The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (7 page)

Good question!

Holiness, righteousness, and decency in extremist and in most of mainstream
⁸²
Moslem culture are based on the example set by Mohammed.
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According to one of Mohammed’s many Islamic biographers, “Sincerely tread the footsteps of Allah's final Messenger [Mohammed]… observe his glorious actions and attitudes, and most important of all follow them, as the faithful among his companions did.”
^84
,
85
Another Islamic biographer titles his book, “The Last Prophet [Mohammed]: A Model For All Time”.
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And today’s Moslem biographers agree that Mohammed is not just a paragon whose actions Moslems should imitate. He is a model of virtue for you and me.
⁸⁷

Though Islamic literature occasionally refers to Mohammed as a “Prophet of Peace”,
⁸⁸
he was anything but. Mohammed called himself by many names. One of those was “
nabiyyu 'l-malhamah”
, “the Prophet of War”.
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,
⁹⁰
Mohammed’s followers have also praised him as “he who was sent with sword”
⁹¹
and “Mohammed the Conqueror”
⁹²
--one of Osama bin Laden’s phrases. “Your brothers at Azzam Publications” point out with pride that Mohammed was a man who used weapons and went into battle, a man who killed. And Mohammed was a military dictator, a totalitarian
⁹³
who used executions and assassinations on a regular basis.

In 624 AD, Allah told Mohammed that he and his followers had permission to wage Jihad
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  to Crusade, to make Holy War.
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Mohammed said that terror, killing
⁹⁶
, and trickery
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would be Jihad’s three basic tools. And Allah backed him up. Said Allah in the blessed book,
The Qur’an
, "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks [decapitate them] and smite all their finger tips off them [mutilate their bodies].
⁹⁸
... Slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)."
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In the next eight years, Mohammed, commanded 65 military campaigns. As “your brothers at Azzam” said with pride, he personally led 27 of them.
¹⁰⁰

If we are all supposed to follow Mohammed’s example, it’s incumbent upon us to battle, kill, and subjugate. Or, as one of the 20
^th
Century’s most important interpreters of Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary State, put it: "...Moslems have no alternative... to an armed holy war against profane governments. ...Holy war means the conquest of all non Moslem territories. ...It will ...be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Koranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other.”
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This duty is not the obligation of serial killers or madmen. Thanks to Mohammed’s example, Islam became and
remains the most successful imperialistic enterprise in the modern world. And it wants its stature as top-player in the empire game back. It wants its prestige, its superiority, its ability to reprogram other societies, its ability to subjugate, and its sheer power. It wants what we want. It wants the form of control--the form of cultural self-replication--we call saving the world.

Adds a biography of Mohammed from the Islamic Universal Sunnah Foundation in Pakistan, the Prophet started with an army of only four Muslims, but grew that force to an army of thirty thousand.
¹⁰²
Explains the Foundation’s biography, during Mohammed’s eight years of “conquest” he, his “Islamic army,” and his “undaunted soldiers of Islam…took control” of all “the vastness of the Arabian Peninsula” and forced Arabia’s citizens “to convert to Islam or to accept the supremacy of the Muslims as their rulers”.
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Mohammed’s biographers are proud of the Prophet’s role as what they call a “military leader”.
¹⁰⁴
The most telling mark of Mohammed’s war-making and empire-founding prowess may be one simple statistic. According to the Universal Sunnah Foundation, under Mohammed’s generalship, “Islam spread on an average of 822 square kilometres per day.”
¹⁰⁵

Mohammed won that land with a series of what would be regarded today as war crimes. How did Mohammed become a killer? What was his story? What was his personality? How did he make his life the epitome of truth, virtue, and holy obedience? And how did he establish one of the three most successful belief systems in the history of mankind.

Most important, what was the example he left for you and me to follow if we want to avoid the fires of hell and see the women of paradise?

How does a man born in a distant desert, born in a land that even God seems to have forsaken, found a movement that outdoes every expansionist and colonialist culture in the history of humankind? How does that man give birth to a movement that does something Western scholars like Harvard’s Caroline Elkins call impossible—winning hearts and minds. Winning them so completely that they refuse to give up the beliefs that were imposed on their ancestors by the deliberate and systematic use of military tactics we would call “atrocities”.

The story begins over 200 years before the birth of Mohammed, a time when the superpowers of the world were in a situation very similar to ours today—they were racked by indecision, under attack by outsiders, and, in one important case, crumbling like Roquefort cheese.

History did a lot to soften the turf for the rise of Islam. 410 AD The barbarian Alaric led his Visigoths in the sack of Rome. The result was a long, slow slide of the Roman Empire into chaos. Europe turned from a paradise into a scrap-heap oozing blood. Roughly half of Western Europe’s population died of starvation or plague. In the West, it was the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Things seemed to be going far better in the East. In 324 AD a Roman Emperor, Constantine transformed an ancient Greek city that straddled the waters dividing Europe from Asia into a capital he called
Nova Roma
, the New Rome. We know that city better by its original Greek name, Byzantium, and by a name honoring the Emperor who lifted its stature, Constantinople. Six years after Constantine’s facelift, he named Byzantium the new capital of the Roman Empire. So, in a sense, Rome didn’t fall when Alaric entered its gates to literally rape and pillage. It moved. The City of Byzantium fought hard to keep the Western properties of the its Empire—the Roman Empire. In some cases it succeeded. In some, it failed. Because of those failures, the Western Roman Empire—especially the 2,200-mile-long north coast of Africa-- remained shaky, something that would eventually help the armies of Islam enormously. But the New Rome, Byzantium, managed to hold on to the Eastern half of the Roman Empire…and keep it in one piece.

That was not as comforting as it sounds. In the East, the New Rome, Byzantium, was up against another superpower, the Empire of Persia. The Persian Empire was as land hungry as Rome—the new Rome or the old Rome. And its credentials for conquest were even more august. The Persians had been master of lands from India to Egypt in the days when Herodotus was writing Western Civilization’s first history, around 440 BC. In those days, Rome was just a pip with a minor squeak. By 550 AD or so, the Persians and the New Romans, the Byzantines, had worn each other into exhaustion in a non-stop battle for the domination of Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor. I’d like to say that both the New Romans and the Persians dismissed the desert fleas of the Arab Peninsula as insignificant barbarians. But that would be an exaggeration. In fact, as we’ll see further on, the emperors of The New Rome and of Persia didn’t even seem to know the Arabs existed. This ignorance would also someday play into Mohammed’s hands. In part, because the Arabs, like many of history’s overlooked barbarians, used war as what Islamic biographer Muhammad Abdul Hai would someday call a “hobby.”
¹⁰⁶
They loved to fight, to kill, to raid, to take revenge for minor slights, and to run off with the spoils--some old clothes and a camel or sheep.

Those who pursue hobbies obsessively sometimes become remarkably good at the skills they practice…another fact Mohammed would eventually turn to good advantage.

Events in the wild wastes of the Arab desert also paved the way for Mohammed’s arrival on the scene. The year was 552
¹⁰⁷
AD. It was the Year of the Elephant. No, this wasn’t China, and years in the deserts the Arabs made their home were not normally named after pigs, bears, and mice. But this year there was a struggle over the religious soul of the Arab heartland, a struggle that would that would involve an animal with a trunk where its nose should have been. The Red Sea divides Arabia from Africa by only 17 miles at its narrowest point. On the Arab side was Yemen. On the African side were the paths that led the 100 miles south to Ethiopia.

Ethiopia was not the mousey little nation we view it as today. The Perisian religious thinker Mani listed it as one of the four great powers of its time, along with Rome, Persia, and China.
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For roughly 200 years, Ethiopia had been Christian.
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For at least 500 years, Ethiopia and Yemen had been trade partners.
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And since 520 AD
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, only 30 years earlier, the Ethiopians had actually ruled Southern Arabia, including Yemen. So the Ethiopians decided to bring a little holiness to their newly-acquired land. They set up a church in the Yemeni city of Sanaa, the sort of massive church designed to attract converts.