Submission as the new religion

Submission as the new religion gives Mahound’s preaching its name and organizing principle, but the novel makes submission more than a settled religious identity: it is tested by political bargains, disputed revelation, persecution, and the demands placed on a community. The faithful’s departure from Jahilia appears at once as an act of survival and as an occasion for doubt about whether a religion that runs away has betrayed its purpose or carried it toward a new beginning.

A faith tested by compromise

Mahound’s creed takes shape amid the challenge of Jahilia’s established worship. The Grandee offers toleration and official recognition in exchange for Mahound’s approval of Lat, Uzza, and Manat; the proposed bargain would also give Mahound a seat on the city council. Salman the Persian warns that accepting would make Mahound appear to have tailored revelation to political advantage, and argues that retreating from the creed would weaken the believers’ standing. Mahound answers from a different understanding of revelation: he experiences listening as a form of asking and believes that Gibreel Farishta comes from the deepest part of his own being. The scene leaves the source of religious speech unsettled even as it shows how sincerely Mahound understands himself to be receiving it.

That uncertainty becomes acute when Mahound considers the proposed accommodation. In his inward questioning, he weighs the lives of the city against the possibility of accepting the three goddesses, wonders whether the Grandee’s offer is sincere, and suspects his own ambition for political standing. He recalls the miraculous signs that failed to persuade Jahilia: the washing of his heart at Zamzam, his accurate account of Jerusalem after his night journey, and the reduction of the daily burden from forty prayers to five after Moses urged him to plead for less. Even such concessions, he reflects, have not displaced devotion to Lat, Manat, and Uzza. The conflict is therefore not merely between political caution and religious purity; it concerns what kind of evidence can compel belief, and whether accommodation can save a community without changing what it is.

Persecution and departure from Jahilia

After the Satanic Verses are repudiated, the political promise of accommodation gives way to persecution. Abu Simbel confines adherents of Submission to Jahilia’s poorest quarter, imposes a curfew, and bars them from employment. The policy is accompanied by assaults, harassment in shops, attacks by gangs secretly controlled by the Grandee, and fires set among sleeping people. Yet the number of believers grows as their circumstances worsen. The novel presents this increase as a historical paradox: repression intended to contain the new faith instead helps consolidate the group exposed to it.

An offer of shelter from Yathrib gives the believers a way out. Hamza urges Mahound to leave Jahilia, arguing that he will not be able to complete his message there while Hind remains hostile. Grieving and withdrawn after the death of his elderly wife, Mahound consents; the faithful begin making their plans. Khalid, who had doubted Mahound, interprets the earlier compromise as a deeper lesson about the workings of evil and its overthrow. Mahound’s bitter response refuses the easy reassurance that the disputed revelation was a deliberate teaching device. The exchange keeps faith and doubt in the same frame: the community can find meaning in its ordeal, but that meaning does not erase the uncertainty or pain that produced it.

The departure is staged as a collective beginning. From Mount Cone, Gibreel Farishta watches small groups leave Jahilia almost empty-handed for Yathrib, imagined as a place of palms and water. The migration falls on the first day of the first year of a renewed era, so that the old dies behind the travelers while a new time waits ahead. Mahound later slips away himself and reaches the oasis. Baal’s valedictory verse depicts Submission as an idea that runs away, turning the migration into a challenge to the faith’s legitimacy as well as a practical escape from danger. The followers’ movement can be read both as flight from a hostile city and as the founding gesture by which their community begins again.

Submission as command and collective discipline

A later strand of the novel gives the language of religious command a different setting. After her disappearance, Ayesha returns to Titlipur and tells the village council that Gibreel Farishta has given a message that is also a command: everyone in the village must prepare to walk to Mecca, where the Black Stone stands in the Kaaba within the Haram Sharif. She promises that after two hundred miles the sea will part and the pilgrims will cross its floor. This is not the same community or episode as Mahound’s followers in Jahilia, but the parallel makes the relation between faith and obedience newly visible: a claimed revelation becomes a rule for bodies, families, and an entire village.

The council votes unanimously to obey. Preparations begin before dawn: food is pooled, supplies and bedding are gathered, the loads are divided among the walkers, and only the youngest infants are exempted from walking and carried in rotation. The Sarpanch’s proposal to provide litters for the old and infirm is rejected because the command is understood to require walking. As the pilgrimage proceeds, its collective discipline meets material limits. The march advances at the slowest pilgrim’s pace, delayed by sick children, official harassment, and a broken cart; at best it covers two miles a day, with about one hundred and fifty miles still to travel and an estimated eleven weeks ahead. Khadija, an elderly member of the group, dies after continuing the pilgrimage despite a dream in which she encounters Azraeel. The episode makes the cost of obedience concrete without resolving whether the promised destination will validate the command.

Public meaning, doubt, and the outcome

By the ninth week, the pilgrimage has become a national spectacle. Journalists, politicians, potential sponsors, tourists, and other onlookers gather around it. Some seek to turn the march into advertising; others treat it as an exotic curiosity. The butterflies that clothe and feed Ayesha confound visitors’ expectations, while her image appears in newspapers and on commercial hoardings. Religious extremists, meanwhile, denounce the Ayesha Haj as an attempt to inflame communal feeling and dispute the pilgrims’ claim to the foot-pilgrimage tradition. The dispute shows how a religious act can be recast as a struggle over public attention, cultural ownership, and political legitimacy.

The villagers’ confidence is also shaken by the killing of a foundling outside a mosque. They refuse to move on, and their withdrawal from Ayesha’s authority brings the question of obedience into the open. Mirza Saeed presses her on why she reports interpretations rather than the angel’s precise words. Her answer—that the message comes in clear and memorable forms—does not end his challenge. At the shore, after the pilgrims finally reach the Arabian Sea, they enter the water and disappear; none is seen again. Some bystanders enter the sea in an attempt to help, while Mirza Saeed continues searching before he is rescued. The pilgrimage ends without a surviving witness able to confirm the promised crossing, leaving belief, misperception, and catastrophe unresolved.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, Submission as the new religion is associated with both collective endurance and the danger of making faith legible through obedience alone. In Jahilia, exclusion strengthens the community even as migration leaves Baal able to mock its departure. In Titlipur, unanimous consent initiates a demanding journey, but hardship, internal dissent, and the final disappearance complicate any simple equation between submission and salvation. The novel does not reduce these scenes to a verdict on belief: it places political coercion, sincere conviction, skeptical questioning, and uncertain revelation beside one another, so that the consequences of submission remain visible even where their ultimate meaning cannot be settled.