The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (14 page)

It was time to finish the killing and get out before anyone could show up to stop the execution. One of the killers gave up on his sword, grabbed his dagger and, he says he, “thrust it into the lower part” of Ka’b’s body then “bore down upon it until I reached his genitals, and the enemy of God fell to the ground”.
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Ka’b, the “enemy of God” was dead.

How did the killers feel about their deed? They extemporized exultant poetry—a common practice in the Arab society of the day—bragging that they’d snuck up on Ka’b in the middle of the night and had used deception and dishonesty to snuff out his life. “Sword in hand we cut him down,” said the poetry, “Ka’b’s brother…beguiled him and brought him down with guile”
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…in other words, Ka’b’s brothers killed him using lies and trickery. “Guile”—lies and trickery—would become a key meme when it came to attacking those outside the circle of the devout, outside the circle of Islam. Someday it would be used on you and me.

The next morning, when the brothers reported their accomplishment to Mohammed and word spread, many other followers of Mohammed spouted their own rap-like poetry to celebrate the murder. Crowed the Moslem rappers, the killers who’d fought an unarmed man two-against-one, were “bold as lions”. The cowardly killing was an act of courage, said the exultant poets, because the killers were “seeking victory for the religion of their prophet”
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Thus was murder “for the religion of the prophet”
elevated to a virtue of the highest degree—one mark of the cultural strategies that would still be at work among extremists and “insurgents” in today’s society.

The killing of Ka’b, the poet, could have been justified. Ka’b was encouraging an enemy. But this was just the beginning of Mohammed’s clamp-down on freedom of speech, his newest memetic contribution, his policy of killing dissidents.

Said the Prophet to his men, “Fight everyone in the way of God and kill those who do not believe in God.”
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One of the first on the hit list was the leader of the Meccans. Mohammed sent two loyalists to sneak into Mecca and kill the city’s leading citizen, Abu Sufyan. But one of the pair of assassins was recognized when he wormed his way back into his hometown, and was remembered as a long-time trouble maker. His name was Amr. When the Meccans spotted Amr, they rushed him before he could do any harm.
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Amr and his companion ran out of town and hid in a cave. But this did not deprive Amr of the privilege of “killing those who do not believe in God.”
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While Amr was laying low, he had a stroke of luck. A one-eyed shepherd with a single sheep came into Amr’s cave to rest. Amr and the shepherd compared family backgrounds, found they had mutual friends, and carried on a schmoozy conversation. Then the shepherd did something he probably considered harmless. Before going to sleep, Amr reports, “he lay down beside me and lifting up his voice began to sing:

I won’t be a Moslem as long as I live,

Nor heed to their religion give.
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Amr brags about how lustily he carried out Mohammed’s order to do away with anyone who does “not believe in God”.
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“As soon as the
badu
[desert dweller]
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was asleep and snoring, I got up and killed him in a more horrible way than any man has [ever] been killed. I put the end of my bow in his sound eye, then I bore down on it until I forced it out at the back of his neck.”
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Then came more lessons in keeping your mouth shut when you disagreed with Islam, more murders, including the assassination by night of a wealthy and influential Jew who’d just given a dinner party in his fortified household for a group of eminent guests.
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This death upset a 120-year old fellow-Jew in Medina, who sang a verse praising the upright behavior of the clan of the victim.
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Abu Afak’s verses bore no criticism of Mohammed or of Islam. They were simply words of lamentation for the death of a decent man. But Mohammed was not pleased.

Using his usual wording, Mohammed called for a volunteer. “Who,” he asked, “will deal with this rascal for me?” The man who took on the challenge went by night and found Abu Afak sleeping out in the open in his yard.
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Says the Islamic historian Ibn Sa’d, the killer “placed the sword on his [victim’s] liver and pressed it till it reached his bed.”
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The next day the assassin sang celebratory verses advertising the glory of what he’d done. In those triumphant lines he let his listeners know that he’d killed a man too old to defend himself and had done it in the most cowardly of ways, a way that was becoming a Moslem trademark—sneaking up on the victim in his sleep:
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“You gave the lie to God’s religion…”, said the murderer. The punishment for this offense? A Moslem
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“gave you a thrust in the night saying ‘Take that Abu Afak in spite of your age!’”
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Next on the hit list was a mother of five, a mother still suckling an infant. Her sin was showing what the earliest Moslem historians called “disaffection” with all the bloodshed in her neighborhood. In her poetry, she dared warn that it was a bad idea to hang around with a leader whose hobby seemed to be “the killing of your chiefs”. Do you follow him, her poetry said, simply to grab your share of the plunder that comes in after his violent raids on passing caravans? Are you making the mistake of following this “stranger who is none of yours” out of sheer greed, “like a hungry man waiting for a cook’s broth?”
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Then the poetess suggested that Mohammed be treated the way he was treating others:

Is there no man of pride who would attack him by surprise

And cut off the hopes of those who expect aught from him?
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Reports the first biographer of Mohammed, Ibn Ishaq, “When the apostle heard what she had said” he repeated his usual line, ‘Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?’”
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The response to this by-now-familiar phrase was instant. One of Mohammed’s followers
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went to the poetess’ house in the middle of the night, found her with her “children…sleeping around her,” felt in the dark to find the baby suckling at her breast, laid the baby aside on the bed, then rammed “his sword in her chest till it pierced up to her back.”
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When the murder was complete, all was not well in the killer’s heart. He was worried that God would punish him for this cowardly act. Says Ibn Ishaq, the assassin went to Mohammed first thing in the morning to ask if he’d brought the wrath of the Almighty down on his head. Not at all, said Mohammed, “You have helped God and His apostle.”
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What’s more, explained Mohammed, ending a life in the name of Allah is a trivial matter, even if the victim is a mother of five. Declared Mohammed, ‘Two goats won’t butt their heads together about her.’”
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A killing in the name of Islam is so inconsequential that it won’t even rile farm animals…much less bring down the fury of Allah. Mohammed had just added another key conviction to his growing weave of cultural concepts—killing a critic of Islam is nothing to get upset about.

Mohammed’s brutality achieved its purpose. At first, the clan of the poetess was in an uproar over her murder.
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But Mohammed sent the killer to bully her kids. “Withstand me if you can,” he told the orphans, “don’t keep me waiting.”
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Asma’s extended family got the message: don’t complain, threaten, or criticize Islam. Convert or risk a bloody death. Says Ibn Ishaq, “The day after Bint Marwan was killed the men of” her tribe “became Muslims.” Why did they switch to a God that had done away with their mother? Answers Ibn Ishaq, “They saw the power of Islam.”
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Murder was proving to be an effective recruitment strategy for the infant meme of Islam.

Another two incidents show more of the totalitarian form of society Mohammed, with his intolerance and anger, was crafting.

Six years later, after the conquest of Mecca, Mohammed was still driving home his absolute insistence on severity. Like Shaka Zulu, The Prophet issued a hit list of those in his old hometown, Mecca, he wanted rubbed out. One of the victims on the list—Abdallah bin Sa’d-- had acted as a scribe for Mohammed, writing down many of the key passages of the Qur’an.
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So what was his crime? Says one of Islam’s most important historians, the tenth century Persian Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, when Mohammed “was dictating ‘Exalted in power, full of Wisdom’”, Abdullah would change the wording and “write it ‘Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful’, thus changing it.”
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Later on, when Mohammed preached, he’d use the words Abdallah had written, not those Allah had originally “spoken” through Mohammed’s mouth.
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To Abdallah this seemed a suspicious way of handling the direct revelations of God. So he rejected Islam and went back to Mecca and to the beliefs of his forefathers.