The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (16 page)

A rumor that the Prophet had been killed spread among the fighters of Islam, and the Moslem soldiers lost their nerve, panicked, and fled. After most of the Moslems had left the field, one of the Meccan enemies discovered that the Prophet was still alive and charged on his horse toward Mohammed, determined to finish what the rock had begun.

Mohammed, weak and tottering, but with a legendary grip of steel
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rammed a spear at the attacker’s neck and sent him tumbling from his horse’s back with a wound that would kill him shortly after the battle was over.
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Despite this gesture, the Moslems lost the battle, and lost it ignominiously.

To celebrate their victory and to literally taste revenge, the women of the Meccans, who had stood behind their men playing drums and cheerleading them on during the fight, went through the battlefield cutting the ears and noses off of Moslem corpses and turning “them into anklets, collars” and “pendants”
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. One cut the liver out of the corpse of one of Mohammed’s uncles, Hamza
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, Islam’s first military commander, whose ferocity in caravan raids and in battles against the Meccans
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had earned him the nickname The Lion of Islam. The Meccan matriarch chewed on The Lion of Islam’s liver, tried to swallow it, found it too tough, and was forced to spit it out.
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But she made her point. The beaten Moslems were too weak to stop this gruesome humiliation.

This is the world in which Islam was born. The brutality of the Arab desert’s culture, along with Mohammed’s humorless, rigid, kill-em-if-they-sneeze, personality, may explain why early Islam was one heck of a mean meme team.

The Jews, who are the nation of pigs and monkeys, are nothing but a source of evil, corruption, tribulation and war. Hatred against the Muslims is inherited by every generation of Jews who in turn teach it to their children. Our enmity and hostility against them is based on our faith. The Jews have never and will never lower the banner of war against us Muslims; it is a war between truth and falsehood, belief and disbelief. It is a war between the truth of Islaam and the falsehood of Judaism. The Jews will never stop adding fuel to the fire of war, nor will they ever stop plotting against us. Whenever the fire of one battle is extinguished, they light another. … all their men should be beheaded, their properties be seized and distributed among the Muslims and… their women and offspring be held captive. … This is the judgment of Allaah with regard to the Jews.

‘
Abdul-‘Azeez Al-Qaari
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Remember the structure of gangs? Each gang has its leader, its bully, its joker, and its nerd. The same is true of the biggest gangs we know--tribes, societies, cultures, nations, and civilizations. Every meme that manages to assemble a superorganism, every meme that assembles a social learning machine, generates its leaders, its bullies, its jokers, and its nerds. [^^see research on gangs in Lucifer Principle and in original source]

Well, almost every superorganism. One of Mohammed’s innovations was his utter elimination of jokers. But back to the point.

Why are nerds so important? Why would they be crucial to the growth of Islam in its early days? Why would they be central to reviving Islam’s strength 1,312 years later? Because they’re vital to social solidarity, to keeping the gang from tearing itself apart when it runs into tough sledding. And they’re vital to something equally important, to the group’s confidence.

Give one lab animal a hard time, and he takes out his woes on another animal smaller than he is. He mauls the lesser animal ferociously. We know this from research on the Frustration Aggression Hypothesis. [^^fill in information on this research] But how does the principle of taking your problems out on someone (or some-rat) else work when you’ve got more than just one rodent with a problem? How does it work when you’ve got troubled groups and gangs? If you put seven rats on a hotplate and turn up the heat, the pain is intense. The maddened animals quickly feel out which is the weakest among them. Then the six strongest turn on their most feeble hotplate-mate, and maul him viciously.
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They find their scapegoat. They find their nerd!!

