The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (6 page)

The result: conquests that built an empire of millions, one of the biggest empires in the history of Black Africa, an empire that at first utterly defeated the Victorian British despite the Brits’ cannons, rifles, and superb organization, an empire molded in the image of one man and of his peculiarly violent personality, Shaka Zulu.

Is the case of Shaka Zulu and of the brutal culture he molded in his own image an accidental anecdote, a rare case, the exception to the rule? Do culture-founders really stamp their own character on their chosen people? Can the founder’s legacy be the source of one culture’s emphasis on kindness and another’s emphasis on killing, one culture’s emphasis on caring and another’s on harshness? Can it make some barbarians and others a bit less barbaric? Think of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Lenin, Mao, and Korea’s Kim Il-sung
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. Each of these culture-founders decreed that some emotions were good and others were unacceptable. Each tried to stamp his most intense personal values into a society. And each succeeded.

In his book
The Nuer Conquest: The Structure and Development of an Expansionist System
, social scientist Raymond C. Kelly has worked with every science at his disposal, including mathematical modeling, to understand militarism and expansionism. His case study focuses on another African culture out for non-stop conquest, the Nuer of the southern Sudan, a tribe that, in the 19
^th
century, nearly destroyed an individualistic neighbor that couldn’t get its military act together, the Dinka. Kelly tries to get at the heart of the imperialist, “expansionist” impulse—the push to constantly seize new territory. He and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, who has analyzed Kelly’s work and written about it in three books
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, come to a strange conclusion. The violent lust to take new land at any expense does not come from genes, say Wilson
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and Kelly. And it doesn’t come from material need. It comes from mere whiffs of nothing, from ideas.
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It comes from what Kelly calls “aspirations” built into the Nuer culture, aspirations to territorial wealth that Kelly says can never be filled,
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aspirations that, if left to their own devices, would gladly take over the grasslands of the entire planet…then would still hunger for more.

Here’s how this perpetual hunger for conquest works. Among the Nuer, to outdo your neighbors you have to have more cattle than they do. To have more cattle, you need more land. So you go out with your fellow warriors, clobber a neighbor, drive him off his fields, and conquer more territory.
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You put a few cows and bulls into the new pasture land and let them multiply. Meanwhile, your neighbors do the same. By the time you’re both finished, you have a lot more cattle. This should put you ahead. But it doesn’t. Why? Because your neighbor has more cattle to. So to outdo that god damned neighbor, you either have to go out to grab more land so you can cultivate more cattle…or you have to live in humiliation and shame.

Where do these aspirations, these standards against which men and women measure their pride or their mortification, come from? What Kelly doesn’t explore is the role of founders in establishing hungry teams of memes.

What the heck are memes? The word meme comes to us courtesy of an evolutionary thinker and zoologist at Oxford University named Richard Dawkins. In 1976, Dawkins published a landmark book, The Selfish Gene.
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Dawkins took us back to the beginning of life 3.85 billion years ago and invited us to imagine a primordial puddle. In that bit of water, Dawkins imagined an early protein learning two new tricks. The first—how to gather a gang of smaller molecules and self-assemble. Then something even more remarkable. To grab hold of more stray atoms, line them up in just the right way, and make a copy of itself. Proteins that made copies of themselves would live on for generation after generation. They would be capable of something God demanded in the Old Testament. They’d be fruitful and multiply like the stars in the skies.

Dawkins called these self-copying proteins “replicators”. Genes, said, Dawkins, are one of the two most potent forms of replicators on the planet. Look what they’ve managed to assemble—millions of bacterial species, plants, animals, and you and me! The second form of replicator wouldn’t appear on the scene until life had been around on this planet replicating for roughly 3.8 billion years. When man arose, a new form of puddle appeared…the puddle of the human mind. And in the rich broth of consciousness, a new replicator appeared. Ideas self-assembled. Folks got together and tried to get others to hum the tunes they had just snapped together in their own heads. They tried to get others to go along with their ideas. And they tried to badger, bully, or seduce others into sharing their techniques and beliefs. Ideas, techniques, and beliefs were all replicators—things that tried to make copies of themselves. Those that made the most copies thrived and survived. They were, said, Dawkins, like mind viruses. The most successful spread like a contagion. Some were so good at copying themselves and overcoming the shredding-power of time that they remain alive today in the minds of all six billion people on this planet. Those most masterful of replicators, let’s call them supermemes, include language. No matter what tongue we speak, we all speak! The supermemes, the memes that have infected all humans, include the invention and use of tools. Even the most primitive peoples have spears, arrows, and fire. The supermemes include clothing and housing. And the supermemes include myth and religion.

