Jahilia’s Persecution Policy Against Submission Adherents

Jahilia’s Persecution Policy Against Submission Adherents is Abu Simbel’s attempt to contain and punish Mahound’s followers after the repudiation of the disputed verses. It operates through civic restrictions and street violence rather than a single public confrontation. The policy makes the adherents’ daily lives precarious, but produces the opposite of its apparent aim: their numbers increase, and the offer of refuge in Yathrib turns persecution into the immediate cause of their departure from Jahilia.

Background and Political Context

Before the persecution, Abu Simbel had proposed that Mahound recognize Lat, Uzza, and Manat in return for toleration and official recognition of Submission, including a place for Mahound on the Council of Jahilia. Salman the Persian warned that accepting such a message could expose Mahound to accusations of fraud and weaken the new creed. Mahound’s account of revelation as a form of listening, and his anguish over what he should recite, place the political offer within a crisis of religious authority as well as a struggle for recognition.

After the repudiation, the narrative places Mahound’s private grief beside the public punishment that follows. His elderly wife is found dead, and he withdraws into silence for weeks. The account leaves the source of the apparent vengeance uncertain; it does not establish her death as an act of Abu Simbel’s policy. Against this bereavement, Abu Simbel institutes the persecution of the adherents of Submission, while Hind considers the measures too slow.

Methods of Persecution

The policy confines Submission’s adherents to Jahilia’s most wretched, hovel-filled quarter. It imposes a curfew and prohibits them from working, restricting both where they can go and how they can sustain themselves. These measures convert religious dissent into an enforced condition of urban exclusion.

The restrictions are reinforced by assaults. Women are spat upon in shops, gangs of young men manhandle the faithful, and fires are thrown through windows at night among people asleep inside. The gangs are secretly controlled by Abu Simbel, connecting street violence to the authority of the ruler even when it is not presented as an openly declared official attack. The policy thus works through both formal constraints and violence that makes ordinary public and domestic spaces unsafe.

Effects on the Community

The campaign does not reduce the number of believers. In a pointed reversal, the faithful multiply as conditions worsen, like a crop flourishing in increasingly poor soil. Khalid, the watercarrier, later tells Mahound that he had mistaken the earlier compromise for betrayal; he now understands it as a deeper test of faith, through which the faithful witnessed and rejected the Evil One. His response shows how the persecution and the controversy surrounding the repudiation become part of the community’s interpretation of its own endurance.

Refuge arrives from Yathrib, whose inhabitants offer shelter to those who submit if they wish to leave Jahilia. Hamza urges Mahound to accept, warning that the message cannot be completed there and that Hind will continue to pursue him. Mahound, grieving and isolated, gives his consent. The faithful then begin making plans to depart, so the policy’s immediate consequence is not the disappearance of Submission but the migration of its adherents to a place willing to receive them.

Significance

The policy exposes the limits of Abu Simbel’s promise of toleration: recognition is offered on terms that would compromise the creed, while rejection is answered with confinement, exclusion from work, and assault. Its pressure also fails to secure religious submission. Instead, persecution strengthens the adherents’ sense of a shared faith and drives them toward refuge beyond Jahilia. The episode therefore makes coercion both a material condition of life in the city and a force that redirects the community’s future.