The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (13 page)

Early Islam poses a puzzle. Why? Because it has proven that a Stalinist Regime is not always a failure. It has demonstrated that an overdose of conformity enforcement is not always a poison. But why? How and when does a ruthless insistence on conformity work? How and when does it give a society an edge over other cultures, including cultures that give more freedom to their diversity generators—their dissidents, their creators, their deviants, their bohemians, their innovators, their heretics, their humorists, their artists, and their rebels?

Could it be that ruthless conformity is a winning strategy when a new meme produces a military culture, an imperialistic culture, what Raymond Kelly calls “an expansionist”
²⁴⁶
culture, a culture that specializes in conquest? Military victory requires heavy-duty conformity enforcement. It requires discipline, obedience, and daily practice at working in synch with your fellow fighters.
When men make choreographed muscular movements together over and over again, it gives them an enduring bond. It pulls them together tightly as superorganismic cells. The historian William McNeill, in his book
Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History
²⁴⁷
, calls this generation of social glue “muscular bonding”.

Islam’s five group-prayers a day are among Mohammed’s cleverest meme-hooks, his most innovative conformity enforcers. They are also one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
²⁴⁸
Five times a day, thirty-five times a week, 1,825 times a year, men are required to gather in ranks and to show their absolute submission to Mohammed’s revelations. “Submission,” is one of the key meanings of the word “Islam”.
²⁴⁹
The faithful spread their prayer rugs, get down on their knees, press their foreheads to the ground, and bow in unison to just one place, Mecca,
²⁵⁰
following a central timetable whose orders circle the globe. Could these be practice sessions for the synchronized movements of soldiers in battle, soldiers all focused on one central goal? Could they train men who may never meet each other to operate in unison? Could they prepare men for the massively parallel processed coordination of peace and war, including modern urban guerrilla war, war with no central commander but with the centering and guidance of a powerful meme team, the form of warfare that revealed itself in the Islamic “terrorism” of the early 21st century?

Here’s a clue that the answer may be yes. Your prayers are most acceptable to Allah if you gather in a prayer group called a jama’ah
²⁵¹
, a unity
²⁵²
, a community, or a party, a form of organization that shows up often in terrorist groups like the New-York-and-Pakistan-based Jamaat-ul-Fuqra
²⁵³
and the Asian-Pacific Jemaah Islamiyah
²⁵⁴
.

In many other societies, ritual is practice for vital social activities. It is a key conformity enforcer. Polynesian men, for example, perform dance rituals in which they make movements that ape the coordinated paddling they have to do when taking their sleek boats out on the open sea to fish.
²⁵⁵
Anthropologist Mary Douglas believes that almost all the rituals of religion are exercises for the social habits that keep a culture together
²⁵⁶
—like the practice for obedience to bureaucratic authority she feels underlies Catholic ritual. Is the idea that Islamic prayer rituals, too, may prepare men for coordination in peace and war racist paranoia? Let’s take a look at Islam’s story and see.

***

??^^[use this opportunity to return to the beginning of Mohammed’s life using
..\..\cnt\islam-timeline for NYMAS EXPANDED 08-06-05-2.doc
]

When we left off many pages ago, the year was 624 AD. Only two years had passed since Mohammed had fled Mecca in fear for his life. Now, he’d trounced Mecca in a bloody victory at the Battle of Badr and had added insult to injury by dumping the bodies of some of Mecca’s most distinguished citizens in a well. He’d taken a big risk and had made the sort of “screw you” pecking order gesture that can get you and your group obliterated.

So making the right decisions about how to assemble Mohammed’s embryonic superorganism would be vital to Islam’s survival. Among the questions ahead of Mohammed and his God were these: to what extent would Islam use persuasion and to what extent would it use coercion as it assembled the first community of Islam? To what extent would it use words and to what extent would it use weapons? To what extent would it use fear and to what extent would it use passion, pleasure, stimulation, and imagination? To what extent would it use conformity enforcers and to what extent would it use diversity generators? What collective personality would Mohammed and his God, Allah, create? And how would they go about it?

When the Prophet was still glorying in his victory at the Battle of Badr, he made a decision that would stain Islam for generations to come. He chose the face of fierceness. He picked the path of military dictatorship. He picked the path of totalitarianism. Like Shaka Zulu, he chose to
kill the opposition.

Mohammed’s first step when he set out on the return trip from Badr to Medina, the town of a thousand where he and his followers were holed up, was a meme-campaign, a pecking order propaganda offensive. He sent two messengers ahead of him, messengers “to bring the good news of victory granted to him by God and the killing of”
²⁵⁷
of many a Meccan. To increase the pecking-order punch of this bulletin, the couriers listed the names of the distinguished Meccans they had killed.
²⁵⁸

A poet in the audience—Ka’b--heard these names and was horrified. According to Ibn Ishaq, Mohammed’s first biographer, Ka’b said, “Is this true? Did Muhammad actually kill these… men?”
²⁵⁹
“Those were the nobles of Arabia, the kings of mankind. By God, if Muhammad has vanquished these people, the interior of the earth is a better dwelling than the top of it.”
²⁶⁰
Recounts Ibn Ishaq, the alarmed rhymer “left the town and went to Mecca”
²⁶¹
280 miles away. When he arrived, Ka’b recited “verses in which he bewailed the Quraysh who were thrown into the pit after having been slain at Badr.”
²⁶²
One of Ka’b’s verses read,

Badr’s mill ground out the blood of its people

At events like Badr you should weep and cry.

…
How many noble, handsome men,

The refuge of the homeless were slain

Liberal when the stars gave no rain.
²⁶³

How many benefactors of Arab society had Mohammed killed and tossed into a pit as if they were garbage?

In Mohammed’s eyes, these verses and Ka’b’s trip to Mecca made the poet an enemy of God, one “who has hurt Allah and His Apostle”.
²⁶⁴
“Who,” he asked, “will rid me of”
²⁶⁵
the offending bard?

Two potential assassins stepped forward, but they were not just run-of-the-mill killers. One considered himself the poet’s brother.
²⁶⁶
The other was his foster brother.
²⁶⁷
Neither shuddered at the idea of hacking a close family member to death. The only thing bothering them was whether they’d be forced to commit a Moslem sin. “O apostle of God,” said one of the volunteers, “we shall have to tell lies.”
²⁶⁸
Mohammed answered with a cold-hearted line he would use more than once as he rose in power: “Say what you like. You are absolved in the matter.”
²⁶⁹
Dishonesty was permissible when it came to protecting “the religion of truth”
²⁷⁰
. One face of the new culture’s personality had just been revealed. One of its core memes had just been set in place. Lie to an enemy of God.

The two killers went to their brother the poet’s house in the middle of the night and stood outside shouting to him to come out
²⁷¹
. The poet woke suddenly, “jumping up in the bedsheet”
²⁷²
. His wife was terrified. Don’t worry. It’s just my brother and my foster brother, said the poet
.
²⁷³
This didn’t calm his spouse, who swore that the voices outside were dripping with blood.
²⁷⁴
But Ka’b, the poet, spoke the words of a noble soul: “
A generous man should respond to a call at night even if invited to be killed.’”
²⁷⁵

Ka’b’s words were prophetic. When he got outside, his brother and foster brother complimented Ka’b on the pomade in his hair and asked if they could smell it. Ka’b tilted his head, and one of the brothers grabbed the hair on both of Ka’b’s temples tightly and shouted to his partner, “Smite the enemy of God!”
²⁷⁶
The two stabbed, pummeled, and sliced at their brother with their swords, but Ka’b’s strength held up. What’s more, he roared so loudly that lights went on in all the houses in the neighborhood.