Baal marries the Prophet’s twelve wives

Baal’s marriage to the twelve women at The Curtain transforms their impersonation of Mahound’s wives into a shared domestic arrangement. What begins as their proposal that he become their husband develops into a role-playing life that makes Baal a private, irreverent counterpart to Mahound.

The marriages and their arrangement

The women first reject the customary symbolic husbands assigned to prostitutes at The Curtain, deciding instead that they wish to marry Baal. After the Madam accepts their proposal, she marries all twelve to him. Baal agrees, and the women organize a rotation so he can spend a day with each in turn, reflecting The Curtain’s reversal of the usual division between business at night and rest by day.

The women expect Baal to perform the duties of a husband and urge him to act more like Mahound, whose wives they have been portraying. Baal refuses to change his name, distinguishing his own identity from the role, but he accepts the arrangement. Their domestic fantasy is not simply an extension of their work: separated from the outside world, the women have come to imagine an ideal ordinary life in which they are submissive companions to a wise and loving husband. The novel presents an irony in that their repeated performance of men’s fantasies has shaped the fantasy they now choose for themselves.

Baal’s transformation and return to poetry

The arrangement gradually makes Baal more than a stand-in in the women’s enactment of Mahound’s domestic life. He grows confident enough to give orders, settle disputes, and impose a month-long separation when their quarrelling irritates him. The authority he adopts is a private, irreverent reflection of Mahound’s: Baal has become both participant in the performance and its increasingly empowered center.

His attachment to Ayesha deepens into love, while the shared household sharpens jealousies and rivalries among the women. After Baal is discovered with Mary the Copt on a day assigned to Ayesha, he must keep his distance from Mary for a time. In this intimate imitation of the Prophet’s household, Baal finds himself drawn into the role he had initially resisted, even as he keeps his own name. He also begins writing again, and the poetry that follows is described as the sweetest he has ever produced.

Baal experiences the poems as arriving through a divided self: at times with Ayesha, he feels a slowing that requires him to lie down and imagines another version of himself standing beside him, speaking verses that he then records. The women interpret these episodes as signs that poetry may be coming and treat them with care. Baal, however, tells Umm Salamah that the verses come only in Ayesha’s company. His renewed authorship thus belongs not simply to his assumed position in the household but to his particular attachment to Ayesha, joining the illicit domestic performance to the return of his poetic voice.

Roles and fading identities

The change begins to register as a blurring of the roles themselves. By the end of the first year, the twelve women have become so practiced at impersonating Mahound’s wives that their previous selves seem to recede; Baal, increasingly short-sighted and hard of hearing, sees them as doubled, shadowlike figures. Their break with The Curtain’s custom of marrying each prostitute to the Love Spout in its courtyard marks a further step: they regard that symbolic husband as almost idolatrous and choose Baal instead. The episode makes performance more than a disguise. The women’s enacted identities alter what they imagine for themselves, while Baal’s failing perception gives their transformation an image of its own.

A household made from performance

The arrangement becomes a collective ritual of attention: the women compete for Baal’s favor and approval, tending to him and dancing for him as they enact the domestic life they had imagined. Their gestures make the borrowed household feel lived rather than merely staged. Yet its intimacy remains inseparable from imitation: Baal’s place in the home is shaped by the role of Mahound, while the women’s shared devotion turns their performance into an alternative, private version of the household they have been impersonating.