Mahound and Abu Simbel

Mahound and Abu Simbel are religious opponents whose conflict becomes a contest over whether a new faith can gain public standing by accommodating the established order. Abu Simbel offers tolerance and a place for Mahound on the Council of Jahilia if he recognizes three goddesses alongside Allah. Mahound initially recites verses that appear to accept the offer, then withdraws them as satanic. The bargain’s reversal changes their political relationship and exposes the novel’s continuing uncertainty about who speaks through revelation, who records it, and who can claim authority over its meaning.

The proposed bargain

Abu Simbel first acts through intermediaries, sending a messenger to Mahound with what he calls a fair test. He proposes that Mahound recognize Lat, Uzza, and Manat as worthy of worship. In return, the followers of Mahound would be tolerated and officially recognized, and Mahound himself would be elected to the Council of Jahilia. The proposal joins a theological concession to concrete political inclusion: a place within the city’s governing order is offered as the price of admitting its established goddesses.

The terms place Mahound under pressure from both sides. His followers have been washing and praying at Zamzam Well in a city whose prevailing religious culture treats their practice as alien. When Mahound returns to them after meeting Abu Simbel, they see exhaustion in him and fear that the offer has compromised their cause. Khalid urges immediate refusal; Bilal affirms his faith in the Messenger, while Hamza cautions him that the Messenger is only a man. Salman the Persian argues that accepting would give Abu Simbel grounds to call Mahound a fraud: if a new revelation conveniently endorsed the goddesses, the city could claim that Mahound had manufactured it to secure recognition.

Mahound does not present his way of receiving revelation as ordinary hearing. He describes listening as a process that also involves asking, and says that Gibreel often seems to come from within his deepest self. That account makes the offer more than a straightforward political negotiation. Its answer depends on a voice whose source Mahound experiences as intimate and powerful, but whose authority his opponents can challenge. Hamza’s advice is therefore not to settle the question by argument among the followers: he urges Mahound to climb Mount Cone and ask Gibreel.

A public recitation and apparent accord

At a gathering of poets, Mahound enters with his eyes closed and reaches the stage without opening them. Abu Simbel publicly welcomes him as a seer and kahin, and the crowd allows Mahound’s disciples to come forward rather than pushing them aside. The gesture gives Mahound a hearing before an audience assembled for entertainment, not religious instruction. Abu Simbel then insists that if Mahound’s God has spoken, the whole world should hear.

Mahound recites verses called The Star. The scribes write them down as he speaks, so the scene brings together a claimed revelation, a public performance, and its written record. He first recites material affirming the truth of what was seen. Without hesitation, he then recites further verses about Lat and Uzza and Manat, describing them as exalted birds whose intercession is desired. The response is immediate: Hind rises, and Abu Simbel stands; as the crowd erupts, Abu Simbel performs the gestures of prayer and prostrates himself. Hind follows his lead. Their public actions make the apparent compromise visible to the assembly, and the followers’ movement from being excluded to being heard has become a dramatic, if precarious, recognition.

Withdrawal and political reversal

The apparent agreement does not hold. After a struggle with Gibreel, Mahound awakens in the wilderness and concludes that the earlier verses came from the Devil disguised as the archangel. He returns to Jahilia intending to remove them from the record. The narration complicates his certainty: Gibreel, watching from above, says that he spoke both the verses and their repudiation. Mahound nevertheless returns to the city and stands before the statues of the Three at the House of the Black Stone. There he announces that the verses are abrogated and excluded from the true recitation, replacing them with verses that reject the goddesses’ status.

This withdrawal overturns the terms on which Abu Simbel had offered recognition. The dispute is no longer only about whether Mahound will share religious authority with Jahilia’s established cult; it also concerns the reliability of the process by which the first recitation was received and recorded. Abu Simbel’s earlier public welcome and prostration stand against the later political consequences of the repudiation. The account does not show him immediately accepting Mahound’s revised position. Instead, it emphasizes that he calculates the odds while Hind demands vengeance, leaving the couple’s response divided between political calculation and her demand for retribution.

Persecution, departure, and the relationship’s aftermath

After the repudiation, Abu Simbel institutes a policy of persecution against Submission. Its adherents are confined to the poorest quarter of Jahilia, placed under curfew, and barred from employment. They face assaults and intimidation, including attacks by gangs secretly controlled by the Grandee. Mahound withdraws into grief after returning home to find his elderly wife dead, and the followers’ position in Jahilia becomes increasingly untenable. The city offers not the toleration promised in Abu Simbel’s bargain, but coercive containment.

An offer of shelter from Yathrib gives the faithful a route out. Hamza argues that Mahound cannot finish his message in Jahilia, and Mahound consents to the departure. Khalid, who had earlier feared that Mahound might accept the deal, now apologizes: he recognizes the possibility that the apparent compromise had led to a deeper understanding of evil and its defeat. The followers leave to prepare for migration. Abu Simbel’s offer has thus failed to produce a lasting settlement; its aftermath is a harsher division between the city’s rulers and the community Mahound leads.

Revelation, record, and retrospective uncertainty

The novel later returns to the episode through Salman the Persian’s recollection. After dreaming that he hovered above Mahound at the cave on Mount Cone, Salman wonders whether he had occupied Gibreel’s perspective—or Shaitan’s. That possibility prompts him to alter the verses he writes down for Mahound. He begins with small substitutions and eventually changes a reference from Christian to Jew. Mahound initially fails to notice, and Salman takes this as evidence that the words he records cannot be cleanly distinguished from revelation by the Messenger himself. He continues until Mahound’s response suggests that he may have reached the limit, then flees Yathrib.

This later account does not simply settle what happened between Mahound and Abu Simbel. Instead, it adds another mediator to the chain: the person who hears, the person who recites, and the scribe who fixes words on a page. Gibreel’s claim that he voiced both the original verses and their repudiation further unsettles any easy division between divine and satanic speech. The novel’s acknowledgments also state that its Qur’an quotations are composites of existing English versions with additions by the author, underscoring the work’s literary construction without making the story’s competing claims resolve into a single uncontested account. Abu Simbel’s bargain remains the political hinge of the episode, but the authority of the words that first made the bargain seem possible remains deliberately uncertain.