The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (12 page)

Despite Mohammed’s fears, one Islamic biographer says proudly that, “The Messenger of Allah fought fiercely. He fought closely with the enemy and none was braver that day.”
²¹⁹
One of Islam’s most prolific historians, the ninth century scholar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari
²²⁰
, makes it plain that, “The Messenger of God [Mohammed] killed many…at Badr.”
²²¹

Though it wasn’t easy, the untried army of Islam slammed the Meccans into “a back-breaking defeat.”
²²²
And, like any other ancient soldiers, raiders, or pirates, Mohammed’s troops stripped the corpses of the men they killed,
²²³
taking everything of value for themselves. The clothes, armor, and weapons stripped from just one downed man could be sold back in Medina for enough money to buy a small date-palm grove.
²²⁴

Even The Prophet participated in the gory plunder. Al-Tabari explains that Mohammed snatched a prized camel from one of his slain enemies at Badr, the “Mahri dromedary on which he used to go on raids”
²²⁵
. Among the other spoils the Prophet grabbed was a sword that would become legendary for its magic powers-- the sword of Dhu al-Faqar,
²²⁶
ripped from the body of “a pagan who died in the battle of Badr.”
²²⁷
This captured weapon would eventually become “the most famous sword of Islam”.
²²⁸

To insult those he’d defeated, Mohammed had the bodies of his slain enemies tossed down the mouth of a deep well.
²²⁹
Meanwhile, Mohammed’s men went on a rampage against the Meccans who still lived, cutting off legs, hands, arms, and heads as they hacked still living men to death. One Moslem fighter, Abdul-Rahman, encountered an old friend from Mecca among those who’d been unable to flee. The friend promised Abdul-Rahman a fortune in ransom if Rahman would spare his life and the life of his son. The Moslem fighter did his best, but, to use his words, his fellow Moslems, “formed a ring round us, and I tried to protect him, but a man struck off the leg of the son of Ummaya and he fell to the ground. Then Ummaya uttered a cry such as I had never heard before. I said to him, 'Save thyself. I can no longer help thee,' and the people fell upon them with their swords and killed them both.” Ibn Ishaq adds a scarcely necessary conclusion: “the slaughter was great”.
²³⁰

But when it came to the few captives left alive, Mohammed was merciful. He had only two prisoners beheaded.
²³¹
One of them asked Mohammed plaintively, ‘Who will look after my children, Muhammad?” The Prophet answered with a vicious, “hellfire” and had the man’s head hacked off.
²³²
The others Mohammed allowed to be ransomed. And each captive warrior too poor to pay ransom was forced to teach ten Moslems to read,
²³³
then was released.
²³⁴
Through this battle, the Battle of Badr
²³⁵
, Allah revealed a vital meme-hook, a meme’s way of guaranteeing that it forever anchors a grappling iron in new minds. Allah set an example of what would happen to those who refuse Islam. He established what one Islamic source calls, “the first installment of punishment for…denying the invitation to Islam”
²³⁶

Keep the phrase “punishment for…denying the invitation to Islam” in mind. It will come in handy later is this story.

Allah also delivered three other critical messages for the future, three other reproductive tricks of the Islamic meme, three other experiments Mohammed and his followers would test on behalf of the world’s Emergent Collective Intelligence and on behalf of Islam’s rapidly evolving mass mind:

1. "It behoveth not a prophet that he should have captives until he hath greatly slaughtered in the land.’”
   ²³⁷
   

2. “
   Allah guarantees that He will admit the Mujahid [the Muslim fighter] into Paradise if he is killed, otherwise He will return him to his home safely with rewards and war booty.”
   ²³⁸
   

3. And, in the words of Mohammed, “
   "The head of…Islam…is the jihad.”
   ²³⁹
   

Militant Islam was to be a natural experiment see if a learning machine built on perpetual warfare, on conquest, and on knee-trembling fear can rise in the pecking order of nations. It was to be a test of the power of a chilling meme-hook—one that said those who dare leave the one true religion should be killed. It was to be a test of another meme-hook that said those who die while killing others win the biggest prize of all, the pleasures of an invisible world called Paradise. It was to be a test of a barbaric approach, one that glorified the act of murder and elevated violence to a holy deed

And it was to be a test to see just how far violence-based beliefs like these could take a new superorganism. How far these memes could take that superorganism in swallowing continents as if they were pizza slices. And how far they could take that superorganism in what anthropologist Ruth Benedict calls “time-binding”
²⁴⁰
, how far they could take a superorganism in its mastery of the centuries—in its ability to keep expanding for 100 years, 1,000 years, and far, far beyond.

Militant
Islam was to be a test of values that idealize killing, torture, deception, and terror. It was to be a test to see if barbarian values can be winners in the long-term game that we call history.

“
Founders usually have a major impact on how the group defines and solves its external problem of surviving and growing, and how it will internally organize itself and integrate its own efforts. … Since they started the group, they tend to impose their assumptions on the group and to cling to them until such time as they become unworkable or the group fails and breaks up. As new members and leaders come into the group, the founder's assumptions and beliefs will gradually be modified, but they will always have the biggest impact on what will ultimately be the group's culture."

Edgar H. Schein
²⁴¹
, specialist in organizational culture at MIT's Sloan School of Management

In my book
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21
^st
Century
, I explain that a complex adaptive system, a collective intelligence, a social learning machine, operates on five rules, rules that Dr. Don Beck, the author of
Spiral Dynamics
²⁴²
calls “the Bloom Pentad”. Those five rules of complex adaptive systems, those five rules of mass mind, underlay 7
^th
century social systems like the one the Persian Empire had evolved to the north of the Moslems, like the one the Roman Empire had evolved to the Moslems’ West, like the one the Chinese Empire had evolved to the Moslems’ East, and like the one that Mohammed was attempting to build in Medina.

The five elements that keep a mass mind—a learning machine, a group IQ, an Emergent Collective Intelligence--up and running are:

1. Conformity enforcers
   

2. Diversity generators
   

3. Resource shifters
   

4. Inner Judges (like the self-destruct mechanisms we’ve peered at earlier in this book)
   

5. And Intergroup Tournaments.
   

Shame, guilt, and punishment are three leading conformity enforcers. They nudge us into in line and keep us on the same page. And they’re vital to holding a social superorganism together. Diversity generators like squabbles, eccentricities, the arts, pop culture, and personal dreams give the superorganism options, alternative ways of dealing with its problems. They also give the superorganism its butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and kings—the differentiated components of a superorganism: the feet, legs, hands, shoulders and head a superorganism needs if it’s to succeed.

In complexity theory, if the
conformity
enforcers of a superorganism’s mass mind paralyze its
diversity
generators, a society will bind up like Oz’s Tin Man after a rainstorm. The social learning machine will lose its flexibility, its ability to respond to sudden risks and to unexpected opportunities. Theory says that an overdose of conformity enforcement will slowly but surely paralyze a mass mind and put the superorganism it controls out of business. Or, even more likely, thanks to the pecking order and to intergroup tournaments, other groups will eat the conformity-bound social beast’s socks, driving it to the bottom of the pecking order, beating it in peaceful competition, whomping it in war, and swallowing the remains of the defeated superorganism whole. The winning social creature will digest the shredded scraps of its conformity-crippled opponent--its riches and its remaining inhabitants--depositing these leftovers of battle into its own flesh, and will eradicate nearly every trace of the failed society’s existence. So says complexity theory.

Not only does this make sense, but it’s supported by the work of authoritative complex adaptive systems researchers like the Santa Fe Institute’s Stuart Kauffman, who calls conformity-enforced paralysis “the Stalinist regime”.
²⁴³
We all know what happened to the Leninist-Stalinist system Russia adopted in 1917 and refined in 1934
²⁴⁴
. In 1989, after 62 years of the Leninist-Stalinist experiment, the USSR and its symbol, the Berlin Wall fell
²⁴⁵
. Russia and its former satellites decided to try a different approach—a free-market system with a semblance of democracy. The system with an overdose of conformity-enforcement collapsed.