John William Waterhouse Waterhouse Ophelia painting

John William Waterhouse Waterhouse Ophelia paintingLeonardo da Vinci St John in the Wilderness paintingLeonardo da Vinci Madonna with the Yarnwinder painting
After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound returns find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance -- whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy? -- wrought, as is not unusual, upon the innocent. The Prophet's wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a stone--latticed window, sits upright with her back to the wall, dead.
Mahound in the grip of his misery keeps himself to himself, hardly says a word for weeks. The Grandee of Jahilia institutes a policy of persecution that advances too slowly for Hind. The name of the new religion is _Submission_; now Abu Simbel decrees that its adherents must submit to being sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a curfew; to a ban on employment. And there are many physical assaults, women spat upon in shops, the manhandling of the faithful by the gangs of young turks whom the Grandee secretly controls, fire thrown at night through a window to land amongst unwary sleepers. And, by one of the familiar paradoxes of history