Submission to divine will and social order

Submission to divine will and social order is the new faith and an increasingly comprehensive code in the dream narrative of The Satanic Verses. Its reach extends from eating, sleeping, sex, and bodily habits to marriage, property, and political authority. Yet the account that most sharply defines it comes from Salman the Persian, a former scribe who tells Baal that the revelations he recorded began to look less like an independent divine command than a system of rules fitted to Mahound’s needs. The idea is therefore presented at once as religious discipline, social order, and a source of conflict over who speaks for God.

A faith expressed through rules

At Yathrib, the followers of the new faith are landless and poor. For years, they support themselves by raiding wealthy camel trains travelling to and from Jahilia. Against that unsettled background, Salman describes Mahound as turning toward law: Gibreel appears among the palm trees and delivers a steadily expanding body of regulations. In Salman’s sardonic telling, almost no area of life remains outside their reach. The faithful are instructed on how much to eat, how long to sleep, which sexual practices are permitted, what they may discuss, and even which parts of the body must not be scratched.

The prescriptions range from intimate to communal. Salman says that sodomy and the missionary position are approved, while sexual positions in which the woman is on top are forbidden. Prawns are prohibited, despite being creatures no member of the faithful has seen. Animals must be killed slowly by bleeding, so that their deaths become a means of understanding the reality of life. The regulations also prescribe burial and the division of property. Taken together, the examples make Submission to divine will and social order more than a statement of belief: in this account, it is a rule-bound pattern intended to organize the ordinary acts and final obligations of life.

Revelation and authority under suspicion

Salman’s central objection concerns not simply the number of rules but the apparent direction of their authority. He remembers Mahound as a successful businessman to whom organization came naturally, and likens the archangel’s steady stream of managerial instructions to the decisions of a corporate God. His suspicion grows when Gibreel’s revelations repeatedly arrive at moments of dispute and support Mahound’s position. The angel confirms, among other things, Mahound’s views on the impossibility of a man walking on the moon and on the eventual end of damnation, after which even evildoers may reach the gardens of Gulistan and Bostan.

For Salman, the sequence matters: Mahound states his position first, and the angel confirms it afterwards. He therefore sees revelation as following the Prophet’s decisions rather than independently preceding them. The rules about widowed women deepen that impression. After the war against Jahilia has cost the faithful many men, the surviving males are instructed to marry widows so that they will not remarry outside the faith. Salman also recounts a permission allowing a man as many as four marriages if he can afford them. He mocks these instructions as practical advantages for the community’s men, not detached spiritual principles.

His account is not a neutral exposition of doctrine. Salman tells it bitterly to Baal, and his recollections disclose the breakdown of his own confidence in the faith. He says that he began to test Mahound after noticing the apparent usefulness and timing of the revelations. In a dream at the Prophet’s cave on Mount Cone, he recalls the episode of the Satanic Verses and wonders whether the perspective he had taken was that of Gibreel or Shaitan. He then secretly changes the rules while writing them down. In this narrative, doubt about the source of revelation becomes an act of resistance by the very scribe charged with preserving it.

Gender, marriage, and social discipline

Salman’s critique becomes especially pointed in his description of women at Yathrib. He contrasts them with the women of Jahilia: there, a husband goes to live among his wife’s people, and she keeps her own tent. If she wishes to end the marriage, she turns the tent so that its entrance faces away; the husband finds no way in, and the divorce is settled. The arrangement gives women a form of control that Salman says the faithful women were beginning to admire.

He describes the response as a new body of restrictions designed to push women back into docility or maternal roles. The expected wife walks three steps behind her husband or remains at home, wise and occupied with her appearance. The women of Yathrib laugh at the faithful, Salman says, but Mahound’s authority and the promise of Paradise lead the faithful women to obey. His account thus places religious submission beside a struggle over marriage and women’s independence: a rule that presents itself as divine order also shapes who may decide where a woman lives and how she may leave a marriage.

Conquest, amnesty, and continuing refusal

The political force of the faith becomes visible when Mahound’s forces approach Jahilia. Hind urges the citizens to reject Abu Simbel’s compromise and fight for the city and its goddesses, but they leave her and return to their homes to lock their doors. Khalid’s destruction of the temple of Uzza marks the turning point in the account: after he reports what he has seen, Mahound’s forces enter Jahilia in the name of the Most High. The idols in the House of the Black Stone are broken. Submission is therefore represented not only through personal observance but through the displacement of Jahilia’s former religious order by conquest.

Victory does not, however, become indiscriminate revenge. Salman is captured and pleads for his life; after Bilal intercedes, Mahound allows him to live. Hind is spared as well. The narration emphasizes that no door in Jahilia is broken down and no old enemy dragged out to be killed. This restraint supplies a different measure of the new order: its answer to victory is clemency toward people who had opposed it, even as the city’s idols have been destroyed and its political authority transferred.

Nor does the end of open resistance mean that everyone has submitted. During Mahound’s absence from Jahilia, the prostitutes at The Curtain take on the identities of his wives. The men who visit them wear masks, and the brothel’s business rises by three hundred per cent. Customers circle its Fountain of Love in a pattern likened to pilgrims circling the Black Stone. Baal, watching from a balcony, recognizes the service as another way of refusing to Submit. The episode turns the language and gestures of religious devotion into a clandestine parody: public authority may govern the city, but private appetite and mockery persist beneath its surface.

Meaning within the narrative

Submission in these episodes is neither solely an inward act of faith nor simply obedience imposed by force. It joins belief to detailed regulation, gender relations, communal survival, and the authority to govern a conquered city. The same order can promise Paradise, prescribe everyday conduct, restrict women’s autonomy, and spare defeated opponents. Its reach is extensive, but its legitimacy remains contested: Salman doubts the voice behind its revelations, Jahilia’s former order resists its replacement, and the masked traffic at The Curtain converts conformity into a performance that conceals dissent.