The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (30 page)

But by 1453, the 811-year-long battle of Islam against Constantinople and its empire had finally stripped the city of almost all of its imperial territories and had cut off its supply of raw materials. What’s more, for centuries Constantinople’s emperor and the Roman pope had squabbled over who carried the full weight and authority of the Roman Caesars and who was Christianity’s authentic connection with heaven. In 1203, the Roman Christians—the Christian kings of Europe and their knights—had mounted a Crusade and, instead of attacking the Moslems, had attacked, raped, and sacked Constantinople.
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So the city was alienated from—and weakened by--what should have been its Christian allies.

By 1453, Constantinople was down to a mere fraction of its original population
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and had only 7,000 soldiers, 2,000 of whom were foreign mercenaries. This was a pitiful number of fighters with which to defend the city’s 42 miles of 36-foot-high inner and outer walls.

Allah had kept the forces of the Jihad from capturing Constantinople ever since Mohammed had sent his letter inviting the Byzantine Emperor Heracles to capitulate to Islam in 629 AD, 824 years ago. Now Allah would teach his loyal followers how patience and belief pays off.

The Emperor of Constantinople shut down the city's small number of mosques and put pressure on the citizens who had converted from Christianity to Islam to return to the Christian fold. According to the Qur’an, this sort of "attack on Islam" is a legitimate cause for war.
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So the leader of the Islamic Empire of the day, the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II, seized the opportunity. He and his father had already built permanent forts just outside the city to cut it off from aid and reinforcement. Then on April 2, 1453, Mehmed camped his forces—over 100,000 of them--outside of Constantinople. His troops trained the world’s biggest cannon on the city--a 27-foot-long monster called "the Basilic"
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that fired a ball nearly the weight of a small car--1,200 pounds. The giant cannon opened holes in the city’s layers of walls, lanes wide enough for files of invaders to penetrate. But it took three hours to reload the Basilic. The citizens and threadbare troops of Constantinople scrambled to repair the breaches while the warriors of Islam labored to reload their superweapon.

The warriors of Islam dug tunnels designed to reach the walls of Byzantium, to undermine their foundations, and to cause them to collapse. The Byzantines told each other, “have patience till God shall have delivered the city from the great dragon who seeks to devour us.”
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But they were praying to the wrong god. It was Allah who would deliver on his promises, not Jehovah.

Fifty-four days after the siege of Constantinople began, on May 29, 1453, Mehmed ordered his troops to assault the pummeled and exhausted city. Within hours, the Moslem troops had killed the Emperor of Constantinople as he led what was left of his forces. When Mehmed entered the city in a triumphal display, the few citizens who remained alive greeted him with flowers and hoped for the best. They got the worst. For seven hours Mehmed’s troops looted and plundered.
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What’s more, the laws of Islam gave the victorious troops the right to seize Constantinople’s remaining citizens—all of them--as “the property of the victor,”
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to be ransomed, enslaved, kept for sexual purposes, used for labor, or to be sold.

Allah had promised his believers Constantinople and Rome. And Allah had delivered on promise number one. But as Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, known as “one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam,” said in 2002, “The other city, Romiyya, remains… This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor.”
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What sort of lesson in patience would Allah teach his global body of followers—his Ummah--before he would deliver on this second promise? What trials would the people of Islam have to undergo before Allah would give them the city of Rome…and its Empire, Europe?

And what about the other portions of the planet that were still drowning in darkness and disbelief? As the Moslem website Islamic World says, "The Qur’an clearly and directly asks all human beings to surrender to God(Allah)."
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Then the website invites you to, "See the audio & video streaming of A Worldwide Islamic State".

The patience that finally brought Constantinople to Islam is the mark of a superorganism that may have been slow to master modern industrial and military technology, but it’s a superorganism that doesn’t see things in just the short-term, a culture whose memes guarantee that it will stick to a project for centuries.

“
dear youth of Islam everywhere, …dear knights of Mohammed the Conqueror, …let your supplies be continuous so that you may… [continue] fighting steadfastly the treacherous Romans ….”

