Mahound’s return and conquest of Jahilia

Mahound’s return and conquest of Jahilia is presented as a dream of Gibreel Farishta: a reversal of the earlier exile, in which the city that once rejected Mahound has become a weakened place within the reach of his power. The episode turns not on a decisive battle but on surrender, the collapse of Jahilia’s confidence, and the symbolic removal of its old religious order. Its victories are followed by acts of clemency, but the question of what can be forgiven remains unresolved in Mahound’s pursuit of Baal.

Return and Recognition

The return is foreshadowed in Jahilia by a drop the color of blood appearing at the eye of the statue of Al-Lat. Baal, now an aging poet, takes it as a sign that Mahound is coming back after a quarter-century of exile. The passage of time has changed both men: Baal feels his body and speech growing heavier, while Mahound is imagined returning in splendor and with power enough to reach the city that once sent him away.

Jahilia, too, has altered. Once a shifting, provisional city of sand, it has hardened into a more ordinary, diminished place. Mahound’s influence has cut off the pilgrims and caravans that sustained its fairs, which have become pitiful. The changed landscape makes the return more than a personal reckoning: the old city’s decline has already weakened the commercial and civic world that resisted him.

Gibreel’s dream first shows a solitary visitor walking between the campfires of Mahound’s army. Abu Simbel has come alone, accompanied to Mahound by Khalid and Bilal. The scene presents the Grandee as having recovered some of his earlier strength, but his arrival signals the transfer of power rather than a renewed challenge to it. The man who once ruled Jahilia comes to negotiate the city’s fate from within the camp of the force approaching it.

Surrender and the Collapse of Resistance

Abu Simbel has embraced the new faith and surrendered Jahilia. When he returns home, a crowd has gathered, and Hind appears on an upper balcony to turn the people against her husband. She has learned that he has made a deal with Mahound despite her efforts to prevent it. She strikes him before the crowd, then denounces his decision and urges the people to resist to the last, invoking the goddesses and Jahilia’s supposed strength.

Abu Simbel answers not by trying to restore his authority through force, but by explaining the terms of the surrender. Mahound has promised safety to those who enter the Grandee’s house, and also to those who remain at home behind closed doors. Hind argues that one house cannot shelter the whole city and accuses her husband of saving himself. Yet when she calls the people to fight, they begin to leave. The people who had relied on her proclamations of Jahilia’s invulnerability are confronted with the evidence of its defeat; they abandon her and return to their homes, locking their doors.

Abu Simbel then leaves Hind and goes into the streets to unlock the city gates. The surrendered city is thus opened by its former ruler, after the crowd’s resistance has dissolved. The sequence makes the conquest a reversal of public belief as much as a military advance: Jahilia’s people move from confidence in their old power to fear, and from collective defiance to shelter behind closed doors.

The Temples and the Conquest

At the open gates stands the temple of Uzza. Mahound initially sends Khalid and a force of men to cleanse it, unwilling to enter the city while the temple remains. The temple’s guardian, from the Shark tribe, tests the goddess by placing his sword around her neck and asking her to defend herself. When the idol remains still, he concludes that it is stone and that Mahound’s God is the true God. Khalid breaks the temple and the idol, but Mahound sends him back: the destruction, as first performed, has not completed the symbolic work required by the dream’s terms.

On returning to the ruins, Khalid encounters a terrifying female figure who recites the verses that Mahound had spoken in the poetry tent. Khalid identifies them as the Devil’s verses and rejects the figure’s claim to religious authority. Only after Khalid reports what he has seen does Mahound declare that the army may enter Jahilia. The sequence binds the conquest to the novel’s uncertainty about revelation: the verses are recalled not as an incidental error but as words whose contested source must be confronted before the city can be possessed in Mahound’s name.

After the army enters, the House of the Black Stone contains three hundred and sixty idols, including the colossus of Hubal. The idols are destroyed. The account moves quickly over their removal and turns instead to the people gathered around Mahound’s tent, where they submit to the victorious faith. The transition from temple-cleansing to public submission makes the change of religious order visible in both the city’s sacred places and its inhabitants’ outward declarations.

Submission, Mercy, and the Unfinished Reckoning

Hind eventually appears without her veil and identifies herself as Abu Simbel’s wife. Mahound recognizes her and accepts her submission, welcoming her into his tents. Her reception marks a change from the balcony’s defiance, but it does not erase the confrontation that preceded it: she enters the new order after Jahilia has fallen and after her husband has surrendered the city.

Salman the Persian is captured the next day. Khalid brings him before Mahound, who begins to pronounce a death sentence. Salman pleads, renews his declaration of loyalty, and offers to reveal the location of Mahound’s remaining enemies. When he names Baal, Mahound’s attention shifts to the poet whose satirical verses have continued to wound him. Bilal intercedes for Salman, and Mahound allows him to live. The episode therefore presents clemency as a real consequence of victory: Hind is spared, Salman is spared, and no doors are smashed down to drag old opponents into the streets for punishment.

That restraint does not bring the conquest to a settled emotional conclusion. Mahound continues to think about Baal, who remains in hiding, and Khalid asks whether he should find him. Mahound rebukes Khalid for failing to understand what is at stake, then falls asleep. The city has been taken, its idols destroyed, and its people have submitted, but the poet’s unresolved challenge survives the public victory. In Gibreel’s dream, conquest establishes a new order while leaving its private account of injury, memory, and possible revenge open.