Four-wife rule

The Four-wife rule is a marriage regulation recounted in Yathrib as part of the revelations associated with Mahound. Its stated limit is conditional: a man may have up to four marriages if he can afford them. In the novel, the rule appears not as detached legal doctrine but amid the practical demands of a community emerging from war—and within a narrative that persistently unsettles who speaks for revelation.

The Rule in Its Postwar Setting

After the war against Jahilia, the faithful had lost many men. Salman the Persian tells Baal that Gibreel Farishta then instructed the surviving men to marry widowed women, lest those women remarry outside the faith and be lost to Submission. Salman presents this as a practical measure, and places the allowance of up to four marriages in the same account: existing marriage did not, in his telling, prevent a man from taking more wives, provided he could afford them.

The two instructions have related but distinct purposes in Salman’s story. The direction concerning widows responds to the immediate consequences of wartime deaths and seeks to retain women within the community. The four-wife limit sets a boundary on the marriages men may undertake while also making affordability a condition. The text does not specify how affordability is assessed or describe procedures for enforcing the limit.

Marriage and Changing Social Expectations

Salman’s account places the rule against his description of different marital customs in Yathrib. He says that men there went to live with their wives’ families and that a wife could end a marriage by turning her tent so its entrance faced away from her husband. In his telling, women’s relative power to reject a husband contrasted with the rules that later sought to restore more docile roles. This is Salman speaking retrospectively and derisively to Baal, not an independent legal account; nonetheless, the contrast makes marriage a site of conflict over authority as well as a means of preserving communal membership.

The rule’s gendered effect is visible in its terms: the permission is framed around men’s ability to take multiple wives, while the postwar directive treats widowed women as people whose remarriage could alter the religious composition of the community. The narrative does not explain how the women understood these arrangements or whether they consented to the marriages. That silence limits what can be said about their experience, while leaving clear the way the policy organizes marriage around male permission and communal continuity.

Revelation, Memory, and Textual Authority

The rule is reported through Salman’s recollection of revelations delivered after the community’s migration, but his broader story makes the authority of such reported words uncertain. Earlier, Mahound recites verses in a poetry tent; later he identifies those verses as satanic and returns to Jahilia to repudiate them. The narration complicates that account: Gibreel Farishta says that he was the source of both the verses and their repudiation. The episode does not identify the Four-wife rule as part of the disputed verses, but it establishes a wider instability around the passage from voice to revelation and from revelation to accepted record.

Salman describes a later test of that instability. After dreaming that he saw Mahound from the archangel’s perspective, he begins secretly changing the rules he writes down. He first substitutes “all-wise” for “all-hearing, all-knowing”; later he writes “Jew” where Mahound has said “Christian.” Mahound initially accepts the altered wording, and Salman says that the experience shook his confidence in the distinction between revelation and the scribe’s writing. The novel does not say that Salman changed the Four-wife rule itself. Rather, his account makes the conditions of its transmission part of the rule’s significance: it reaches the reader inside a story where recitation, memory, transcription, and religious authority do not remain neatly separable.