Jahilia’s social condition after submitting to Mahound

Jahilia’s social condition after submitting to Mahound is marked by a decisive shift from the city’s polytheistic merchant order to the public rule of Submission. The change is enacted through conquest and the destruction of the city’s idols, then made ordinary through daily prayers, restrictions on alcohol, and the seclusion of wives. Yet the crowds’ outward profession of the new faith does not resolve the questions of conviction and authority that preceded the takeover: the city has changed hands, while the meaning and source of revelation remain contested.

The conflict before submission

Before Jahilia falls, Abu Simbel offers Mahound a compromise: the city would tolerate and officially recognize his followers, and Mahound would be elected to its council, if he approved the worship of Lat, Uzza, and Manat. Salman the Persian warns that accepting the offer would threaten the credibility of the revelation and weaken the community’s creed. Mahound, however, describes his experience of listening to Gibreel as a form of asking, in which the angel seems to come from within his deepest self. The dispute is therefore not only political. It turns on whether a revelation can be trusted when its apparent words seem to answer a human need.

That uncertainty sharpens in Mahound’s later distress. He recalls the miracles shown to Jahilia, including his night journey to Jerusalem and the reduction of the faithful’s daily prayers from forty to five after his encounter with Moses. Still, the people worship the goddesses. Mahound wonders whether Lat, Manat, and Uzza might be angels and questions whether accepting them would save the city’s people or serve his own ambition. His uncertainty gives the eventual settlement a charged background: Submission arrives not after every doubt has been settled, but as a victorious religious and political order.

Conquest and the remaking of sacred space

The immediate transition follows the destruction of Uzza’s temple. Khalid reports what he has seen there, and Mahound then announces that the army may enter Jahilia. The narrative describes the city being possessed in the name of the Most High. In the House of the Black Stone, the old sacred inventory is extensive: three hundred and sixty idols, including a sun-god, an eagle, a rainbow, and the colossus of Hubal. They are all broken. The brief, sweeping account makes the change to the city’s religious landscape appear both material and final: images that had occupied its central sanctuary are removed rather than incorporated into the new order.

After the cleansing of the House, Mahound establishes his tent on the old fairground. People gather around it and embrace the victorious faith. As they bow, they murmur the confession that there is no God but Allah. The narrative also describes these as life-saving words, leaving room between public compliance and inward belief. Mahound asks Khalid whether Salman the Persian has been found. He has not; he is hiding, and Mahound expects him to be found. Even in the moment of collective submission, the absent dissenter remains a concern.

Rules in daily life

Jahilia settles into a new routine organized around the new religion. The call to prayer sounds five times a day; alcohol is prohibited; and wives are locked away. These changes extend Submission beyond the conquered sanctuary and the public gathering around Mahound’s tent, into the repeated rhythms of the day and the regulation of households. The new social order is thus presented through concrete practices, not solely through declarations of belief.

Hind withdraws to her quarters, while the narrative immediately asks where Baal has gone. That question points to a consequence of the changed city without yet supplying an answer: public life has been reorganized, but some inhabitants are absent from the new communal scene. The account’s attention to Hind’s retreat and Baal’s disappearance sets the official uniformity of the settlement against unresolved individual fates.

Public submission and unresolved authority

The new order is powerful because it joins sacred space, public allegiance, and daily discipline. The idols are destroyed, the victorious faith is embraced in the streets, and the community’s schedule and domestic arrangements are recast. But the account does not make visible acceptance equivalent to private conviction. The inhabitants’ murmured confession is described in the language of survival, and Salman’s continued absence underscores that submission has not made every conflict disappear.

The transition also retains the earlier problem of mediation. Mahound has described Gibreel’s revelations as arising from his deepest self, while the disputed proposal from Abu Simbel had tested whether a message could accommodate political advantage. The later conquest imposes a clear public religious settlement, but it does not erase the uncertainty surrounding how revelation is heard or the difference between a received command and a human desire. Jahilia’s transformation is therefore both an institutional victory and a narrative pressure point: the city’s practices have changed, while the story continues to test the authority behind them.