The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (20 page)

War, its spoils, its sexual rewards, and divvying them up would become so fundamental to militant Islam’s meme team that the Qur’an has an entire chapter on the subject—chapter eight. It’s called “The Spoils of War, The Booty”.
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That chapter is based in large part on the example Mohammed set after the murder of the Banu Quraiza.
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To repeat one of militant Islam’s most potent meme-hooks,
“with Allah are profits and spoils abundant.”
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Why was a supply of sex slaves as important to this holy jackpot as it had been to the Yanomamo raiders of the Amazon River basin and to the Roman rapists of the Sabine women? Why were even those who died fighting in the way of Allah showered with sexual prizes: the famous “seventy two Women of Paradise”
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“so beautiful, pure and transparent that the marrow of the bones of their legs will be seen through the bones and the flesh"
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?

Because genes reproduce gleefully in new wombs. And memes—religions, ideas, and worldviews—reproduce with equal glee in the minds of the children those new wombs produce. So the hunger of genes and memes—the hunger of replicators—whisper, shout, and scream in the holy books of Islam.

Mohammed had gotten across his message. When you can’t win in any other way, pick on a Jew. But he was about to shape the instinctual itch to attack scapegoats into an even more potent military strategy: using atrocities against Jews to attract allies and, more important, to terrify larger targets into surrendering without a fight.

The Prophet’s real goal was to take over the reins of the town in which he’d grown up, the town that had humiliated him, the town from which he’d fled, and the town that had the holiest site
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in the mountainous strip of Arab desert called the Hijaz. That town was Mecca. But beating the Meccans wouldn’t be easy. Mohammed had tried it in the Battle of Badr and had done well. He had tried it again in the Battle of Uhud and had failed miserably. Then he had racked up a questionable victory in the Battle of the Trench. How could Mohammed conquer Mecca without a fight? How could he use his favorite weapon, terror, to bring Mecca to its knees? And how could he generate that terror by using the nerd strategy?

Ninety-five miles away
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from Mohammed’s base, Medina, was a remarkable town, a town that belonged to Mohammed’s favorite walking wallets, the Jews. Called Khaibar, this community nestled in the valleys between tall cliffs
was rich in date palms, wheat, orchards,
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jewelers,
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armor-crafters, weapons-makers, and wealthy merchants.
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Says Mohammad Haykal, “The masses of Jews living in Khaibar were the strongest [and] the richest…of all the peoples of Arabia.”
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Ibn Ishaq adds that Khaibar was “the garden of the Hijaz…the principal town of”
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its portion of the Arabian Peninsula.
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Khaibar was a perfect target for what Mohammed had in mind—scaring the robes off the town fathers of Mecca.

The citizens of Khaibar were sitting ducks. They had no idea a Moslem “raid” was coming. Ibn Ishaq quotes the recollections of one of Mohammed’s soldiers, who explained that Mohammed’s army arrived at Khaibar by night, set up camp, then marched after dawn
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with their leaders, including Mohammed, riding war horses.
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“We met the workers of Khaibar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, ‘Muhammed with his force,’ and turned tail and fled.”
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How did Mohammed feel about taking a people he was at peace with by surprise? Apparently wonderful. When the unarmed farmers of Khaibar ran in panic, Mohammed “rode… through the lane of Khaibar quickly… and…when he entered the town”
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gave out a mighty, “Allah Akbar! Khaibar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people’s square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned [to convert to Islam].”
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Just to make his message clear—and to set an example for 1,400 years of Moslem conquerors to come—Mohammed repeated his blood-curdling war cry…“Allah Akbar”, “God is great”…three times.
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The Moslem army besieged Khaibar for 20 days.
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The fighting was bloody. Ibn Ishaq describes a model soldier, a “leader glorious, [a] knight ever ready”
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like this: “Stepping into the breach, he cut heads to pieces.”
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One of the participants in Mohammed’s battles said that Moslem “swords…cut off every arm and skull with their blows.”
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Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, confronted one Jewish defender wearing a stone helmet and “a safflower-dyed Yemeni neck protector”.
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Ali had gone from poverty to riches thanks to war plunder, so he was as just as fashionable. He “was wearing a suit of reddish purple whose fringes were of two colors, white and red.”
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But expensive clothes didn’t get in the way of the matter of the day—gore. “Ali struck” his opponent “a swift blow that split the stone [helmet], the neck protector, and his head and landed in his rear teeth.”
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When the Jews of Khaibar gave up, Mohammed “had already

taken all their property”
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, but he wanted more. He wanted their money—their savings, their jewelry, and their cash. The keeper of Khaibar’s treasury—one of the city’s most prominent leaders, a man whose prestige will come up in a sexual context in a few pages--refused to tell where the town’s valuables were hidden. Mohammed confronted this problem with his usual compassion and mercy. He told one of his warriors, Zubayr, “Torture him until you extract what he has.”
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What on-the-spot torment did Zubayr improvise? “He kindled fire with flint and steel on” the Jewish leader’s “chest until he was nearly dead.”
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Ibn Ishaq doesn’t tell us whether the tortured Jewish dignitary ever gave Mohammed the location of the town’s treasury. He simply says that “the apostle delivered” the half-dead victim to a Moslem soldier who “struck off his head.”
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Why are details like this important? The Islamic superorganism grew strong by amplifying the Founder Effect. Its meme team insists that following in Mohammed’s footsteps is essential to a righteous life. Strict Islam insists on remaining true to the examples The Prophet and his companions set in the 7
^th
century.

Other peoples, says Islam, have been given the authentic word of God. Allah has sent mankind over 25 true prophets
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. And every people that’s received God’s truth, God’s chosen memes, the memes in the Qur’an and in the Hadith, has perverted the gift of divine truth. How? By reinterpreting Allah’s message to fit the circumstances of the day. That reinterpretation has turned the truth from a heavenly blessing to a Satanic perversion.

Only the superorganism of Islam, the Islamic ummah, has known how to preserve God’s word. Only the Moslems have looked unflinchingly backward to the life of Mohammed and to his words and deeds. Only the Moslems have studied Mohammed’s utterances and his actions to find answers to every question from how to make war to how to wipe yourself when you defecate.
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So the Prophet’s examples have played a major role in shaping the militant Islam of the last thirteen centuries…including
our
century.

And Islam’s memes, including its examples from the life of Mohammed, are likely to prove potent shapers of the actions of militant, extremist, and even mainstream Moslem groups for centuries to come. Mohammed’s life is a meme-team you and I can’t afford to ignore. But back to our story.

The Jews of Khaibar who remained alive once the mayhem ended agreed to give 50% of the yield of their farms each year to the Moslems,
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supplying food that would nourish Islam’s troops…allowing the armies of Islam to remain permanently mobilized for war.
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As Julius Caesar says in his Conquest of Gaul, full-time soldiers, soldiers who fight nearly every day, can whip part-time fighters any day of the week. But giving Mohammed a standing army, a permanently mobilized killing machine, was just the tip of
what evolutionary biologists call “the resources”--the plunder and payoff, the “profits and spoils”
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of jihad.