Baal’s trial and execution

The secret behind the poems

Soon after the arrests, the twelve women find that their new names have displaced their old ones so completely that they cannot give their jailers any name at all. The guards register them by numbers, from Curtain No. 1 onward. Their former clients, afraid that disclosure would expose their own connection to the women, keep silent. In this hush, the episode makes identity itself part of the confinement: the women are present, but the names by which their lives might be recognized have become inaccessible.

Two days after the arrests, the jail is crowded with prostitutes and pimps, their numbers enlarged during the two years in which Submission introduced sexual segregation to Jahilia. Men gather beneath the windows to serenade the women, despite the jeers of bystanders and the risk of prosecution under the new immorality laws. The women behind the barred gates do not encourage their admirers. On the third day, a dark-skinned man in a turban and pantaloons joins the crowd. Passers-by initially laugh at his appearance; when he begins to sing, the beauty of his verses arrests their attention. The guards themselves, moved by the poems, make no attempt to stop him as he nails them to the jail wall.

The poet returns each evening with another set of verses. The women come to the windows, drawn by the poems, and the crowd grows to hear them. On the twelfth evening, Baal completes the final poem in the sequence. Each verse is dedicated to a different woman, and the names of his twelve subjects match those of another group of twelve: Mahound’s wives. What had sounded like a succession of love poems is thus revealed as an oblique insult, concealed in a form that has captivated its audience.

Confession and reversal

When the shared names are recognized, the crowd’s mood changes from exaltation to outrage. Men surround Baal and demand an explanation. He removes his turban and identifies himself, declaring that he recognizes no jurisdiction beyond his Muse, or, more precisely, his twelve Muses. The declaration exposes both the disguise and the purpose of the performance: the jail visits have not been anonymous acts of admiration, but Baal’s return to public speech through the women’s assumed identities. The guards seize him.

Khalid, Mahound’s general, wants Baal executed immediately. Mahound instead orders that the poet be tried after the women. The twelve women, whom Baal calls his wives, are sentenced to death for the immorality of their lives. Baal then stands face to face with Mahound in the tent of judgment, placed in the scene as the satirist opposite the religious leader whose authority he has challenged.

Asked for an account of his actions, Baal describes his time at The Curtain in simple terms and conceals nothing. That account includes his own cowardice; he presents what he has done since as an effort to make reparation for it. The confession does not soften the proceedings. Instead, it produces an unexpected response: the audience begins to laugh. Jahilia’s people know Baal as a celebrated satirist, and the more plainly he recounts his marriages to the women posing as Mahound’s wives, the less able they are to contain their laughter. Even soldiers threaten the crowd, but the threat does not immediately restore order.

Sentence and significance

Baal insists that the proceedings are not a joke, but the crowd continues to laugh until silence returns and Mahound rises. Mahound connects the present performance to Baal’s earlier mockery of the Recitation: the people had enjoyed that mockery too, he says, and now Baal has again brought out what Mahound regards as their worst. The judgment therefore addresses more than the poet’s deception. It treats the audience’s pleasure in his satire as part of the offense, making public laughter a sign of the authority’s inability to control how its claims are received.

Baal offers no further defense and leaves the decision to his judges. He is sentenced to be beheaded within the hour. As soldiers lead him from the tent toward the killing ground, he calls attention to the shared vulnerability of writers and prostitutes, presenting both as people Mahound cannot forgive. Mahound answers by refusing to distinguish between them. The exchange closes the episode by making the sentence more than a punishment for Baal’s conduct: in the court’s final words, the poet and the women become parallel targets of judgment.

Because Gibreel sees the episode in a dream, the trial is also one of the visions through which the novel stages its entanglement of religious authority, satire, and uncertain narration. Within the dream, Baal’s sequence of poems first gathers a crowd through beauty, then reveals its concealed insult; his candid account produces laughter rather than submission, and the laughter ends in a death sentence. The progression gives the scene its stark reversal: the performance that momentarily commands the jail, the crowd, and even the guards cannot protect its maker once its meaning is openly named.