The Hijra from Jahilia to Yathrib

The Hijra from Jahilia to Yathrib is the departure of Mahound’s followers from a city where persecution has made their continued presence increasingly dangerous. The migration follows Mahound’s repudiation of the Satanic verses and his bereavement; it is both a practical escape toward refuge and a narrative crossing from Jahilia’s aridity into a promised landscape of palms and water.

Causes and Background

After repudiating the verses, Mahound returns home to find his seventy-year-old wife dead beside a stone-latticed window. Grief leaves him withdrawn and almost silent for weeks. Meanwhile, Abu Simbel, Jahilia’s Grandee, imposes restrictions on adherents of Submission: they are confined to the city’s poorest quarter, placed under curfew, and barred from employment. The pressure is enforced through assaults, harassment of women in shops, beatings by gangs secretly controlled by the Grandee, and fires thrown through windows at night. Yet the faithful multiply as conditions worsen.

An offer from the oasis settlement of Yathrib provides a way out: it will shelter those who submit if they choose to leave Jahilia. Hamza believes they must accept. He warns Mahound that the Message will not be completed in Jahilia and that Hind will continue her assault on him. Mahound, alone in the house and surrounded by the echoes of bereavement, gives his consent; the faithful begin preparing to depart.

Departure and Khalid’s Apology

As the migration gets under way, Khalid the watercarrier hangs back while Mahound waits for him. Khalid admits that he had doubted Mahound, then reinterprets the earlier compromise: what he had taken for betrayal, he now believes, exposed the Devil and made possible the Devil’s overthrow by the Right. He tells Mahound that the episode enriched their faith and apologizes for his judgment.

Mahound moves out of the sunlight at the window and answers with bitter cynicism. He rejects Khalid’s elevated account of the compromise rather than accepting the interpretation as vindication. The exchange leaves the meaning of the disputed revelation unsettled even as the community reaches a decision about where it can survive.

The Migration and Its Framing

From the peak of Mount Cone, Gibreel watches the faithful leave Jahilia for Yathrib. They travel in small groups, almost empty-handed, across the sun-struck empire. The movement is rendered through a contrast of landscapes: they leave the city of aridity for a place associated with cool palms and water. The scene presents departure not as an arrival at security already achieved, but as a passage toward shelter and a different beginning.

The journey starts on the first day of the first year of a new beginning of Time: the old is left behind as the new waits ahead. This calendrical language gives the migration a sense of historical rupture, while the nearly empty-handed travelers keep its material vulnerability in view. The story remains framed by Gibreel’s watching presence on Mount Cone, joining the human movement across the landscape to the dream’s larger reordering of time.

Mahound’s Departure and the Aftermath

Mahound does not leave with the first groups. Only later does he slip away, and his escape is discovered after the fact. In response, Baal composes a valedictory ode that asks what kind of idea Submission seems now. The poem turns the departure into a question about how the new religion will be understood, rather than closing the episode with a settled interpretation of Mahound’s earlier compromise.

The migration thus carries two unresolved judgments at once: Khalid’s belief that the compromise strengthened the faith, and Mahound’s refusal to treat that interpretation as a satisfying account of what he did. Against that uncertainty, the faithful’s departure is concrete: persecution has driven them from Jahilia, Yathrib has offered shelter, and the journey marks the beginning of a new era for the community.