Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (7 page)

Consequently, when Muhammad began to gather a group of followers, including his rich and influential wife and her cousin, who was a Christian Nazarene priest,
¹⁷
the pagan establishment in Mecca was prepared to accommodate the new godly revelation Muhammad preached.

The Meccans were convinced that Muhammad’s Koranic revelations were “but a medley of dreams” and “inventions.”
¹⁸
Some even thought Muhammad was “possessed” and had become a “madman,”
¹⁹
but they had a tradition of tolerance toward novelties, including the bizarre. Moreover, they all knew Muhammad, who had led many successful trading caravans to Damascus. He came from a respected family that was part of the Banu Hashim or Hashemites, a clan of the Quraish tribe, the dominant tribe in Mecca.

Since Muhammad was not powerful enough to impose his will on everyone, the Islamic prophet initially agreed to a
modus vivendi
with the Meccan Quraishi establishment. He thus produced Koranic verses allowing Muslims to pray to Mecca’s female deities as intercessors before Allah. Later Muhammad revoked these verses, claiming they had been inspired by the devil. These so-called “Satanic Verses” were replaced by new ones that denounced the non-Islamic deities, declaring, “Have you thought on Al-Lat and Al-Uzzah, and, thirdly, on Manat? Is He to have daughters and you sons? This is indeed an unfair distinction! They are but names which you and your fathers have invented: Allah has vested no authority in them.”
²⁰

As Muhammad’s following grew, he became intolerant and demanding, and the controversy between Mecca’s pluralist polytheists and Muhammad became ever more virulent. One day, Muhammad entered the
Kaaba
shrine and addressed the Meccans with a menacing threat: “By Him who holds my life in His hand: I bring you slaughter.”
²¹

Muhammad initially hoped the Jewish and Christian tribes would support him in his conflict with the Meccan establishment. This explains why some of the Koran’s early verses are friendly toward Jews and Christians. When it became clear, however, that the Jewish tribes distrusted him and that Jewish poets even mocked him in verse and song, the Koran became extremely hostile toward Jews.
²²
Later still, when Muhammad realized that many Christians would not support him either, the Koran began to predict hell and damnation for Christians as well.
²³

Muslims later became embarrassed by these contradictions between earlier and later Koranic verses. Islamic theologians solved this problem with the concept of
al-nasih wal mansuh
(“the abrogating and the abrogated”). According to this concept, whenever there are contradictions in the Koran, later verses overrule earlier ones; in other words, Allah revoked what he had earlier revealed. This means, in effect, that the earlier verses speaking favorably of Jews and Christians are overruled by later, hostile verses, and that tolerant verses are overruled by intolerant ones. Speaking about the often-quoted, tolerant verse, “There shall be no compulsion in religion,”
²⁴
Pope Benedict XVI observed, “According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat.” It is contradicted, as the Pope pointed out, by “the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.”
²⁵

Muhammad showed in word and deed his rejection of the Meccans’ pluralism. In 619, Abu Talib, the highly respected clan leader of the Hashemites and Muhammad’s uncle and foster father, lay on his deathbed. The other Quraishi leaders used the occasion to try to reconcile with Muhammad and establish peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims. The prophet, however, rejected all their proposals and demanded that Mecca unconditionally submit to Allah—in other words, submit to him.

By 622, after the deaths of both Abu Talib and Khadija, Muhammad realized he had lost his most influential protectors. Consequently, the Muslims slipped out of Mecca and began their
hijra,
or “emigration,” to the oasis of Yathrib, 210 miles to the north. Yathrib was a predominantly Jewish area
²⁶
that was just as tolerant as Mecca. The
Muhajirun,
or “immigrants,” as the Yathribians called Muhammad and his gang, were welcome to stay, and the Jewish tribes even asked Muhammad to mediate their quarrels. It was a foolish request with devastating consequences, for Muhammad used the opportunity to establish a political dictatorship based on his Koranic revelations.

Yathrib was soon renamed Medina an-Nabi, “the City of the Prophet,” later shortened to Medina, or “the City”—the name the town still has today. The day Muhammad’s group left Mecca for Yathrib, September 9, 622, became the first day of the Islamic calendar. This indicates that in Islam, the establishment in Medina of Islamic political rule is a far more important event than the Night of Qadr, when Jibreel first brought Allah’s religious message to Muhammad. Yathrib also became the site of the Muslims’ first mosque, a symbol of their political domination over the town.

Muhammad presented his personal tyranny as a theocracy, exploiting his ability to abrogate Koranic verses and fabricate new ones on the spot according to whatever the situation demanded. After Khadija’s death, Muhammad decided to take more than one wife. Conveniently, Jibreel suddenly announced that Muslims were allowed to take several wives, thus permitting the prophet, then in his fifties, to marry the 6-year-old Aisha. Soon afterward, when Muhammad fell in love with the wife of his adopted son, the latter offered to divorce her. Arab incest taboos, however, did not allow a man to marry the ex-wife of an adopted son. Hence, Allah
ordered
Muhammad to marry the woman so that, says the Koran, “it should become legitimate for true believers to wed the wives of their adopted sons if they divorced them. Allah’s will must be done. No blame shall be attached to the Prophet for doing what is sanctioned for him by Allah.”
²⁷
Before long, Muhammad had eleven wives, including the child Aisha.

The Arabs were not stupid, and many realized how opportunistic Muhammad’s “revelations” were. Even Muhammad’s scribe, who had to write down the prophet’s revelations, renounced Islam and returned to Mecca. Others, however, were terrorized into submission. “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, maim them in every limb!” declares the Koran.
²⁸

From Medina, Muhammad began raiding the camel caravans of Arab traders traveling between Mecca and other Arab towns and oases. These plundering raids are called
ghazi
in Arabic, from which the word
razzia
is derived. Muhammad organized eighty-two
razzias,
twenty-six of which he personally led. “Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it,” says the Koran.
²⁹

The pre-Islamic Arabs had a chivalrous war code. Muhammad, however, frequently violated it, allowing him to defeat his opponents who obeyed the rules and who simply could not imagine that their enemy would not do the same. This is an early example of a trend that Kolakowski identifies—that ideological and theocratic regimes fundamentally changed the character of war. Because these regimes have made “the universal truth” (as they see it) into a political ideology, they do not obey rules of warfare. Prisoners are slaughtered and the concept of betrayal applies only to those who renounce the side that pretends to be the vehicle of truth.
³⁰

To protect their caravans, the Meccans gave them armed escorts. In the Battle of Badr, in March 624, about 300 Muslims led by Muhammad defeated a Meccan escort three times their number and captured several important Quraishi leaders. The spoils of the battle went to Muhammad in accordance with a Koranic revelation that came to Muhammad immediately after the battle. It ordered, “They ask you about the spoils. Say: ‘The spoils belong to Allah and the Apostle.’”
³¹
Not content with mere robbery, Muhammad had the captured Quraishi leaders massacred because, according to the Koran, “a prophet may not take captives until he has fought and triumphed in his land.”
³²
A Jewish poet from Medina was so indignant about this atrocity that he wrote a eulogy commemorating the slain leaders. Islam’s prophet had the poet murdered for it. When a woman spoke out against Muhammad for killing the poet, the prophet beseeched his followers to murder her as well. “Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?” he asked. One of his followers obediently killed her in her house.
³³

The next year, in March 625, at the Battle of Mount Uhud, the Meccans defeated an army led by Muhammad. A Koranic verse that was revealed immediately after the battle attributed the outcome to the Muslims’ disobedience to Muhammad and their desire for loot.
³⁴
In a fateful decision, the peace-loving Meccans, satisfied they had taught Muhammad a lesson, chose not to march on Medina, destroy the Muslim powerbase, and liberate Yathrib from Muhammad’s tyranny.

During the following years, the Muslims continued raiding Arab caravans and wantonly murdering innocent people. “A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives,” declared Muhammad. “Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.”
³⁵
Muhammad also ordered people to be tortured, such as Kinana al-Rabi, the man who had custody of the treasure of the Banu Nadir, a Jewish tribe from Yathrib. When al-Rabi refused to reveal the location of the treasure despite a fire being lit over his chest, he was decapitated.
³⁶
As the Koran states, “Lay hold of him and bind him. Burn him in the fire of Hell, then fasten him with a chain seventy cubits long. For he did not believe in Allah, the Most High, nor did he care to feed the poor.”
³⁷

Tortured to death were also eight men from ’Ukil who had joined the Muslim state in Medina but had apostatized and run away. Muhammad had them apprehended, had their hands and feet cut off, and had them left to die in the desert. This was all in accordance with the Koran, which says that “those that make war against Allah and His apostle and spread disorders in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides.”
³⁸

In order to stop this reign of terror, in March 627 a confederate army of Meccans, Jews, and other Arab tribes marched on Medina. The skirmish that followed, the so-called Battle of the Trench, was undecided. The anti-Muslim alliance then fell apart because of internal disagreements, ending the siege of Medina. Muhammad used the opportunity to exterminate his opponents in Yathrib. The Banu Qurayza, one of the oasis’s largest Jewish tribes, was annihilated and all its men were decapitated on the order of Allah’s prophet. Some 700 boys and men were butchered, with Muhammad himself actively participating in the massacre. The women and children were sold as slaves.
³⁹

In March 628, Muhammad signed a 10-year truce with the Meccans, giving him time to rebuild and strengthen his army. In January 630, sooner than expected, he was able to march on Mecca with 10,000 men. Outnumbered by a merciless enemy, Abu Sufyan, the 70-year-old leader of the largest Quraish clan and the commander of the Meccan forces, surrendered the city to Muhammad without a fight. Abu Sufyan soon accepted Allah, proclaiming that the Meccan gods had not been able to defeat the Muslims. (His conversion served him well, for Abu Sufyan’s son became the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled the Islamic world from 661 until 750.) After his victory, Muhammad brought his theocracy from Medina to Mecca. He eliminated all the idols from the
Kaaba
and declared it a holy shrine of Islam, claiming it had originally been built for Allah by Ibrahim (Abraham). He also cleansed Mecca of all the polytheist pagans, Jews, and Christians. In the following two years he subjugated the whole of Arabia.

Muhammad died on June 8, 632, in Medina. Within a century his followers conquered most of the civilized world, from the Pyrenees in the West to the Indus in the East. The Persian Empire fell quickly and was completely eliminated. The whole southern half of the Byzantine Empire, from Syria downward, was lost; the entire Middle East and the whole of north Africa—previously Christian—were lopped off by the Muslims.