Nerds are so important that if you remove the animal who’s being beaten, battered, and abused, you don’t stop the rain of battering. A group deprived of its scapegoat simply picks the weakest animal left in the bunch and begins the nerd-bashing all over again. It is, says primatologist Frans de Waal, a primal, potent, and apparently biologically-built-in bonding mechanism.
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Picking on the helpless doesn’t do anything to lower the hotplate’s temperature. But apparently it eases the pain. And it transforms a negative into a positive. Evidence indicates it ups testosterone levels and turns a moment of shared torment into a cement that bonds the six strongest rats together.
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In 624 AD Mohammed found his nerd, his scapegoat, his easy target. He found the demon-that-bonds…an enemy. [^^get into demonizing outsiders—us vs. them—see David Berreby’s Us vs. Them and Tajfel. Also de Waal’s citation of Tajfel’s red group versus blue group in Our Inner Ape] This was a demon that, when attacked, would deliver up rich rewards. Especially once Mohammed learned how to use his scapegoat to best advantage.

Mohammed’s successful Battle of Badr had just ended, and the Prophet’s murders of protesters, poets, and satirists had done their job.
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They’d “cast terror” into the hearts of the citizens of Medina. Specifically, says Mohammed’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq, they’d “cast terror among the Jews, and there was no Jew in Medina who did not fear for his life.’”
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The “fear” “instilled in the Jews” was so great, says the Moslem biographer Muhammad Haykal, “that none of them dared leave his house.”
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Why were the Jews in particular frightened by the string of political assassinations? Like many a dissident before and after them, the murdered male poets, Ka’b, and the 120-year-old Abu Afak were Jewish.

The morning after the murder of the poet Ka’b, the Prophet took a giant step beyond individual killings and called for genocide. “Whoever of the Jews falls into your hands,” he said, “kill him.”
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The result? According to ibn Ishaq,

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Thereupon …Mas’ud leapt upon …Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom…[he] had social and business relations and killed him. … [His older brother, who wasn’t a follower of Mohammed] began to beat him, saying, ‘You enemy of God, [why] did you kill him when much of the fat on your belly comes from his wealth?’ Muhayissa answered, ‘Had the one who ordered me to kill him [Mohammed] ordered me to kill you I would have cut your head off. …[His older brother] replied, ‘By God, if Muhammad had ordered you to kill me would you have killed me?’ He [the younger brother] said, ‘Yes, by God, had he ordered me to cut off your head I would have done so.’ He [the older brother] exclaimed, ‘By God, a religion which can bring you to this is marvellous!’ and he became a Muslim.”
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From that moment on, the Jews would play a special role in Islamic history. So would the “marvelous” appeal of killing.

Mohammed rapidly discovered that Jews could be used for more than mere practice in homicide. In 624 AD, he was running low on cash.
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So the Prophet staged a provocation. He went to the marketplace of a tribe of Jewish jewelers and goldsmiths
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on the outskirts of Medina, the Banu Qaynuqa, and demanded that the Jews convert to Islam or face “the vengeance” with which Allah had slaughtered the losers in the Battle of Badr.
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The Jewish Banu Qaynuqa refused to switch religions
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and tried to tough it out. Said their leaders, “O, Muhammad, …do not deceive yourself because you encountered a people with no knowledge of war and got the better of them; for by God if we fight you, you will find that we are real men.”
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With that statement, Mohammed claimed that the Jews had declared war
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besieged the quarters of the jewelers and of their families for fifteen days.
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The Jewish tribe was not able to live up to its brave words and surrendered unconditionally.
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The minute the Jews gave up, says the classic Moslem historian al-Tabari, Mohammed “wanted to kill them.”
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Horrified by Mohammed’s zeal for mass murder, a chief of one of the local Medina tribes—one of the tribes who had ponied up the cost of hosting the Moslems and who had fought alongside Mohammed and his followers in their risky camel-caravan raids
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--demanded that Mohammed treat the Jewish captives well. They were, he said, his allies.
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Mohammed turned his back on this Medina-ite aristocrat and pointedly ignored him. So the tribal leader grabbed Mohammed by “the collar of the apostle’s robe”.
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To quote the ninth-century Islamic historian al Tabari: