Salman alters the revelations and flees Yathrib

Salman alters the revelations and flees Yathrib in an episode that turns the authority of revelation into a struggle over who speaks, who hears, and who fixes words on the page. His small substitutions begin as a test of Mahound; when they pass unnoticed, the test becomes a crisis of belief, a deliberate rewriting, and finally an escape made under the shadow of Mahound’s return.

The earlier crisis of revelation

The episode’s background lies in the poetry tent at Jahilia, where Mahound announces that he is the Messenger and brings verses from a greater source. After Abu Simbel insists that the whole world must hear what God has said, Mahound recites “The Star,” and the scribes begin to write. He proceeds without hesitation to verses naming Lat, Uzza, and Manat, then declares that their intercession is desired. The response is immediate and public: Hind rises, Abu Simbel turns toward worship, and Hind follows him to his knees. The scene makes a recitation consequential not only as speech but as an event that alters allegiance in front of a crowd.

That proclamation does not remain secure. After wrestling with the Archangel Gibreel, Mahound wakes alone in the wilderness and decides that the earlier encounter was with the Devil, not an angel. He understands the verses from the poetry tent as satanic and returns to Jahilia to remove them from the record. Yet Gibreel’s account makes the distinction unstable: he says he was the speaker both when the verses were first delivered and when they were repudiated. The episode Salman later recalls therefore already contains a dispute over the source of words—and over whether a change in their status can be settled by the authority of the person who speaks them.

A dream becomes a test

Years later, Salman is writing rules at Mahound’s feet in Yathrib. His own account of the turn begins with a dream: he hovers above Mahound at the cave on Mount Cone and recognizes that his viewpoint resembles Gibreel’s. The dream brings back the Satanic verses incident with unusual vividness. Salman wonders whether he had dreamed himself as Gibreel or as Shaitan; the uncertainty gives him the idea to test Mahound by altering the text he is copying.

At first, the changes are slight. Where Mahound describes God as “all-hearing, all-knowing,” Salman writes “all-knowing, allwise.” He expects Mahound to catch the substitution, challenge him, and give him the chance to correct it as a mistake. Instead, Mahound does not notice. Salman is left with a more disturbing result than the one he intended: his words can enter the written Revelation without being distinguished from it by the Messenger who recites it. His experiment is not presented as proof that he knows the source of the words; it shows that, within the scene, the authority to recognize and preserve them is vulnerable to the ordinary act of transcription.

From substitution to betrayal

Salman persists, moving from a small change in description to a change of religious identity: Mahound says “Christian,” and Salman writes “Jew.” When he reads the passage back, Mahound nods and thanks him politely. The lack of correction leaves Salman shaken and sad. He says he had changed his life for Mahound, left his own country, and crossed the world, yet now finds himself writing the Book—or rewriting it—with no one noticing. The sequence gives the betrayal a double edge: Salman is falsifying the text, but he understands the failure to detect the falsification as evidence that his own suspicions about its divine poetry may be right.

He also describes himself as unable to stop. He considers the possibility that Mahound merely missed the first alteration, then deliberately makes a larger one; when that too passes, he continues. Only later does Mahound frown and shake his head as if clearing it, before slowly nodding his approval with a trace of doubt. Salman takes this hesitation as the limit of the test: the next rewriting, he believes, would reveal what he had done. His account thus traces a progression from an intended, reversible test to a sustained act that could expose both men. Each new alteration raises the stakes, while the act of reading the passage aloud briefly returns the written words to the speaker for judgment.

Flight and the unresolved word

On the night after Mahound’s doubtful response, Salman stays awake thinking that he holds both his own fate and Mahound’s in his hands. He frames his choice as death with revenge or life without anything, and chooses life. Before dawn he leaves Yathrib on a camel and makes his way back to Jahilia, passing through misadventures that his account does not relate. His departure ends his work as Mahound’s scribe but does not end his fear: Mahound is now returning in triumph, and Salman believes his power has grown too great for him to undo.

When Baal asks why he expects Mahound to kill him, Salman answers that the dispute will be Mahound’s word against his. The line condenses the episode’s conflict into an unequal contest over testimony: Salman has manipulated written words, but Mahound possesses the public authority to speak about what happened. The novel does not give Salman’s remembered dream the power to settle the supernatural question raised by Gibreel’s account. Instead, the overlapping versions leave the source of the revelation uncertain, while the concrete acts of reciting, hearing, writing, altering, and fleeing show how that uncertainty becomes a human and political danger.