The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (34 page)

On the other hand, the economies of most of the world’s 57 Islamic nations are doing very poorly
⁸⁵²
, especially the Moslem economies in the Middle East. Only oil bolsters the wealth of Islam’s petrocrats—a fact that’s true for half-Moslem Nigeria, for fully-Moslem Malaysia, for Moslem Saudi Arabia, and for Moslem Iran. So Islam’s future prospects look poor. After all, learning machine rules say that, “He who loses is left out. Modules that prove useless grow weak, become isolated, or die.”

But Islam has two advantages in the global shoving-match for top position. Advantage number one: Islam has a stratagem that’s been vital to its meme team ever since Mohammed issued his “invitations to the kings”—his ultimatums to the emperors of his day. That trick is Islam’s emphasis on the word “one”: one God, one prophet, and, most important, one government, one law code, and one unified military system. Yes, one government, one
global
government. That global government is the longed-for caliphate.

What’s a caliphate? It’s a central government ruled by one man and one man only—a Commander of the Faithful who runs the sort of kill-the-opposition regime Mohammed established in Medina and Mecca. The caliphate is not just a militant Moslem fantasy. It existed for 1,292 years, moving from Damascus to Baghdad to Egypt to Spain
⁸⁵³
, and, finally, to Constantinople
⁸⁵⁴
. The caliphs lived in opulence, had enormous harems
⁸⁵⁵
, and had the last word on the life or death of every citizen, on what some caliphs called every “slave”, of their empire. But the empire of Islam was so immense that the caliphs were seldom able to govern it all. The caliphs also couldn’t stop the Moslem world’s internal battles, battles between leaders, tribes, sects, dynasties, and clans for pecking order supremacy.

Now with modern technology, Islam’s dream of ruling the world from one central city may finally be achievable. It may stand a chance of becoming reality. In other words, Islam is the only superorganism with a meme team that was built for global rule by its founder.

Islam’s second advantage is another direct gift from Mohammed: the eagerness of its militants to solve political disputes with violence. Violence is a potent force multiplier, especially in a world peppered with democratic societies. When Japan’s militant right wingers wanted to take over their country in 1936, they simply murdered four of the duly elected heads of Japan’s democratic government, tried to assassinate the prime minister but accidentally killed his brother instead
⁸⁵⁶
, and were able to make policy for the next nine years. No campaigning and electioneering necessary.

What do these Moslem advantages amount to? To repeat the words of
Cairo constitutional lawyer, Dr. A.K. Aboulmagd
⁸⁵⁷
"I even venture sometimes to say that Islam was not meant to serve the early days of Islam…. It was...meant to be put in a freezer and to be taken out when it will be really needed. And I believe that the time has come. "
One of the bloodiest barnyard battles of the 21
^st
century is a contest to see whether Dr. Aboulmagd is right.

***

Meanwhile the very nature of the barnyard has changed. [^^rep of globalization] Thanks to globalization, we are undergoing an evolutionary quantum leap like the one that separated memes from genes beginning in roughly 550 BC. The hunger of meme-teams and the gluttony of superorganisms is shifting from the massive multi-continentalism of Islam’s first 1,238 years and of Britain’s 19
^th
century Victorian empire to meme-driven ambitions aimed at domination of the planet.

The West coheres around a set of values it sees as necessary imperatives for all the humans on this globe. These include democracy, freedom of speech, gender equality, multi-cultural tolerance, and human rights…
our
kind of human rights. We Westerners have attempted to spread these memes--these values--through the International Court of Justice, through UN Peacekeepers, and through Non-Governmental Organizations, organizations out to heal the wounds of an injured world.

And we’ve attempted to spread our meme team through one of our most heavily disguised forms of cultural imperialism--our idealism--our planet-girdling anti-globalist and anti-capitalist movements, movements that use cell phones, wireless connectivity, and laptops to weave formerly isolated peoples into a seven-continent struggle for social-justice and for eco-consciousness, a struggle for a global Gaian paradise conceived and led by Westerners.

