Mahound and Hind

Mahound and Hind are religious and political antagonists whose confrontation turns a contested accommodation between rival faiths into a declared struggle without truce. Hind, the Grandee’s wife and a member of the family responsible for Jahilia’s temples, presents herself not as a peripheral opponent but as Mahound’s equal and opposite. Their exchange joins intimate gestures and strategic calculation to a larger dispute over whether Allah can recognize the goddesses without diminishing their independence.

Positions and Stakes

Hind’s standing is grounded in both marriage and religious authority. She tells Mahound that the Grandee knows she takes lovers but does not intervene because the temples of Lat, Uzza, and Manat are in her family’s care. She even tests the proposed religious settlement by asking whether the temples of the new angels might be called mosques. Her question brings the rival systems into the same sentence without treating their equivalence as settled: the names and institutions may be brought together, but the power behind them remains contested.

Mahound’s position is more inwardly uncertain. Salman the Persian warns him that accepting the Grandee’s proposal could make his revelation appear manufactured and weaken the credibility of his creed. Mahound answers that he has learned to listen, describing revelation as a kind of asking and saying that Gibreel seems to come from the deepest parts of him. Later, the remembered dream gives that uncertainty sharper form: Mahound asks whether Lat, Manat, and Uzza might be angels, and wonders what he should recite. Hind’s confidence in an irreconcilable opposition therefore confronts a leader who is still struggling to interpret the voices and demands surrounding him.

The Private Confrontation

The two meet after Mahound has fainted from exhaustion following the events in the poetry marquee. Hind sits close, touches his chest, and asks whether he is becoming weak. Before he can answer, she places a finger over his lips and tells him not to speak: she is the Grandee’s wife, and neither of them is his friend. The gesture gives her control of the conversation, while her blunt account of the Grandee’s weakness strips away the public reputation for cunning that she says Jahilia has given him.

Hind offers Mahound cubes of melon from a dish and tries to feed him. He refuses to take them from her fingers, accepting the pieces only in his own hand. The small exchange establishes a boundary within the closeness of the scene: Hind may direct the conversation and approach him, but she cannot make him receive the food on her terms. She then names Baal as her last lover. Mahound’s anger shows that Baal is already a point of friction between them, and Hind responds that Baal and Abu Simbel are not his equals—before asserting that she is.

Rival Claims and the Refusal of Truce

Hind repeats that she is Mahound’s equal and his opposite, and says she does not want him to become weak. When Mahound bitterly replies that the settlement will protect her temple revenues, she says he has missed her point. If Mahound is for Allah, Hind is for Al-Lat; in her account, Al-Lat does not accept being recognized by his god as a daughter. Hind rejects the hierarchy implicit in that recognition and describes Al-Lat as Mahound’s equal just as she is his.

Her argument refuses the practical logic of a bargain. The Grandee may or may not betray his pledge, she says, because he does not know his own intentions and must calculate the odds. But the political uncertainty is secondary to her religious claim: between Allah and the Three there can be no peace, and she does not want one. Her declaration that she wants a fight to the death makes the confrontation more than a dispute over the Grandee’s offer or the income of the temples. For Hind, compromise would misrepresent the nature of the opposition itself.

Mahound answers with an image of water washing sand away. Hind reverses the image: the desert absorbs water, and he should look around him. Their exchange gives the conflict a compact, opposing logic. Mahound imagines change as the force that wears down resistance; Hind imagines the surrounding world as a landscape capable of taking that force in without yielding. Neither concedes the other’s account, and the imagery makes their disagreement feel enduring rather than negotiable.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Soon after Mahound leaves, wounded men arrive at the Grandee’s palace to tell Hind that Hamza has killed her brothers. By then Mahound is gone and is heading once again toward Mount Cone. The news brings the wider conflict into Hind’s household, but the passage does not describe her response or establish what follows between the two. It does place the report beside their exchange: their argument over whether religious opposition can end in peace is followed by news of a family loss within the same violent struggle.

The relation is defined less by a continuing domestic bond than by mutual recognition as opponents. Hind does not reduce Mahound to a fool or a weak man; she distinguishes him from the Grandee and insists that he is the adversary worthy of her. Mahound, in turn, answers her challenge with a counter-image rather than a dismissal. Their encounter concentrates the novel’s religious conflict into a contest over equality, recognition, and the limits of political accommodation, while leaving the outcome of their personal opposition unresolved.