Submission’s persecution in Jahilia

Submission’s persecution in Jahilia is the campaign against Mahound’s followers after he retracts verses that appeared to honor Lat, Uzza, and Manat. It turns a dispute over the source and authority of revelation into a program of civic exclusion: the faithful are segregated, deprived of employment, and exposed to assault. Their numbers nevertheless increase, and an offer of shelter in Yathrib gives them a route out of Jahilia.

The disputed recitation and its repudiation

The persecution follows a public moment of apparent religious and political reversal. At a gathering in a poetry tent, Mahound announces that he brings verses from a greater source than the assembled poets. When Abu Simbel insists that a genuine divine message must be heard by the world, Mahound calls for “The Star,” and the scribes begin to record his recitation. After verses describing Lat, Uzza, and Manat as exalted beings whose intercession is desired, Abu Simbel performs the gestures of Muslim prayer and proclaims the greatness of Allah; Hind follows his lead. The spectacle briefly suggests that Jahilia’s ruler and his wife may accept Mahound’s message.

The possibility of compromise had already alarmed Salman the Persian. He warns that approving the goddesses could make Mahound appear to have manufactured a convenient revelation, and that abandoning the creed of one God would weaken the believers’ position. Mahound answers that the movement is already dismissed: his audiences rarely exceed fifty, and Baal’s lampoons circulate through the city. Abu Simbel’s offer would promise tolerance and official recognition, including a place for Mahound on Jahilia’s council, but the public recitation does not settle the question of what authority spoke through him.

After wrestling with the Archangel Gibreel Farishta in the wilderness, Mahound wakes, decides the earlier message came from the Devil, and hurries back to Jahilia to expunge the verses. The narration complicates his certainty: Gibreel Farishta says that he supplied both the initial verses and their repudiation. The conflict is therefore not presented simply as a settled distinction between a false message and a true one; the identity of the voice behind the words remains unstable even as Mahound acts decisively upon his revised understanding.

Abu Simbel’s campaign against the faithful

Mahound returns home to find his seventy-year-old wife dead beside a stone-latticed window. He withdraws into grief and scarcely speaks for weeks. Against this personal bereavement, Abu Simbel institutes the policy of persecution. The adherents of the new religion, called Submission, are ordered into Jahilia’s most wretched quarter, crowded with hovels. A curfew limits their movement, and a ban on employment denies them the means to support themselves.

The policy is enforced not only through official restrictions but through intimidation and physical violence. Women are spat upon in shops; gangs of young men, secretly controlled by Abu Simbel, manhandle the faithful; and a fire is thrown through a window at night among people asleep inside. Hind finds the persecution too slow, while Abu Simbel’s measures steadily make religious allegiance visible as a condition for housing, work, safety, and freedom of movement. The attack reaches into ordinary life rather than remaining a dispute between leaders.

Growth, resistance, and departure

The worsening conditions do not extinguish Submission. The narration compares the faithful’s growing numbers to a crop flourishing as its soil and climate deteriorate. That reversal makes persecution an unintended source of communal strength: the effort to marginalize the believers coincides with their multiplication.

An offer then arrives from the oasis settlement of Yathrib to shelter anyone among the faithful who wishes to leave Jahilia. Hamza urges Mahound to accept, arguing that the message cannot be completed in a city where Hind wants to silence him and the persecution continues. Alone in the house of bereavement, Mahound consents. The faithful begin making plans to depart, turning a campaign designed to contain them within Jahilia into the immediate background for their migration.

Khalid the watercarrier hangs back to speak with Mahound. He apologizes for having doubted him, interpreting the earlier compromise and its reversal as a deeper demonstration of the Devil’s workings and defeat. Mahound answers with bitterness and cynicism, refusing the consoling interpretation that the episode was a triumph of insight. His response preserves the cost and uncertainty of the events even as the community prepares to leave.

Narrative significance

The persecution links contested revelation to material power. Before the restrictions begin, the issue is whether Mahound can recognize and report a message accurately; afterward, Abu Simbel’s authority is expressed through control of residence, labor, movement, and bodily security. The narrative’s competing accounts of the verses—Mahound’s decision that they were satanic and Gibreel Farishta’s claim that the same voice produced both versions—keep the origin of the words unsettled while making their social consequences unmistakable.

The novel later returns to that uncertainty through Salman the Persian’s recollection of his work as a scribe in Yathrib. After dreaming that he might have been Shaitan rather than Gibreel Farishta, Salman secretly changes small details in the revelations he writes down; Mahound does not notice the first alterations, including a substitution of “all-wise” for “all-hearing.” This later episode does not explain away the persecution, but it extends the novel’s scrutiny of how speech becomes authoritative through hearing, memory, recitation, and writing. The acknowledgements also state that the Qur’an quotations in the book are composite English renderings, with additions by the author, marking the text’s literary construction rather than presenting the novel’s invented episode as a historical account.