Jahilia’s polytheistic religious order

Jahilia’s polytheistic religious order is both a way of understanding the sacred and the foundation of a city’s commercial and political life. Its crowded pantheon gives pilgrims many objects of devotion, while the shrines and the revenues attached to them sustain the ruling families. Against this established plurality, Mahound’s declaration of one God sounds not merely theologically unfamiliar but socially and economically disruptive.

Sacred Place and a Crowded Pantheon

The order gathers around the House of the Black Stone, a sanctuary whose story reaches back to the world’s creation. The valley is described as the earth’s navel; in the founding account, Adam sees a radiant stone beneath a canopy of emerald pillars and builds walls to hold the vision in place. Ibrahim later rebuilds the House after Hagar and Ismail survive with angelic assistance. Over centuries, pilgrims’ touch darkens the once-white stone. In Mahound’s time, the sanctuary stands amid three hundred and sixty stone gods, a history in which an older sacred center has become the focus of an expansive cultic world.

The gods are not a single undifferentiated multitude. Hubal, associated with the waxing crescent, stands above the treasury well; Kain, linked to the waning crescent, has his own devotees. The city’s divine assembly also includes He-Of-Shara, Astarte, Nakruh, Manaf, the eagle-formed Nasr, and Quzah, who holds the rainbow. Their diverse associations make the sanctuary resemble an international gathering as much as a local religious center: deities, like pilgrims, have come from far away. This variety is part of the city’s appeal, but it also places the gods within a system of competition for devotion.

Allah is acknowledged as having a general authority, yet the Jahilians favor more specialized divine figures. The three most beloved goddesses have distinct characters and powers: Uzza is associated with beauty and love; Manat with fate and hidden purposes; and Al-Lat, the mother-goddess, is treated as the highest of the three. Her name makes her Allah’s opposite and equal in the account’s description. The order thus contains both a hierarchy among deities and a tension between a broadly authoritative god and particular gods whose specific powers draw worshippers.

Shrines, Wealth, and the Pilgrimage Economy

Religious authority in Jahilia is bound to control of sacred sites. Abu Simbel’s family, more precisely the family of his wife Hind, controls Al-Lat’s famous temple at the southern gate. It also receives the revenues of Manat’s temple in the east and Uzza’s in the north. These temple concessions are described as the foundations of the Grandee’s wealth. His position is therefore more than personal devotion: the shrines connect his household’s political standing to the city’s religious geography.

The same dependence on pilgrimage shapes Jahilia’s response to commercial decline. The city prospered when camel caravans carried goods across the desert, along routes linking Zafar and Sheba with Jahilia, Yathrib, Midian, Aqabah, and Egypt, as well as destinations farther east and north-east. But increasingly capable ships draw trade away from the overland routes. Jahilia’s rulers have little power to reverse that change, and the council seeks to attract pilgrims by gathering statues of foreign gods. The religious marketplace is itself competitive: a major temple in Sheba draws visitors away, and the crowds at Jahilia’s fairgrounds diminish. Abu Simbel suspects that pilgrimage may be the remaining barrier between the city and ruin.

Under his recommendation, the rulers also cultivate the city’s reputation for profane entertainment and gambling, hoping to make it attractive to visitors. That policy has damaging consequences. Extortion at the sanctuary’s gates and abuses of pilgrims discourage return visits; the account also notes that female pilgrims face kidnapping or sale into concubinage. These practices reveal how the pilgrimage economy can be exploited by those who control access and movement. The city’s religious abundance does not ensure a stable or benevolent order: its sacred attractions coexist with commercial desperation and the abuse of visitors.

One God and the Crisis of Authority

Mahound’s message of one God enters this environment as a direct challenge to multiplicity. Its force is sharpened by Jahilia’s condition: the city’s prosperity has relied on a network of shrines, specialist deities, and pilgrim traffic, while its leaders are increasingly anxious about the decline of that traffic. Abu Simbel proposes that Mahound accept the three goddesses in exchange for toleration and a place on the council. The offer makes explicit what is at stake: religious recognition could also absorb a rival into the city’s political order.

Salman the Persian warns Mahound that accepting such a compromise could make the revelation appear contrived and weaken the faith of his followers. Mahound replies that listening for Gibreel is also a kind of asking, and that the angel often seems to come from within his own deepest self. The scene leaves the source of revelation unsettled even as it establishes Mahound’s account of his experience. In a later episode of this visionary struggle, Mahound asks why the people continue to worship Lat and the other goddesses despite the miracles associated with Gibreel and his own journey to Jerusalem and ascent. Gibreel, in turn, experiences the two figures as bound together in an intimate, reciprocal dream relation, and remains unable to supply Mahound with an answer. The conflict is therefore not only between one god and many: it also concerns how religious speech becomes authoritative and whether its source can be distinguished from the speaker’s inner life.

The Order’s Afterlife in the Novel’s Religious Conflicts

Jahilia’s pantheon establishes a recurring problem in the novel: religious claims are lived through institutions, bodies, voices, and public acts, not held apart from social power. Later, the Imam casts history itself as an enemy and transmits his call to revolt through Bilal’s radio voice, showing another attempt to define legitimate belief by rejecting a rival account of the world. The episode does not reproduce Jahilia’s polytheistic order, but it echoes the struggle over who may speak with sacred authority and what forms of knowledge a religious community will accept.

The later pilgrimage led by Ayesha offers a different contrast. She claims that Gibreel has commanded the villagers of Titlipur to walk to Mecca and that the sea will part for them. The villagers prepare collectively, carry provisions, and proceed at the pace of the slowest; the journey lasts roughly eleven weeks and is repeatedly delayed. As the pilgrimage attracts national attention, outsiders dispute its religious and cultural legitimacy. At its end, the pilgrims enter the Arabian Sea and disappear beneath it, while several people who rush in after them are rescued. The novel does not resolve the event into a simple proof or refutation of faith. Set beside Jahilia’s competing shrines and Mahound’s struggle over revelation, it extends the question of religious authority into a different landscape: belief can organize collective action, but neither public controversy nor the outcome supplies an uncontested interpretation.