Osama bin Laden, 2004
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Does Islam really stand a chance of finally achieving its ancient aim of taking Europe? Could it ever possibly reach top predator status in England, France, Germany and the rest of the European nations?

Memes, genes, and superorganisms use a host of strategies to expand their sway. Some are conscious. Many more are unconscious. Among those that straddle the line between consciousness and invisibility are reproductive strategies, strategies that show up in different cultural attitudes toward sex, toward the role of women, and toward socially acceptable--or socially required--family size.

Reproductive strategies came to the surface in 2004 when conservatives in the US looked at demographic figures and realized that they were winning the battle for the American mass mind in part by out-reproducing their rivals, liberals.
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Reproductive strategies came to the surface in 2005 when mainstream Jews realized that the Jewish population of the world, a population that’s already very small, is growing even smaller. One rabbi suggested a new mainstream Jewish answer—larger families with more kids
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.

But the most telling war of reproductive strategies in the 21
^st
century is the one between dar el Harb and dar el Islam
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—the home of War, your home, and the home of Islam.

A dedicated Moslem, Ali Mazrui, Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and writer and host of the nine-part PBS series
The Africans
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,
says that, “When Islamic fundamentalism is combined with the zeal and dedication of jihad… the culture of procreation merges with the culture of combat.” What does he mean? “Fundamentalist Muslim families…,” he explains, “resort to having more and more children as a strategy for 'multiplying in the name of Allah'.” Then Mazrui gets down to brass tacks. “Procreation itself,” he says in words whose like we’ve heard from him before, “can be counted as a form of jihad.”

That jihad—that war of the womb--gains from a simple rule: “If the father is Arab, the child is Arab, regardless of race or ethnic origins of the mother.”
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And if the father is a Moslem, so is his child. Mazrui calls the resulting Islamic reproductive approach “competitive procreation”.
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Then Mazrui gives an example of how effective “competitive procreation” can be. “"Islam originally arrived in Africa as a religion on the run,” he reports. “The first Muslim refugees arrived in Ethiopia early in the seventh century AD, fleeing from persecution in polytheistic Arabia. The refugees presumably decided that intermarrying with Ethiopians and having large families was a way to strengthen their kinship ties in the Horn of Africa, and to expand their local Muslim communities in exile.”
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Thus, Mazrui says, began “Islam's culture of procreation."
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Then things turned nasty. "The second significant arrival of Islam in Africa,” he says, “occurred in Egypt in AD 639. This time the Arabs arrived as conquerors rather than as refugees. But how was the Egyptian population not only converted to another religion (Islamization), but also transformed into Arabs (Arabization) over the centuries? How was this Arabization accomplished in the rest of North Africa and in much of the Nile Valley as well?” Good question. And Mazrui is kind enough to answer it. “Historically,” he writes, “the culture of procreation among the conquering Arabs reinforced their jihad culture of combat. North Africa and much of the Nile Valley were Arabized as much by Arab intermarriage as by Arab conquests. The patrilineal system of the Arabs was part of their population policy, destined to transform a continent and affect the world. ...By the end of the twentieth century, half the population of Africa was professing Islam.”
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Just in case he hasn’t gotten his message across, Mazrui repeats that, “Preference for large families…was often deeply rooted in…the imperative of jihad.”
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And that preference often continues, he says, “when the family is middle class”
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. Remember, Mazrui is a Moslem whose works frequently claim that Islam is a victim of imperialism, not an aggressor. So he’s skipped over the way the “Islamizers” and “Arabizers” used what the Qur’an calls “those whom thy right hand possesses”
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to increase the numbers of the faithful. He neglects rape, forced sex with slave girls, and forced sex with female prisoners. Mazrui also fails to explain what the modern Arab Moslems of the northern Sudan intend to do when, as he reports, they head South to the black portion of the country, Darfur—the land of Moslem raids and Moslem rape—saying, “I am going south--to bring into the world 40 more Arabs before I die!”
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Despite these omissions, Mazrui is telling you and me that one of militant Islam’s goals is to win more of the world by out-reproducing us.