The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (18 page)

Oh you who foolishly threaten him [Mohammed]

…
Do you not fear the basest punishment

…
That you may be thrown beneath his swords

As Ka’b al-Ashraf [the Jewish poet] was

…
When…He [Allah] sent down Gabriel with a gracious revelation

To His servant [Mohammed] about his killing.
⁴⁰¹

Another exultant warrior crowed enthusiastically about Islam’s payoff to the greedy—loot and plunder:

“
The spoil which God gave the apostle from the people of the towns [the Jews] belongs to God and His apostle. What the Muslims gallop against with horses and camels and what is captured by force of arms belongs to God and his apostle…and what the apostle gives you take.”
⁴⁰²

The subtext of all this ancient Islamic poetry and prose was simple. It was a key meme that militant Moslems would use for the next thousand years and more. God gives money, goods, and sex—a subject we’ll get to in a minute--to those who are willing to kill in the name of Allah. God delivers the goods to those who make war. He delivers the profit of plunder to those who murder on his behalf. A
s the Qur’an puts it,
“with Allah are profits and spoils abundant.”
⁴⁰³
What’s more, God adds a bonus. He gives the hormonal boost that exalts a winner. He gives the glee of victory. God also grants the ultimate learning-machine prize-- a lift in the pecking order, a lift in power, in prestige, and in influence.

Part of that pecking order lift would come from a sense of superiority to a permanent class of underdogs and enemies, the Jews. Jews would remain Islam's nerds, its easy targets and one of its key sources of bonding, cohesion, and social glue, for the next 1,400 years.

***

Meanwhile, the Jews of the Banu Nadir took refuge in Syria and in the town of Khaibar.
⁴⁰⁴
But Khaibar and Syria too would soon be threatened by the advance of a new picture of the invisible world, by the advance of a new social learning machine, by the hunger of a new superorganism eager to compete in the pecking order of groups, a new superorganism driven by a new team of memes. Khaibar and Syria would soon be utterly changed by the advance of militant Islam.

"The person who governs the Moslem community must always have its interests at heart and not his own. This is why Islam has put so many people to death: to safeguard the interests of the Moslem community. Islam has obliterated many tribes because they were sources of corruption and harmful to the welfare of Moslems."

Ayatollah Khomeini—the founding father of today’s Islamic Republic of Iran
⁴⁰⁵

After two ethnic cleansings and a call for genocide issued by The Prophet himself, the Jews got the message:
⁴⁰⁶
they’d become a permanent target. And if they didn’t do something about it they’d become an arrow-mulched bulls eye. According to one Islamic biographer, A. S. Muhammad Abdul Hai, the latest group of Hebrews the Prophet tossed out of their homes in Medina, the Banu Nadir,
⁴⁰⁷
working from their refugee camp in Khaibar, “hatched a dire conspiracy against Muslims. They instigated nearby tribes against Muslims and made Quraysh [the leading tribe of Mohammed’s hometown, Mecca] agree for a battle”,
⁴⁰⁸
a battle to wipe out Islam utterly.
⁴⁰⁹

In fact, it appears that the Meccans were eager to attack the Moslems with or without Jewish instigation. One Meccan leader looked forward to the fight with relish. Making “an end of Mohammed and his men”, he said, would bring “immortal fame”
⁴¹⁰
. He’d turn out to be wrong. Dead wrong.

The Moslems got wind of the Meccan attack weeks in advance, and couldn’t figure out how to deal with it.
⁴¹¹
Then one of Mohammed’s followers, a Persian, came up with a bright idea. He recommended that Mohammed protect his men from face-to-face combat by using a Persian defensive ploy—digging a trench to shield Medina and the forces of Islam. Mohammed took an iron pickaxe
⁴¹²
and hacked out the first chunks of soil and rock himself
⁴¹³
.
³
Then the Prophet put three thousand of his followers and allies to work digging the remainder of the fifteen-foot-deep, almost three-and-a-half-mile-long defensive ditch,
⁴¹⁴
a ditch it took 20 days to complete.
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After the trench was finished, the Meccan attackers finally showed up, allegedly accompanied by ten thousand black mercenaries, the forces of three tribes of allies,
⁴¹⁶
and a contingent of Jewish soldiers.
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The Meccans and their coalition troops soon discovered that even with their camels and horses, trying to cross the Moslem trench set them up for easy slaughter. So they pitched camp outside the trench and laid siege to Medina.

For nearly a month, the “war” bogged down in stalemate.
⁴¹⁸
Thanks to the trench, there was very little serious fighting. But there were also no fresh supplies. The Moslems and their allies in Medina ran low on food and were close to starvation. But the attackers, the Meccan “unbelievers”, were not doing that well either. They had difficulty finding food in the desert. Says Ibn Ishaq, their “horses and camels were dying”. And the weather proved to be far less than friendly. A blast of bitterly cold wind put out the Meccans’ fires, “upset their cooking pots and overthrew their tents”.
⁴¹⁹
Or, as the Qur’an puts it:
⁴²⁰
“the grace of Allah …sent against them a hurricane.”
⁴²¹

The leader of the Meccans couldn’t take it any more. He said, “You can see the violence of the wind which leaves us neither cooking pots, nor fire, nor tents to count on. Be off, for I am going.”
⁴²²
With that he walked to his camel, which was hunkered down to avoid the wind, “mounted it, and beat it so it got up on its…legs,”
⁴²³
then trotted back to Mecca. Thus ended what went down in history as the Battle of the Trench.
⁴²⁴
Chalk up another victory for Allah!

But there are no spoils and no booty in a victory in which few men face combat and in which only six Moslems and three Meccans
⁴²⁵
are killed.
⁴²⁶
For Mohammed that lack of loot was a serious problem. How do you supply your troops, give them prizes, and raise your prestige when your triumph consists in freezing the enemy with a freak of the weather, exhausting them, lying to them (for the story of the lies, see the footnote
⁴
), and convincing them to go back home? How do you prove that Allah delivers the goods, that, in the words of the Qur’an, “those who strive and fight hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward”
⁴²⁷
and that “Allah will swiftly reward those who (serve him)”
⁴²⁸
? You return to your strategy for automatic wins. You go back to picking on your nerds. So in 627 AD, Mohammed moved his war against the Jews into higher gear…this time in a bid for an even higher material payoff.

Mohammed got the ball rolling by telling his followers that the Jews were
“a people without understanding…transformed into apes and swine…racing each other in sin and rancor…. Evil indeed are their works.
”
⁴²⁹
The Prophet added that, in fact, Islam’s very ability to affect history would depend on a slaughter of Hebrews. “The Hour will not be established,” he said, “until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”
⁴³⁰

Then Mohammed explained that when he’d returned from the loot-less Battle of the Trench to the house of one of his wives
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, had laid down his arms, and had taken a bath,
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Allah The Most Benevolent, The Most Merciful
⁴³³
had sent a figure in an embroidered gold turban riding up to the house where Mohammed was cleaning up.
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The visitor “on a white mule with a brocade covered saddle”
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was the angel Gabriel, who the Prophet said had told him to stop lazing around, to put his armor back on,
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and to attack the richest people in the neighborhood, a town of Jewish leather specialists
⁴³⁷
called the Banu Quraiza. As an added incentive, Gabriel promised that, “
I, too, will attack the Jews and shake them out of their homes.”