Memes are the magic bullet that would make Mohammed one of the most influential men in the history of life. A man who so outdid Shaka Zulu and the Nuer in ways so extraordinary that his followers consider them miracles of Allah. But those miracles are based on such tenacious and successful replicators, such tenacious and successful memes, that they’ve outdone the imperial conquests of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and of Western Imperialism at its peak. What’s more, those memes influence—and threaten—your way of life and mine today. Mohammed’s memes, in fact, are out to replace the memes we hold dear—human rights, gender equality, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, pluralism, and tolerance. Only time will tell if our memes have the stick-to-it-iveness to survive or if Mohammed’s memes will take over your life and mine.

Memes gave Mohammed’s chosen people an astounding advantage over the Nuer and the Zulus. How? The violence of both these African tribes was stopped in 1910 by yet another militant, expansionist, imperialist group that tried to replicate and to expand its sway by making war for many centuries. This world-grabbing empire looked back to founders like a resolute peacenik named Jesus and to the democratic, pluralist legacy of a “Glorious Revolution” in 1688. It was the Empire of England. The British would also someday take Islamic territory. But they would hold it only briefly. And they would prove utterly incapable of yanking out Moslem memes and replacing them entirely with British replicators, British ideas. What’s more, Islam would show signs of reversing Britain’s victories in a snap of historical time. Militant Islam, in fact, would brag in the 20
^th
and 21
^st
century that it was about to take over Britain itself. How in the world did this reversal happen? Why did Mohammed’s memes prove so resistant to removal? And why did they show the power to do what the Nuer ways of thought and the ideas of Shaka Zulu could not achieve—out-expand the greatest empires on earth. How, in fact, did the ideas of Mohammed and his Founder Effect give Islam a head-start in the competition to take over yet another new puddle that would emerge in the 20
^th
and 21
^st
century—the puddle of a globalized world?

“
The Prophet [Mohammed] said, ‘A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah's Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.’"

Sahih Bukhari, Book #52, Hadith #50
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The roots of our 21
^st
Century mayhem—the roots of our wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the roots of headlines about “terrorism” in the Philippines, Malaysia, Kenya, the Sudan, Kashmir, Thailand, Chechnya, London, Amsterdam, Madrid, New York, and Washington—the roots of what we call militant Islam, Fundamentalist Islam, and of what some Western extremists call Islamo-Fascism--run far deeper than most of us intelligent Westerners think. They go straight back to Mohammed.

Why? Mohammed was one of the most successful culture-founders, phrase-crafters, and society-assemblers of all time. He worked extremely hard to stamp his personality on the superorganism he assembled. He was a virtuoso at doing something few men or women before or since have achieved-- ratcheting the Founder Effect up to a level far higher than mere instinct, psychology, or biology alone have ever achieved. Mohammed’s attempt to remain a shaper of men and women’s nature for the rest of time paid off. The generations of the faithful who came after his death labored with astonishing diligence to insure that every word, gesture, and quirk of their founder would remain at the core of the Mohammedan civilization’s meme. After Mohammed died, the faithful assembled Mohammed’s revelations from God in the Qur’an
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. And they tracked down and questioned every person they could find who had known Mohammed. They compiled eyewitness accounts of the Prophet’s every gesture and word in a massive set of volumes called the Hadith.
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For the next fourteen centuries, Islamic judges and scholars would dictate every detail
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of a pious Moslem’s life based on the example Mohammed had left behind.

What were these personality traits that Mohammed stamped permanently into his believers? To find out we have to answer a question posed by Azzam Publications, an online information site for militant Moslems that quietly shut itself down after 9/11.
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Before the website disappeared, its creators, “your brothers at Azzam Publications”, wrote that, “There is no such thing as a 'moderate' or 'liberal' Muslim. If there was, in what category would be place[d] the Prophet Muhammad…? Would we say he is a moderate, a liberal, an extremist, a fanatic, [or] a terrorist?”
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The boys at Azzam then took a stab at an answer to their own question. Mohammed, they said, “certainly would not be a moderate or liberal since he ordered 600 – 700 Jewish males to be beheaded in Madinah…. He also fought in 27 battles for the sake of Allah. Are we now going to call him a terrorist as well?”
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