Jahilia’s decline before Mahound’s return

Jahilia’s decline before Mahound’s return is both material and political: the once-shifting city hardens into an impoverished place, its trade falters, and its people cling to Hind’s vision of undiminished greatness even as daily life contradicts it. The city’s decay unfolds over the quarter-century of Mahound’s exile. What had seemed provisional, almost mirage-like, becomes fixed and ordinary; what had sustained Jahilia’s standing is gradually cut off. Its decline is therefore not simply a change in the city’s appearance, but a narrowing of its economic and civic life.

From shifting city to stagnation

Jahilia is no longer built of sand. Years, desert winds, the moon, forgetfulness, and progress are associated with the transformation: the city has lost its shifting, provisional quality and become prosaic. This hardening accompanies impoverishment rather than security or renewal. The city’s fairs, once part of its commercial vitality, have become pitiful, and Mahound’s expanding power has encircled Jahilia and cut off the pilgrims and caravans that provided its lifeblood. The city remains in place, but its connections and prospects have contracted.

The same stagnation appears in the people and institutions that once gave Jahilia its character. The gangs of Sharks have grown middle-aged, while older performers and practitioners struggle to survive. A generation raised with the expectation of unemployment and poverty becomes conservative and attached to the material world. Even the cult of the dead loses popularity. That change is described through its ordinary consequence for the city’s camels, no longer left beside human graves, but it also marks a broader erosion of inherited customs. Jahilia’s decline is cumulative: commerce, cultural practices, and the sense of a shared civic identity all diminish together.

The Grandee and Hind

The Grandee, formerly the city’s ruler, has also fallen into visible decline. His white hair has thinned, his teeth are missing, and his concubines have grown old; he lacks the energy, or perhaps the need, to replace them. His neglected appearance makes him seem defeated, and his weakening presence leaves room for Hind to dominate Jahilia’s politics. The contrast is striking: while the city and its established ruler age, Hind, now sixty, remains apparently untouched by time.

Hind’s unchanging appearance sustains the belief that she embodies a more powerful Jahilia than the impoverished streets reveal. Her reputation for witchcraft and her apparent failure to age reinforce one another, so that her vitality can be taken as proof of the city’s own endurance. She writes admonitory proclamations and has them posted throughout the streets. In Jahilians’ eyes, she becomes the city’s living avatar: her physical constancy and emphatic declarations offer a more flattering image of their community than the Grandee’s deterioration does. Her influence reaches beyond ordinary political authority; her posted words become more influential than poets’ verses.

Greatness as political consolation

Hind’s proclamations reject the evidence of decline and insist on Jahilia’s greatness, leadership, and immortality. The people find this account compelling not because their circumstances confirm it, but because it gives them an alternative to what they see around them. They tolerate reports of Hind’s extravagance, including the emeralds in which she is weighed on her birthday and her enormous wardrobe, while her public image offers the city a fantasy of undiminished magnificence. The disparity between hardship and proclamation is central: Hind’s authority draws strength from her capacity to make denial feel like civic loyalty.

That authority is backed by force. Jahilia’s streets have become increasingly dangerous, murders for small amounts of money are common, and riots by starving people are brutally suppressed by Hind’s personal police force, the Manticorps. The population’s belief in the city’s glory persists despite evidence carried by their eyes, stomachs, and wallets. Political rhetoric does not reverse the underlying decline; it helps contain the response to it. Hind’s apparent permanence and her promises of Jahilia’s greatness offer consolation, while coercion limits the space in which deprivation might become organized opposition.

Baal’s refusal

Baal stands apart from the public response. Rather than lending his poetry to Hind’s civic vision, he turns away from public affairs and writes poems of unrequited love. His retreat is also shaped by the altered conditions of the city: there is no longer a market for satire, because fear of Mahound has destroyed the demand for insults and wit. The decline of Jahilia therefore affects not only trade and public safety, but also what its writers can say and whom they can address. Where Hind’s proclamations occupy the streets, Baal’s dissent withdraws into private verse.

The city’s decay before Mahound’s return is thus marked by a tension between material contraction and insistence on grandeur. Jahilia loses commerce, customary life, and civic confidence; the Grandee visibly ages; Hind presents herself as timeless and makes her image a substitute for collective strength. Baal’s disengagement reveals the cost of that political atmosphere for satire and public speech. The result is a city that continues to proclaim its magnificence while its everyday conditions increasingly refute it.