Mahound–Hind relationship

Mahound–Hind relationship

Mahound and Hind are joined first by the conflict over Jahilia and then by a public act of submission after his victory. Hind had fought on the Jahilian side, driven by vengeance for her brothers and associated with the killing of Mahound’s uncle Hamza. When she later appears before Mahound in his camp, she declares that she has submitted, and he welcomes her. Their encounter marks a decisive change in political and religious allegiance, but the evidence presents no private reconciliation: the relation is staged through Hind’s gesture, Mahound’s response, and the new order of Submission.

Antagonism and Hind’s Authority

Before the encounter, Hind’s power in Jahilia rests on a mixture of force, public language, and an image of permanence. At sixty, she appears not to age, while the city around her declines. Abu Simbel grows old and physically diminished; gangs and other established groups lose their former vitality; and Jahilia’s confidence in itself ebbs. Against that visible decay, Hind’s unchanged appearance and forceful proclamations allow her to represent a more flattering image of the city to its people. Jahilians come to regard her, rather than Abu Simbel, as the city’s living embodiment.

Hind’s influence is not merely symbolic. She writes admonitory proclamations that are posted throughout Jahilia, and these become more influential than the poets’ verses. Her authority combines the written word with the threat of force: she has fought disguised as a man in the Jahilian army, using sorcery to deflect weapons as she searched for her brothers’ killer. She killed Hamza, Mahound’s uncle. This history makes her later appearance before Mahound more than a change of religious profession. The woman welcomed into his camp is also a former armed opponent whose actions are bound to the losses on both sides.

The city’s attachment to Hind helps explain the scale of that reversal. Her proclamations promise Jahilia continued greatness and deny the decline visible in its streets. The people tolerate accounts of her extravagance and sexual conduct while living amid growing danger, poverty, and violence, and while her personal police force brutally suppresses riots by the starving. Their confidence in her is therefore tied to a political fiction of endurance: Hind’s apparent youth and uncompromising language let Jahilia imagine itself still powerful even as its conditions deteriorate. Her eventual submission to Mahound is consequently also the submission of the figure who had embodied the city’s defiance.

The Encounter in Mahound’s Camp

After Mahound has returned to Jahilia, Hind approaches him veiled and kneels. Her gesture initially appears to be worship, which Mahound rejects: he tells her that only God should be worshipped and urges her to stop. When she declares that there is no God but Al-Lah and that Mahound is his Prophet, he recognizes that her excessive demonstration carries a bitterly ironic force. She then removes her veil and identifies herself as Hind, the wife of Abu Simbel. Her identity turns the episode into a confrontation with Jahilia’s recent past, not an anonymous act of conversion.

Mahound acknowledges that he has not forgotten her. After a pause, however, he accepts her declaration of submission and welcomes her into his tents. The order of these actions matters: recognition of Hind’s identity and history precedes acceptance. His welcome follows her stated allegiance to the new faith, rather than erasing the conflict that came before. The promise that those who submit will be spared gives the exchange a clear political and religious condition. The scene records a change in status, but does not establish a personal bond beyond that act of acceptance.

Submission and the Limits of Reconciliation

Hind’s submission reverses her former position without making her past disappear. She had been a figure of Jahilian resistance, a military participant who pursued vengeance and killed Hamza; now she proclaims the formula of the victorious faith before Mahound himself. For Mahound, accepting her demonstrates that his new rule can incorporate a former enemy who submits. For Hind, the act means entering his camp under the identity of a conquered city’s prominent former ruler and as Abu Simbel’s wife. The episode offers no further account of their private dealings or of how either understands the other beyond this public encounter.

The relation is therefore defined by an uneasy conjunction of memory and amnesty. Mahound’s acknowledgment that he remembers Hind prevents the welcome from reading as forgetfulness, while his decision to receive her establishes that her history does not bar her from submission. His welcome is neither a description of affection nor evidence that their opposing histories have been settled between them. Instead, the scene makes the political terms legible: Hind names her new allegiance, and Mahound grants her entry among his followers. The former adversary is accepted, but the act that changes their relation is submission.