The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (23 page)

Pecking order squabbles don’t just take place between beasts and between nations. They dominate entire ecosystems. At the top in a natural ecosystem is not a Prophet, a Pope, a conqueror, or a king. It’s a meat-eater and killing machine called the top predator
⁵⁶⁹
. A top predator is the descendant of the replicators in the earth’s primordial seas roughly 3.5 billion years ago that invented a shortcut to gathering the goods they needed to make copies themselves.

If you’re on the bottom or middle of an ecological food chain, you spend a lot of your time nosing around trying to find stuff to eat. And once you’ve swallowed your food, you may need a huge and energy-consuming gut to turn it from seaweed, leaves, and grass to muscle mass, to meat. The bellies of cows, goats, sheep, camels, giraffes, llamas, buffalo, deer, wildebeest, and antelopes, for example, have stomachs with four separate chambers and have to take the time to eat their food twice. On the first go-round, these beasts yank, mash, and grind the grasses of the fields with their lips and teeth. They swallow these tough blades of greenery, and deposit them temporarily in the first two caverns of their four-chambered stomachs--caverns called the rumen and reticulum. There the grass blades are saturated with saliva, the easy-to-get-at nutrients--the starches--are dissolved by digestive enzymes,
⁵⁷⁰
and the resulting natural Gatorade is sent to the two back-end stomach chambers for final processing.

But the much tougher fibers are kept on hold in the stomach's two preliminary processing chambers, the rumen and the reticulum, until the animal gets a substantial dollop of spare time. Then the beast brings the ball of stems, stalks, and remaining greenery back up into its mouth for a second bout of chewing. This burdensomely long second pass at grinding, slicing and mashing is known as rumination, the treatment technique from which these animals get their name: ruminants.

Even after an acid bath and a second go at chewing, when the twice-mulched food is returned to the four chambers of the stomach it's still too tough for the cow, camel, antelope, or sheep to digest on its own. The ruminant needs the aid of massive bacterial and single-celled protist colonies in its four-fold stomach to wring the fuel it needs from the grasses it eats... and re-eats.
⁵⁷¹

If you’re a top predator you do not take this long and difficult route to food. Instead you pounce on others who’ve already gathered the ingredients you need, then you feast on the treasure they’ve managed to pre-assemble as protein, rumps, loins, and ribs—their meat. The predatory strategy is a short-cut to riches. And with riches you can ride the social learning machine others have created, making the collective intelligence of those you prey upon work for you.

Or, to put it in human terms, why build a civilization from scratch when you can take over the helm of a civilization others have spent hundreds of years piecing together? And, while you’re at it, why not go further and highjack a whole bunch of civilizations? Predation is efficient. It also often sews what it swallows together in new ways.

Top predators in the world of humans have advantages others lack. They focus on the glory of killing and war. They aren’t held back by what us settled folk call scruples. When the Jews of the Banu Quraiza had held out for over three weeks against Mohammed, they concluded that extending the war would give Mohammed an excuse to exterminate them utterly. So the Jews weighed their options. Said their leader, the men of the Banu Quraiza had three choices.

Choice one: reject the Torah, the holy book of the Jewish people, and accept
⁵⁷²
Islam and Mohammed as a legitimate…and final…prophet. This is like asking Christians to shred the New Testament and to toss away their belief in Jesus. The Jews answered that they, “will never abandon the law of the Torah.”
⁵⁷³

Choice two: “Kill our wives and children and send men with their swords drawn to Muhammad and his companions leaving no encumbrances behind us.... If we conquer we can acquire other wives and children.”
⁵⁷⁴
The Jews replied, “Should we kill these poor creatures? What would be the good of life when they were dead?”
⁵⁷⁵

And choice three: try to “take Muhammad and his companions by surprise”.
⁵⁷⁶
How? By attacking on a Saturday, a day consecrated to rest. The Jews refused to "profane” their Sabbath.
⁵⁷⁷

These are scruples. Because the men of the Banu Quraiza refused to abandon them, they lost their heads.

A second advantage of barbarians is often their delight in war and their distaste for peace. The Vikings loved hacking and chopping their fellow humans so mightily that their version of paradise was a Valhalla
⁵⁷⁸
in which they woke up each morning, donned their armor and their weapons, then rode to the battlefield and spent the day glorying in the pleasures of combat, in the thrill of their favorite sport, killing.

And many of the Christian Crusaders loved fighting so much that when they had to abandon the killing fields of the Holy Land, they went off looking for other pagans they could slice into submission—and found them in the as-yet-unchristianized Slavic tribes of Prussia.

These are just a few of the reasons why nomadic peoples who luxuriate in the use of weapons, why enthusiastic removers of limbs and of lives, often go down in history despite their atrocities.

But there’s more. Some top predators suture together the civilizations they conquer in new ways. The Indo-Europeans spread from China to Scandinavia and left us our language. The Vikings terrorized and blitzkrieged the Holy Roman Empire, brutalized—and revitalized--Normandy, upgraded England
⁵⁷⁹
, and did the same for Asia, where the Norse raiders established the nucleus of an entirely new empire, a gaggle of princedoms that some say got its name from the Vikings’ russet hair, a gaggle that would slowly evolve into the Empire of Russia
⁵⁸⁰
.

The violent, nomadic Mongols conquered the Chinese Empire, introduced paper money, standardized China’s weights and measures , and established massive free-trade zones in Asia.
⁵⁸¹
The barbarians known as the Manchu ruled China from 1644 to 1911. These Manchu invaders took China to greater heights than it had ever seen before, giving it control over 13 million square kilometers of land
⁵⁸²
, including an island China wants back today--Taiwan.
⁵⁸³
In addition, the barbarian Manchus revived a critical element of Chinese administration that had fallen into disuse, the State Examination System
⁵⁸⁴
, the system that guaranteed that China's bureaucrats would not be the random sons sired by nobles, but would be hired on the basis of merit and would be among the best-educated in the world--masters of "music, archery and horsemanship, arithmetic, writing, and knowledge of the rituals and ceremonies".
⁵⁸⁵

The nomadic armies of Islam sutured together an empire in which an ambitious traveler like the fourteenth century master of curiosity Ibn Battuta could travel from Spain to China, could speak a universal language—Arabic—wherever he went, and could accept a position as a judge in any of the central cities he stopped in. Why? Because every capital’s ruling class used the language of the conquerors, Arabic, the protocols of the Arab peoples, and the codes of Islamic law, codes in which Ibn Battuta was an expert.
⁵⁸⁶

All of these empire-builders and empire re-makers, these top predators in the human eco-system—the Indo-Europeans, the Vikings, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Moslems--began as barbarians. Few of them started out literate. Few of them initially knew how to build a city. But all idealized violence.

And all put themselves in the saddle, raiding, breaking, then riding superorganisms originally organized and infrastructured by others. So did another folk who made war with the gleam of blood lust in their eyes, a sedentary people who followed the top predator strategy to the nth degree--sewing together an empire that nurtured cultural diversity, one in which cities could tear down their defensive walls and open themselves to the world. That highly disciplined gang of gore-lovers, warriors who attacked with a disciplined rigor the rest of Europe could not believe, was…the early Romans.

But not all predators are alike. When it comes to strategies for grabbing the lands and goods of others, the Moslems have made all the top predators of history—all of the world’s barbarian conquerors-- look like amateurs. As we’re about to see, they seized a swatch of land five times the size of the Roman Empire and seven times the size of the USA. And the Moslems kept up these territorial conquests. As we’ll soon see, they pursued a path of unprecedented imperialism and colonialism for over twelve centuries straight.

Why was Islam able to pull off this radical increase in the magnitude of conquest? Because militant Islam has a weapon the Mongols, the Vikings, the Indo-Europeans, and even the pre-Christian Romans lacked—a worldview prefabricated to make war, to win, to rake in the riches, to reorganize captured societies, and to install the earliest believers—usually Arabs--at the top, then to take a deep breath and go out to conquer more.

Even more important, militant Islam has a belief system that, like that of the Hindus, cements the captured people in their place. It inserts into its victims a picture of the invisible world that makes
voluntary
subservience, utter submission (a core meaning of the word “Islam”
⁵⁸⁷
), permanent.
Muhammad Ali Al Hashmi in his book
The Ideal Muslimah
⁵⁸⁸
gives a description of how complete and overwhelming this submission can be. Though Al Hashmi is describing the perfect faith of a woman, he is also presenting the
stooped-and-chastened
attitude toward fate that is basic to all those Islam subjugates: