The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (26 page)

By sending his letter to a head of state like the Byzantine Emperor Hercules, Mohammed demonstrated an audacity that Haykal calls “amazing”
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. And amazing it was. When Hercules was puzzled and asked where Mohammed’s letter had come from, he was told that it was from a people too backward for Hercules to bother his head about: “from the Arabs, people of sheep and camels”.
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It had come from insignificant barbarians.

What’s worse, Mohammed still ruled only one flyspeck, one unheard-of city—Medina, a town of a mere thousand souls lost in the vastness of the Arabian desert. He hadn’t even conquered Mecca. Hercules, on the other hand, ruled one of the biggest empires of the day, an empire that held territory on three continents and that spanned so many cultures that it dizzies the imagination.
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Yet Mohammed-the-insignificant told Hercules-the-mighty:

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I invite you to Islam and if you become a Muslim you will be safe, and Allah will double your reward, and if you reject this invitation of Islam you will be committing a sin by misguiding your subjects.”
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In other words, if you refuse to impose Islam on your citizens, you’ll be hung out to dry on one of Islam’s meme-hooks. You’ll send all of those you rule to torture in an eternity whose endless centuries make our few fleeting years on this planet seem insignificant. What, according to the Qur’an, happens to you if you sin by dooming your subjects to the never-ending fire? Military defeat and an endless sizzle on the coals of the inferno. Says the Quran, “Say to those who reject Faith: ‘Soon will ye be vanquished and gathered together to hell an evil bed indeed (to lie on)!’”
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The Quran adds that Allah gives his armies “permission…to annihilate [their]enemy”.
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“How many towns,” says the Quran, have We destroyed (for their sins)?
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Or, as the 13
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Century Islamic scholar Imam Ibn Taymiyyah
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summed it up, “whoever has heard the summons of the Messenger of God… and has not responded to it, must be fought.”
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What did this mean in reality for the lands of the six rulers who received Mohammed’s invitations? A good deal more than any of them imagined. Writes Mohammad Haykal, “within barely thirty years of the time he sent those missions, the kingdoms of these kings were conquered by the Muslims.”
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And those kingdoms would simply be Allah’s appetizers. The entrees were yet to come. How in the world did such an outlandish reversal of world power, a total change in the pecking order of nations, occur?

Any nonreligious [i.e. non Islamic] power, whatever form or shape, is necessarily an atheistic power, the tool of Satan; it is part of our duty to stand in its path and to struggle against its effects. Such Satanic power can engender nothing but corruption on earth, the supreme evil which must be pitilessly fought and rooted out. To achieve that end, we have no recourse other than to overthrow all governments that do not rest on pure Islamic principles, and are thus corrupt and corrupting, and to tear down the traitorous, rotten, unjust, and tyrannical administrative systems that serve them.

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

At the height of the Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness. Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, [and] the whole world of ideas..."
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Eisenhower was right about the potential power of what he described, a totalitarian superorganism, a massively conformity-enforced social beast battling for top predator status. But he was wrong when he said that this totalitarian social strategy was “unique in history”. He overlooked the fourteen-century-long history of militant Islam.

By 629 AD, when the battle of Khaibar was over, Mohammed had invented precisely what Eisenhower described…a new form of superorganism—a totalitarian military dictatorship with a full-time army, an army paid with taxes and loot sucked from the unbelievers. Mohammed had crafted
the first dictatorship ?? with a meme-team that covered every aspect of life from the direction in which you urinate and your daily schedule to what you believe, a dictatorship that came complete with a new picture of the invisible world. Mohammed’s new squad of memes demanded perpetual war
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and “dawa”—conversion by persistent, peaceful persuasion. Mohammed’s new worldview also that said you won more prizes if you died “fighting in the way of Allah” than if you remained alive.

Every new form of superorganism is a gamble, a guess on the best way to mine a niche in a rapidly evolving world. Mohammed’s guess turned out to be one of the best in history. His new form of social organization proved its fitness for the top predator slot with deeds that no previous superorganism on this planet—no matter how hungry and brutal-- had ever achieved.

When Mohammed died in 632 AD, there was a squabble over who should take his place. Mohammed’s best friend, Omar, won. He became the “caliph”, the “successor” of Mohammed. And he took Mohammed’s global ambitions seriously—very seriously indeed. For good reason. Without its Prophet, the Islamic community was in danger of falling apart. Battle is a bonding mechanism, a way to give a superorganism the social glue it needs to survive. It’s also a way to test your new social structure by gambling your males on growth. Omar apparently sensed the adhesive power of us versus them, especially when it’s strengthened by bloodshed. After Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, says sociologist of Islam Reuben Levy, "war… was the normal state, ...peace ... was the period of the year when campaigning was not possible."
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The victories early Islam achieved were staggering. In 634 AD, a mere two years after the Prophet breathed his last, the armies of Islam conquered Iraq.
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In 637 AD, five years after Mohammed’s death, the Moslem forces toppled the emperor of Persia, sacked the Persian capital, Ctesiphon (the home base of Nestorian Christianity), and took over the massive Persian Empire. That same year, 637 AD, the desert Arabs of Islam snatched the city most holy to Jews and Christians, Jerusalem. Mohammed’s new meme-team was on a road test in the real world and was proving that it had remarkable horsepower!

In 640 AD, eight years after Mohammed’s demise, the Moslems went multi-continental. They conquered Syria outright and began their penetration of the Sudan in Africa. In roughly 642 AD, the Caliph Omar, the friend of Mohammed’s who took over when the Prophet died, reportedly issued the following order to his governor in Syria--"Strike terror into wrongdoers and make heaps of mutilated limbs out of them."
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This psyche-slamming strategy—Mohammed’s strategy of terror, like the rest of militant Islam--worked.

In 642 AD, a mere ten years after Mohammed’s death, the Moslem armies conquered Egypt, began to take Afghanistan, and started sending delegations to China, winning Chinese converts, and building China’s first mosque.
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In 654 AD, 22 years after Mohammed’s departure unto paradise,
a Moslem fleet of over 200 ships clobbered a Byzantine navy of 500 vessels in the Mediterranean,
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demonstrating that a tribe of camel-herding desert traders and Sinbad-the-sailor type Indian Ocean seafarers could be deadly both on land and on sea. In 674 AD, Islam established a colony in a place so far away that no previous Middle Eastern or European conqueror had even tried to add it to his package of real-estate--the Pacific Rim island of Sumatra—5,000 miles east of Mecca.
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But this totally-against-the-odds conquest of an immense territory was just the beginning. From 642 to 705 AD, Islam grabbed the entire Mediterranean coast of Africa—Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.
In Africa, the wives of indigenous kings killed themselves so that they wouldn’t become sex toys—slave girls--in the hands of the Moslem invaders. One of these queens, the
Western African Sudanese ruler Dahia-Al Kahina, died in 705 AD after leading her troops against the Arabs and driving the growing hordes of Allah north to Tripolitania.
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From 711 to 714 AD, The Islamic governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj bin Yousef, a man who called himself "The Bone Crusher", went on a campaign to expand the empire of Islam even further. He ordered his generals to conquer a breathtaking swath of territory—Central Asia’s Turkestan
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(including today's Chinese province of Xinjiang),
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swatches of India, all of Spain, and to tighten control of North Africa. His orders for the treatment of unbelievers was simple: infidels should either be converted, killed, or enslaved.
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The armies sent by “The Bone Crusher” into Europe were led by an ally won over to Islam’s victory-generating military and political strategy, a newly converted Berber slave, Tarik ibn Ziyad.
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Ziyad’s troops crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, toppled the Christian King of Spain--the Visigoth Roderick--seized his entire kingdom, then advanced into Southern France.
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In 712 AD, a mere 80 years after the death of the one true Prophet, the Bone Crusher’s Arab troops and their rapidly expanding cohort of foreign allies took Mohammed’s example of non-stop military expansion even farther and conquered Sind in Western Pakistan. This was a perfect base for more attacks on an only partially-conquered India.
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And attack is exactly what the armies of Islam did. Said one Sufi Moslem, Amir Khusrau, “The whole country, by means of the sword of holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. Had not the Law granted exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax the very name of Hind[us], root and branch, would have been extinguished.”
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