment produced by exclusion.

An offer of refuge from Yathrib gives the community a way out. Hamza advises Mahound that he will not be able to complete his message in Jahilia and urges him to leave before Hind destroys him. Mahound consents while grieving his wife’s death. Khalid, who had doubted him, apologizes and interprets the compromised revelation as a means of exposing and overcoming evil. Mahound answers with bitterness rather than accepting that consoling interpretation. His response keeps the episode’s moral uncertainty alive: the movement’s survival does not make its compromises easy to explain, even to its own adherents.

The migration unfolds in small groups, with the faithful leaving almost empty-handed for Yathrib, a place of palms and water. Gibreel watches them depart from Mount Cone. The journey takes place at the beginning of a new era, as the old order recedes behind them and a new community begins elsewhere. Migration is both practical escape from persecution and a symbolic beginning for Submission; the believers carry their faith away from the city that has refused to recognize it.

Law, leadership, and life in Yathrib

In Yathrib, the followers of Submission are landless and poor. For years they support themselves by raiding wealthy camel trains traveling between the oasis and Jahilia. The narrative presents a community living outside settled law even as Mahound becomes increasingly associated with the making of rules. In Gibreel’s dream, revelations regulate many aspects of daily life, including food, sleep, hygiene, conversation, worship, burial, inheritance, and sexuality. The breadth of these prescriptions gives Submission a comprehensive social character: it is not only a creed but an order that claims authority over ordinary conduct.

Salman the Persian comes to suspect that this body of law reflects Mahound’s own practical judgment. He notices that revelations often arrive after disputes, confirm positions Mahound has already taken, and support decisions useful to the community’s organization. The rules concerning women sharpen his suspicions. Salman contrasts Jahilia’s customs with women’s greater independence in Yathrib, where a wife keeps her own tent and can end a marriage by turning its entrance away. He describes new restrictions as pushing women back toward docile roles. These are Salman’s criticisms, conveyed in a later conversation with Baal; they are not presented as an impartial account of every believer’s experience. Their importance lies in how they make law, gender, and the Prophet’s authority inseparable subjects of dispute.

The narrative also places these disagreements within competing ways of deciding what counts as truth. When Alicja Cohen argues that Gibreel’s visions indicate a need for psychiatric treatment, Alleluia Cone resists the assumption that an extraordinary conviction can be dismissed as madness. This later dispute does not establish that Gibreel’s experiences are divine revelations. Instead, it echoes the book’s larger difficulty in drawing a stable line between faith, delusion, and interpretations authorized by institutions.

Victory, clemency, and the afterlife of authority

When Mahound returns to Jahilia, the House of the Black Stone is cleansed of its 360 idols, and the city submits to the new faith. In the immediate aftermath, Mahound asks whether Salman has been found, evidence that the scribe’s earlier doubts and actions remain unresolved for him. Salman is eventually captured. Although Khalid argues for his execution, Bilal intercedes, and Mahound allows Salman to live. Hind, too, has been spared; the narrative stresses that victory does not lead to a campaign of revenge against every former enemy. Submission’s conquest therefore includes clemency, although Mahound remains preoccupied with Baal and his satirical verses.

Baal’s later life at the Curtain shows how the defeated order’s critics continue to inhabit the new one. After two years, a client recognizes him despite his altered appearance. Baal is able to receive Salman, who has earned his living as a letterwriter and plans to leave Jahilia. Their conversation turns again to Submission’s laws concerning marriage and women. Baal, once Mahound’s poetic opponent, now defends some restrictions as politically useful and protective of the wives; Salman rejects his reasoning. The exchange shows how survival and proximity can change a critic’s position without ending disagreement.

Submission’s language of authority also has a later political echo in the Imam’s revolution in Desh. Bilal’s trained voice reaches a clandestine radio transmission and is heard in the Imam’s proclamations against the Empress and against history itself. The Imam invokes the completion of revelation to Mahound as a reason to reject later knowledge and social change. This is not the same organization as Mahound’s movement, but it demonstrates how a claim to revealed completion can be redeployed as a political program, with a powerful voice lending authority to the demand for obedience.

A pilgrimage and the limits of communal faith

A later command attributed to Gibreel turns religious authority into a collective journey. After her disappearance, Ayesha returns to Titlipur and tells the village council that she has received a command for every man, woman, and child to walk to Mecca, kiss the Black Stone, and cross the sea when its waters part. The council votes unanimously to obey. Villagers pool food, cooking utensils, bedding, and other provisions; the old and infirm are not to be carried in litters, and adults will take turns carrying the youngest infants. The preparations make belief tangible as shared labor, but also as discipline: the community accepts the requirement to walk.

The pilgrimage is slow and vulnerable to illness, official harassment, and practical delays. At its best, it covers two miles a day, and the first death occurs on the eighteenth day, when Khadija dies after telling her husband she needs to rest. By the ninth week, journalists, politicians, advertisers, tourists, and other visitors surround the march. The butterflies associated with Ayesha attract attention, while religious extremists denounce the pilgrimage as an appropriation of a national tradition. The journey has become a public contest over who may claim religious and cultural legitimacy, not simply a private act of devotion.

The community’s unity fractures after a foundling is killed by stoning outside a mosque. The exhausted villagers refuse to continue; Mishal is too ill to rally them, and Ayesha will not dispute their decision. Mirza Saeed challenges the way she reports the angel’s messages, asking why she gives interpretations rather than the angel’s precise words. His question returns the article’s central problem in a new setting: the command may be received as divine, but its route to the community passes through a human interpreter.

When the pilgrims reach the Arabian Sea, the expected miracle is not verified in a way that settles the dispute. Ayesha, Mishal, and the villagers walk into the water and disappear; none reappears. Saeed, Osman, Srinivas, the Sarpanch, and Mrs. Qureishi enter the sea in an effort to help, but are rescued. Saeed continues searching before he, too, is brought ashore. The pilgrimage ends in disappearance for its central group and in official questioning for the survivors. This later episode does not simply confirm or disprove Submission’s claims. It leaves faith, communal obedience, human loss, and the interpretation of miracles bound together in an outcome that no surviving authority can explain away.