The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (10 page)

Rather than be ridiculed by his fellow Meccans as a madman, Mohammed trekked up into the mountains to find a convenient cliff from which he could fling himself “and gain rest”.
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But a man showed up like the Jolly Green Giant, straddling the horizon with his torso in the sky, his feet planted on the ground, and with wings outstretched wings outstretched from one end of the sky to the other.
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This oversized apparition spanned the horizon no matter which way Mohammed turned his head. Said the massive super-sized humanoid, “Oh, Mohammed, thou art the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.” Mohammed stopped still in his tracks.

Meanwhile, his wife, Khadija, was worried and sent out servants to find her missing spouseim. The servantsy brought back a seriously shaken man. Sitting at Khadija’s thigh, Mohammed told his wife that he thought he was losing it. “None of God’s creatures was more hateful to me than an (ecstatic) poet or a man possessed,” he said, “I could not even look at them.”
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Yet that was the level of delusion to which he felt he’dd sunk. Khadija reassured Mohammed that God would never implant madness in a man so honest and kind.

But beneath her soothing manner, Khadija, too, must have been disturbed. When the family returned home from the mountains, Khadija gathered her robes about her
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and paid a visit to her cousin the Christian, the man schooled in the Jewish Torah and in the Christian Gospels. The cousin came up with the perfect face-saving solution. Mohammed’s visions were not a humiliation, he said, they were a promotion. Explained the cousin, “the law of Moses has been bestowed on him and he is the prophet of this nation!”
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That was it. A new calling. InFrom 610 to 613 AD, Mohammed started his career in prophecy. For its first three years, Iit was at best a home business, a mom-and-pop cottage industry. Mohammed’sHis first convert was was just a few inches away in his bed—Khadija, his wife. Doesn’t sound like much, but with Khadija signed up as a believer, Mohammed had her fortune as funding. Convert number two was a newly-arrived
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house-guest, Mohammed’s ten year old nephew, Ali. Abu Talib, Mohammed’s uncle and guardian, had been too strapped financially to continue taking care of his own son, Ali. Mohammed, flush with Khadija’s money, had taken over the task and Ali had moved in to Mohammed’s home. Now the ten-year-old signed up eagerly as a follower of Mohammed’s still rudimentary belief system. , the son of his uncle Abu Talib. But Mohammedenism would have a tougher time with adults. But Abu Talib himself, Ali’s father and , one of the men closest to Mohammed, gave the self-styled spokesperson for Allahhim a turndown, explaining that, “I cannot abandon the religion of my forefathers.”
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Then came a big score, an actual jump outside the immediate household-- Mohammed’s best friend Abu Bakr, who pulled in six of the heavyweights who would someday play a role in militant Islam’s blitzkrieg of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. But there would be many difficulties to overcome before Islam could pull that blitzkrieg off.^^@

It took three years, but by 613 AD613 In three years, Mohammed’s new religion, Islam, which Sarwat Saulat says means, “the religion of obedience, peace, and security”
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hads taken shape in Mohammed’s mind. The angel Gabriel has taught Mohammed how to wash up five times a day, then to pray.
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God, Allah,God has revealed enough scriptures to Mohammed to fill a smallsmall Qur’an. The big He in the sky drove homehas gotten across a core belief: “Anyone who does not admit the existence of God or believes in polytheism is a rebel. This was the real and true religion of Adam, the first man, of Abraham, of Moses, and of Jesus.”
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In other words, God told Mohammed that the religion of the Jews and the Christians was distorted, dishonest, and corrupt, but that He, the Most Gracious Most Merciful,
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was going to hand Mohammed the REAL religion the Jews and Christians should follow.

What’s more, by 613And Mohammed hads worked out his way of introducing himself to strangers: “I am an apostle from Allah to you and command you to adore Allah and not to bestow this adoration on any other; to renounce the worship of idols; to believe me, His apostle, and to defend me that I may explain to you the revelation with which Allah has sent me.”
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He was asking a lot. That may be whyBut the new belief system, still limited to a hidden existence in Mohammed’s house, hads only worked its way up to 40 believers.

So613 God sent Mohammed the word that it wasds down the message that it’s time to get serious. It was’s time to go public. Very public. Or, as God put it, Actually, God sait wasys it’s time to “publish”.
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But Mohammed couldan’t read or write and the printing press hadsn’t been invented yet. So Mohammed followed god’s instructions and told his family, “"O children of Ka'ab Ibn Lu'ay, save yourselves from Hell. O children of Murrah lbn Ka'ab, save yourselves from Hell. O children of Hashim save yourselves from Hell.”
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How? Basically, by doing anything and everything Mohammed demanded.
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After those cheerful words, So Mohammed wentgoes to one of the highest soap-boxes around, the sacred Mount of Safa, a hill topped with the idol of the goddess Na'ila.,
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He askeds the people of Mecca to gather ‘round, then gaveives his equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, a speech that showeds just how dramatically Islam wouldill be a religion of fear, not a religion of love:^^@

Would you believe me if I tell you that a large army was hidden behind this hill ready to attack you? Well, if you think so, I ask you to believe in one God, and if you refuse to do so God will give you severe punishment.
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With these uplifting words, Mohammed loses his audience, who promptly head for just about any part of town where Mohammed isn’t standing.
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One reason for this instant departure: much as the Meccans love mocking their fellow humans—and they do--they prefer to laugh
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about Mohammed behind his back. For the moment.

613-619 Why be laughed at for taking an inch when you can be hated for stealing a mile? For the next six years, from 613 AD to 619 AD, Mohammed takes his religion a giant step forward. He turns it, says Sarwat, into “a call to create a whole new society, free from all evils and exploitations, on the basis of Divine guidance.”
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This doesn’t go down well with the Meccans in power, those who benefit from the existing status quo. Says Mohammed’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, when Mohammed insults their idols, the folks at the top, “accuse him of seeking power, deny his revelation, and unite to injure him.”
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Then comes the heavy-duty persecution. Depending on whose version of the story you listen to. And there’s only one left. The Moslem version. Which goes like this. Something rather hard to gather together on the planet earth of the year 613 AD or so--a group of Mohammed’s followers--goes out to a valley to pray. A group of something not quite so hard to find—idol-fearing Meccans—comes across the Mohammedans, insults them, and “provokes them to fight”
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. One of the Moslems, a bloke named Sad, clobbers one of the Meccans with the jaw of a camel, a natural lever long and hefty enough to kill someone. In this case, the Meccan victim is only injured. But Ibn Ishaq notes a critical fact: this is “the first blood shed in Islam.”
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The Meccans try to figure out how to handle the trouble Mohammed’s causing. He is undermining the fabric of society. And he’s doing it big-time. Says one of the Meccans, Mohammed “has come with words …which separate a man from his father or from his brother, or from his wife, or from his family.”
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So the Meccans make a singularly poor decision. The annual Holy Months have arrived, the time when everyone within hundreds of miles has to schlep to Mecca to amble around the Kaaba, to honor the idols, and to trade. The Meccan elders take up a position by the roadside, stop every incoming visitor, and warn him about Mohammed and his anti-social poison. Without knowing it, they’ve just given Mohammed something he’s never had before—a public relations campaign. Word of Mohammed spreads far and wide.

So the Meccans try to convince Mohammed to return to his position as a respectable member of the community. They offer him money. They offer to make him a prince. They offer to make him a king. They ask him to produce a few miracles to prove that his claims of prophecy are legit. Nothing works.
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So the Meccans turn to cruder techniques of cult-deprogramming. One believer’s uncle ties him up hand and foot, beats him with ropes, and locks him in a room, and tells him he’ll stay there until he agrees to leave the Mohammed-cult and return to his senses.
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The Mohammedan doesn’t abandon his wild and crazy belief in Mohammed and his preachings. Another uncle of a believer tosses his cult-ridden nephew into a room filled with choking smoke. When yet another convert announces in public that he’s switching over to the Mohammed sect, the public responds by beating him up. Others are beaten, then locked up without food and water until they can’t stand it and do more than merely abjure Mohammed. They promise to worship a dung beatle.
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But to the extent that Islam is catching on, it is doing best with the poor and with the slaves. And it’s the slaves who get the really heavy-duty de-Mohammedification treatment. The desert sands outside of Mecca heat up like a hamburger grill when the sun hits them. The master of one Moslem slave forces his victim’s back down on this searing desert surface at noon, when the heat would char a slice of camel liver into solid carbon, then loads the slave’s back with a huge stone to pin him in place and to make sure that he bakes evenly. The slave refuses to leave the Mohammed cult. So the master takes another approach. He ties a rope around the broiled slave’s neck, then takes advantage of a powerful motive force—adolescent boys, some of whom are always up for a joy-ride. The slave owner asks the boys if they’ll oblige him by dragging the sauteed slave “from one corner of town to the other”
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. The slave can barely talk, but still manages to spit out the Moslem catchphrase, “God is one”
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. Finally Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s best friend and second male convert, offers the owner a trade-- a black slave of his own in exchange for the cooked and dragged Moslem slave-- and gains the char-broiled Moslem his freedom.
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Another slave is beaten into unconsciousness, wakened, then beaten again. To make matters worse, his father is battered, bloodied, and bruised, and his mother is run through with a lance. This cocktail-toothpick treatment is fatal to the old woman. Another slave gets an even more decisive detoxification. He’s spread out on burning coals until the melted fat of his body finally cools the embers. By then, he is presumably dead.
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But Mohammed himself is untouched. No one dares cross his uncle and his uncle’s allies.
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