The persecution of the Submitters in Jahilia

The persecution of the Submitters in Jahilia is the campaign Abu Simbel imposes against the followers of Submission after Mahound repudiates verses he had recited in praise of Lat, Uzza, and Manat. The campaign turns religious conflict into the daily regulation and physical endangerment of a community, but its intended suppression has the opposite effect: the faithful multiply, and an offer of refuge from Yathrib sets their departure in motion.

The Recitation and Its Repudiation

At the poets’ gathering, Mahound announces that he brings verses from a greater source than the assembled poets. He calls for “The Star,” and the scribes begin to write. After an initial recitation, he delivers two more verses without hesitation, including words that affirm the intercession of Lat, Uzza, and Manat. Hind rises during the recitation; Abu Simbel stands with her, then adopts the gestures of prayer and prostrates himself. Hind follows. Their public response makes the subsequent reversal especially consequential: Abu Simbel has appeared to accept Mahound’s message before becoming the authority behind a policy against its adherents.

After a wrestling encounter with the archangel Gibreel, Mahound wakes in the wilderness and finds himself alone. He concludes that the voice he heard had been the Devil, not the angel, and hurries back to Jahilia to strike the verses from the record. The narration leaves the source of the recitation unsettled: Gibreel’s account insists that he supplied both the original statement and its repudiation. The persecution therefore follows not a simple resolution of religious doubt but a reversal whose truth remains contested within the story.

Abu Simbel’s Campaign

Mahound returns from repudiating the verses to find his seventy-year-old wife dead beside a stone-latticed window. He withdraws into grief and speaks little for weeks. In Jahilia, Abu Simbel institutes a policy directed at adherents of Submission. They are confined to the city’s most wretched quarter, a district of hovels; a curfew restricts their movement, and a ban on employment attacks their means of support.

Official restrictions are accompanied by violence. Women are spat upon in shops, gangs of young men manhandle the faithful, and a fire is thrown through a window at night among sleepers. Abu Simbel secretly controls the gangs, linking the public policy to intimidation carried out in the streets and at people’s homes. The measures seek to make adherence costly through isolation, poverty, and bodily threat rather than through a single decisive confrontation.

Persecution and Its Reversal

The campaign advances too slowly for Hind, but it does not diminish the community. The narrative instead compares the growing number of the faithful to a crop flourishing as its soil and climate worsen. This reversal gives the persecution a consequence its authors do not appear to intend: oppression becomes a condition under which Submission spreads rather than disappears.

The novel later complicates the authority of the revelation at the center of the crisis through Salman the Persian’s account. Recalling a dream in which he seemed to occupy Gibreel’s viewpoint, Salman begins to wonder whether he had been Shaitan. He says that, while serving as Mahound’s scribe, he secretly altered wording in the revelations; Mahound did not notice even when Salman changed a reference from Christian to Jew. Salman’s story does not settle the earlier dispute, but it extends the novel’s uncertainty about who speaks, who records, and how sacred authority is recognized.

Refuge and Departure

An offer arrives from the oasis settlement of Yathrib: it will shelter those who submit if they wish to leave Jahilia. Hamza urges Mahound to go, arguing that he will not finish his message in a city where Hind wants to silence him. Mahound, isolated in the house of his bereavement, consents. The faithful begin making plans to depart.

Khalid the watercarrier stays behind long enough to apologize for having doubted Mahound. He interprets the earlier compromise and repudiation as a deeper lesson: Mahound had exposed the Devil so that believers could witness evil’s workings and its overthrow. Mahound answers with bitterness, rejecting the praise rather than embracing Khalid’s consoling interpretation. The group’s departure thus begins under two unresolved pressures: the immediate danger of Abu Simbel’s campaign and continuing uncertainty about the meaning of the revelations that helped precipitate it.