The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (21 page)

The bonanza Khaibar yielded to the Islamic meme was one of the biggest Muhammad and his raiders had ever seized. It was so ample that it made the 1,800 men Mohammed had led in battle richer than ever before.
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The booty included donkeys, horses, sheep, cows, camels, chickens,
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gardens, rich food, lace, and clothing
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—a highly prized luxury even if it was slightly used. The food may sound inconsequential to us, but it meant everything to at least one of the clans that had marched with Mohammed. They were so hungry that their strength had gone. To them receiving “the richest food in Khaibar” was literally a godsend, a battle-prize that Ibn Ishaq says Allah gave specifically to feed this starving group.
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This bit of just-in-time nourishment was one more reason that he-who-can-gather riches also gathers allies.

Then there was the land. Just two of Khaibar’s valleys were big enough to divide into 1,800 shares. Mohammed’s men got not just the real estate, but a half-share of the crops these orchards and fields would yield for years to come. To top it off, Mohammed gave out a staggering number of loads of wheat, barley, and dates. One of the men under him who had been helpful in negotiating the surrender of nearby towns got 30 loads of barley and 30 loads of dates.
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Mohammed’s family made out even better. Says Ibn Ishaq—Mohammed “gave his daughter Fatima 200 loads”
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of dates and apportioned 700 loads “to his own wives”
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. Then Mohammed gave his wives 180 loads of wheat.
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As usual, mere material goods were not enough. Islam was a masterful satisfier of selfish genes and a masterful collector of new wombs in which those genes could incubate. Says Ibn Ishaq, “The women of Khaibar were distributed among the Muslims.”
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And Mohammed set down rules for their use. He prohibited “carnal intercourse”
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with pregnant captives. And he said that “it is not lawful for a man who believes in Allah” to have sex with one of his new slave girls or slave women “until he made sure she was in a state of cleanness”.
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A few sentences after issuing rules for the use and abuse of captured women, the Prophet gave out edicts on the employment of captured animals and clothing—ordering that no one remove a steed or a garment from the pool of booty, ride the animal to exhaustion or wear the clothing out, then return it to the pool in unusable condition.
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The prophet implicitly lowered the captive women to the rank of animals by including them in this list.

Then there were the trophies won in Islam’s picture of the
invisible
world. Even those who died fighting on the Moslem side got sexual prizes. A hired servant of the Jews who had turned on his employers mere hours before the battle began and had fought on the side of the Moslems was killed by a stone. Despite the fact that the servant had never had a chance to participate in the prayers demanded by Islam, Mohammed said, “He has with him now his two wives from the dark-eyed houris [the virgins of paradise
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]”
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The fantasy of a paradise oozing sex was a cheap way to give out big prizes. But it worked.

Captured women did more than slake sexual appetites. They added to your prestige. Another fighter wanted a woman named Safiya, but Mohammed
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insisted on taking her for himself
and gave Safiya’s two female cousins to the warrior who had initially claimed her.
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Why did Mohammed want this particular captive?

When Mohammed first saw Safiya, she was not at her prettiest. She was led out of Khaibar past the bodies of her beheaded husband and her husband’s friends. Driven wild with grief,

she shrieked and slapped her face and poured dust on her head. When the apostle saw her he said, ‘Take this she-devil away from me.’
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Despite his distaste for her howls, Mohammed

Gave orders that Safiya was to be put behind him and threw his mantle over her, so that the Moslems knew he had chosen her for himself.
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Then the prophet showed something rare—a moment of pity. Mohammed turned to the Moslem fighter
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who had led Safiya and another Jewish woman out of the fortifications and into their new role as slaves, concubines, or unwilling brides. “Had you no compassion,” he barked at his companion, “when you brought two women past their dead husbands?”
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In Safiya’s case, sexual appetite and superorganism-building went hand in hand. When she calmed down, Safiya was more than merely attractive. She was “the lady of the Banu Qurayzah and Banu al Nadir” and “the daughter of their king.”
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She was also the wife of the leader Mohammed’s henchmen had tortured in an attempt to find the Jews’ treasures. She was a queen.

So Mohammed ordered that Safiya be made “beautiful and combed”
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and “passed the night with her”
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in one of his tents, thus marrying her within hours of her husband’s beheading. Whether Safiya went into Mohammed’s tent willingly or unwillingly, the biographers don’t bother to say.

However one of the prophet’s Moslem chroniclers, former Egyptian Minister of Education Mohammed Haykal, explains that in taking Safiya, Mohammed followed “the example of the great conquerors who married the daughters and wives of the kings whom they had conquered.”
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A conqueror is not a normal role model for the sort of prophet we’re accustomed to in modern Western civilization. But the words “conquer” and “conquest” appear 95 times in just one of Islam’s holy books, one of the Hadith, the compilations of eyewitness accounts of Mohammed’s life.
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By contrast, the words conquer and conqueror don’t show up in another bloody and genocidal book, the Old Testament, at all.
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Mohammed’s model of war and conquest would soon become very normal for those following in the Prophet’s footsteps.

One other thing would become normal. The conviction that, as Mohammad Haykal—who it’s important to remember is a former high-level Egyptian politician and mainstream newspaper editor
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--puts it, “there could be no peace with the Jews as long as they were not thoroughly destroyed.”
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***

Mohammed’s strategy of brutalizing the small fry to frighten the big fish into surrender worked. First three nearby Jewish towns, Fadak, Wadi al Qura, and Tayma, gave up to the Moslem warriors with barely a struggle.
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Then the leader of Yemen heard the news of Mohammed’s “total destruction of Jewish power”
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, converted to Islam, and brought Yemen into the Moslem fold.
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Finally, in 630 AD, the strategy of using attacks on Jews to
“cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers”
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paid off big time. When Mohammed and his troops showed up outside of Mecca, the Meccans were well aware of
the slaughter and devastation Mohammed had
spread
among Arabia’s Jews. So they gave up without a fight
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, preferring life as Moslems to death as indigenous idol worshippers, to death by “cutting heads to pieces”.
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The Meccans had an additional incentive to switch sides and go with Islam.
Thanks to its lucrative victories over the Jews, the Moslem political, military, and religious system appeared to be the winning meme of the moment, the worldview whose military triumphs promised the biggest genetic and material rewards to those who would fight under its banner. And the Meccans liked to fight. As Maulana A. S. Muhammad Abdul Hai puts it, war and looting were the Meccans’ “hobby”.
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Now that the Meccan military hobbyists were a part of the Moslem community, the spread of Islam and its memes would speed up dramatically.