Roman Catholic, Mormon, Pentecostal, Anglican, and Evangelical Christianity, five other carriers of Western values, are spreading explosively
⁸⁵⁸
in lands as far apart as South America, Africa, and Russia
⁸⁵⁹
.

These culture-crusades hint at the hunger of modern meme teams to pick apart smaller social structures and to cement their components into a new breed of superorganism—a global superorganism. More hints that some of us hunger for new forms of global integration come from the birth of supranational organizations like the European Union, NAFTA
⁸⁶⁰
, CAFTA
⁸⁶¹
, ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations)
⁸⁶²
, APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation)
⁸⁶³
, The World Muslim Congress
⁸⁶⁴
, the Organization of the Islamic Conference
⁸⁶⁵
, The World Bank, and The International Monetary Fund. China and fourteen other Asian nations even called for an integrated Asian free-trade zone
⁸⁶⁶
, one that would make the quilts of all previous transnational amalgamations look like mere Kleenexes. The proposed Asian financial super-merger would include an Asian bank, the Asian Monetary Fund, with monetary reserves far, far larger than those of the United States or the European Union.
⁸⁶⁷

Then there’s what China has been up to on its own. China’s quietly moved to spread its influence in a way that defies its old rules of empire. Those ancient ways of doing things involved expanding by conquering the nations conveniently located on the Chinese borders. When it came to distant foreigners, the Chinese emperors didn’t leave their palaces.
⁸⁶⁸
They required the pitiful barbarians to send emissaries who arrived in the Chinese court bowing, scraping, and bearing gifts.
⁸⁶⁹

But in 2001 Chinese president Jiang Zemin did something utterly unprecedented—something utterly un-Chinese. He left Beijing and went on an international tour, visiting six Latin American nations, signing cooperation agreements, and calling “on China and Latin America” to work toward building what he called “a new international order’'', an order designed “as a counterbalance to what it [China] views as overwhelming American hegemony.”
⁸⁷⁰

Three years later, in November, 2004, Chinese President Hu Jintao followed up Jian Zemin’s performance by flying to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba and signing a total of 39 strategic partnership and bilateral cooperation agreements.
⁸⁷¹

Then China got even more cheeky. It convinced the European Union to enter a strategic partnership that would include "cooperation in banking and international finance, energy and raw materials, anti-terror and nuclear nonproliferation, [and] technology transfer"
⁸⁷²
. Other allies flocked to China and China worked hard to pull them into its new international web. For example, China signed strategic partnership agreements with Russia
⁸⁷³
and with ASEAN
⁸⁷⁴
—an association of ten Asian Nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam
⁸⁷⁵
).

China appeared to be quietly positioning itself for the day when Islam and the United States would bleed each other into exhaustion, allowing the growing Chinese mega-power to step in and become the new hegemon, the new alpha superorganism in the global pecking order, the master of the “New International Order”
⁸⁷⁶
Jiang Zemin had spoken of, the keeper of a new planetary peace.

Whether China succeeds in its ambition to make this the Chinese Century or not, one thing is certain. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of memetic struggle—a struggle between superorganisms more massive than any social structure the human race has ever seen. Why call these new politico-cultural blocs mega-organisms? The populations of Islam, China, and India are
each
bigger than the entire human population on this planet in 1850. In that peak year of the Industrial Revolution, there were 1.2 billion
⁸⁷⁷
Homo sapiens
spreading their genes and their memes, and working hard to make riches from the minerals, plants, and animals on this globe. In 2005, the number of Moslems alone trumped that figure dramatically. It was, as we’ve seen before, 1.6 billion.
⁸⁷⁸
In 2005, the number of Chinese was also bigger than the entire population of humans on this planet in 1850. It was 1.3 billion
⁸⁷⁹
. And the number of Westerners was a paltry 760 million.
⁸⁸⁰
But even that was more than the total human population of the planet in 1750.
⁸⁸¹