The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (11 page)

In the deserts of Mecca, even bad publicity is good publicity. All this persecution spreads the word of Islam and its essential messages, and keeps new converts trickling in.
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615 Mohammed gets one group of believers out of the firing line by telling them to take refuge in Africa—in the Christian superpower of Ethiopia.
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News of Islam inches its way through tiny portions of the Ethiopian population and fires up curiosity. So 20 Christians take the long trip from Ethiopia to Mecca to check out the self-proclaimed “Apostle of Allah” for themselves. When Mohammed recites the Koran to them they cry, they believe, and they apparently convert.
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This takes Islam international for the first time. But it’s only a nano-preview of the international surprises Islam will spring a mere 20 years down the line.

615-618 The Meccans decide to choke Islam before it can get more threatening. Their tourniquet of choice? Economic sanctions. They ban all trade with the Moslems, ruling out even the sale of food to Mohammed’s followers. The goal is what Muhammad’s biographer Muhammad Haykal calls: “boycott, isolation, and starvation”
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. Meanwhile five Meccans amuse themselves by mocking Mohammed. Allah taps Mohammed’s shoulder to deliver one of the revelations—one of the direct communiqués from God The Merciful, The Compassionate-- that now pop into Mohammed’s life on a regular basis. These bulletins will someday be collected in the Koran. The message, in this case, concerns the five wise guys who are making fun of Mohammed. “They will know,” says Allah. In other words, they’ll get the message. But what message and how will they get it?

Gabriel stands by Mohammed’s side when the five wise guys are worshipping by circling the Kaaba. One of the jokers is hit by a green leaf in the face and goes blind. Gabriel points to the stomach of another, his stomach swells
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and he dies. Gabriel points to a wound on the heel of the third man who has dared to make fun of Mohammed. The wound the scar covered opens and kills him. Three taunters down, two to go! Gabriel does something normally only worms and contortionists can pull off. He points to the sole of the fourth target’s foot. A thorn penetrates the sole and kills the guy. For his final act, Gabriel points to the head of the fifth mocker, which “ferments with poison”
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and sends the cut-up directly to the new home of his four co-mockers, hell. The lesson? It’s handy to have a merciful and compassionate God on your side. And sometimes the fact that He shows His mercy and compassion by killing can give you a competitive edge.

619 Mohammed’s two protectors, Khadija, his venture capitalist, and Abu Talib, his uncle and his muscle
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, die.
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Things have been bad in Mecca for the Moslems, and now Mohammed is afraid they’ll get worse. He sets out on a trip to find new backup—allies from other tribes who will protect him. He works out a minor variation on his opening line: “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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And he tries another tack, the export market. Mecca still has its trade fairs, events that attract the visits of tribes from great distances.
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If your neighbors won’t buy your spiel, why not try it out on strangers? Especially ones who’ve shown up in a buying mood? So Mohammed tries winning over the tourists. In the process, he meets the folks from Medina, a hamlet 280 miles up the road, who seem far more interested in what he has to say than most of the folks at home.

When he returns home, things are worse than ever. The Meccans have come to the end of their rope. Once simply playing practical jokes and mocking Mohammed was enough. Like the day a bunch of Meccan pranksters slid a camel foetus or a camel’s guts, depending on whose account your reading, down the back of Mohammed’s robes. But those days are over. Now the Meccans plan to solve their unwanted prophet problem by doing away with its cause, Mohammed. Mohammed gets wind of this scheme, and hot foots it out of town with his best friend and first adult convert, Abu Bakr—a man who will someday be rewarded for his loyalty with conquests beyond most men’s dreams. The two head the 280 miles to Medina, leaving behind another convert, Mohammed’s teenage cousin Ali. Ali sleeps in Mohammed’s bed that night, setting himself up as a decoy. It turns out that the rumor of Mohammed’s assassination was true. A gang of Meccans intent on murder enter Mohammed’s home in the middle of the night armed to the teeth. But when they peel back to covers to give them clear aim at their victim, all they find is a boy. Killing kids is not what they have in mind. Ali leaves for Medina to join up with Mohammed and Abu Bakr. The Meccans will someday rue their mercy. Ali will someday become one of Islam’s greatest slayers, a man who hones his blade on the bodies of Meccans.

A handful of other followers join Mohammed in Medina, including his wife, Khadija. 622 AD, the year of this relocation of the Allah operation, known hejirah, is year zero on the Islamic calendar. It’s the point Moslems will come to regard as the beginning of history. All that came before will be considered Jehillilla—the years of darkness, when chaos, ignorance, and evil ruled mankind. What would banish that black and endless night of humanity? The light Mohammed bore like a lantern. The light of Islam.

Tribal wars were a constant. One of Mohammed’s Islamic biographers, Sarwat Salat thinks this strife went against Mohammed’s grain. “The Prophet,” he says, “was by his nature a human[e] and peace loving person…[who] hated war.”
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Mohammed’s life in Medina would tend to argue otherwise.

^^@^^ [hb: insert the Ansar system Mohammed set up in Medina]

In 622 AD
, when it looked as if Mohammed was about to be murdered in his home town, Mecca, he and a handful of believers fled 280 miles through wild hills and desert to a tiny city with only a thousand inhabitants—most of them Jews
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--Medina. There Mohammed and the Meccans who followed him lived on the food and lodging provided by their Medina-ite hosts.

Mohammed instinctively knew the rules of the learning machine: he who gets gets more. He who loses is left out. Mohammed needed camels, sheep, land, date palms, oases, slaves, swords, and armor.
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And he needed a constant stream of military wins. He needed these things to feed his followers, to give them the best weapons, and to give them pecking-order status, to give them prestige.
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He needed consumer goods to make sure that the meme-team he preached would spread. He needed wealth and earthly possessions to build solidarity in the Moslem community. And he needed luxuries and the good things in life to pay his Medina-ite hosts back for housing and supporting his “believers.”

Mohammed also needed a flood of treasure and triumphs to take advantage of another rule of the learning machine, that allies flock to the beast on top. The first technique the One True Prophet chose to score wins and to bring in the booty was simple: raiding passing caravans then divvying up the loot.
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God himself backed Mohammed in this policy. As the Qur’an says, “
Allah made it binding on the Muslims to fight in His way. Warfare is ordained for you, though you dislike it.”
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Mohammed led his desert raids literally dressed to kill. As one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the 20
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century, the Ayatollah Khomeini, put it, Mohammed, “would place a helmet on his blessed head, don his coat of chain mail, and gird on a sword.”
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Mohammed had nine swords in his personal weapons collection, many of them stripped from the hands and bodies of slain enemies.
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Ibn Ishaq, who wrote the first and most definitive Islamic biography of Mohammed just 150 years after Mohammed’s death, explains that to down foes at a distance,
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Mohammed also carried a bow and a full arrow case.
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In 624 AD, the year of the “permission” to make Jihad, Allah offered the Moslems and their Medina-ite helpers a special treat. Mecca, the Moslems’ hometown, had humiliated the Prophet and his first followers. Now a Meccan camel caravan bringing home the profits
of a luxury-goods-transport mission to Syria
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was about to pass near Medina. The owners of this caravan and of its cargo of treasure were Mecca’s leading citizens, the folks whose ridicule and threats had turned Mohammed into a fugitive. This was a brilliant opportunity for plunder
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… and for revenge.
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When Mohammed and his followers attacked the string of Meccan cargo camels, one of the caravan’s leaders, a Meccan aristocrat, sent home for help. An army of a thousand men, 700 camels, and 100 cavalry horses
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heeded the caravan’s call for military backup. This forced Mohammed to switch from mere raiding to full-scale war.
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According to Mohammed’s Islamic biographers, the Moslems “were in a difficult test, they were going to face their own brothers, sons and relatives”
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—they were about to go toe-to-toe with the people they’d grown up with back home in Mecca. And Mohammed was apparently gut-wrenchingly scared. He prayed his heart out, but his words were haunted by fear of defeat: “"O Allah, bring about what Thou hast promised to me. O Allah, if this small band of Muslims is destroyed. Thou will not be worshipped on this earth."
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