“The Prophet [Mohammed] said, ‘A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah’s Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it.’”
Sahih Bukhari, Book #52, Hadith #50[75]
The roots of our 21st Century mayhem—the roots of our wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the roots of headlines about “terrorism” in the Philippines, Malaysia, Kenya, the Sudan, Kashmir, Thailand, Chechnya, London, Amsterdam, Madrid, New York, and Washington—the roots of what we call militant Islam, Fundamentalist Islam, and of what some Western extremists call Islamo-Fascism—run far deeper than most of us intelligent Westerners think. They go straight back to Mohammed.
Why? Mohammed was one of the most successful culture-founders, phrase-crafters, and society-assemblers of all time. He worked extremely hard to stamp his personality on the superorganism he assembled. He was a virtuoso at doing something few men or women before or since have achieved—ratcheting the Founder Effect up to a level far higher than mere instinct, psychology, or biology alone have ever achieved. Mohammed’s attempt to remain a shaper of men and women’s nature for the rest of time paid off. The generations of the faithful who came after his death labored with astonishing diligence to insure that every word, gesture, and quirk of their founder would remain at the core of the Mohammedan civilization’s meme. After Mohammed died, the faithful assembled Mohammed’s revelations from God in the Quran[76]. And they tracked down and questioned every person they could find who had known Mohammed. They compiled eyewitness accounts of the Prophet’s every gesture and word in a massive set of volumes called the Hadith.[77] For the next fourteen centuries, Islamic judges and scholars would dictate every detail[78] of a pious Muslim’s life based on the example Mohammed had left behind.
What were these personality traits that Mohammed stamped permanently into his believers? To find out we have to answer a question posed by Azzam Publications, an online information site for militant Muslims that quietly shut itself down after 9/11.[79] Before the website disappeared, its creators, “your brothers at Azzam Publications,” wrote that, “There is no such thing as a ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ Muslim. If there was, in what category would be place[d] the Prophet Muhammad…? Would we say he is a moderate, a liberal, an extremist, a fanatic, [or] a terrorist?”[80]
The boys at Azzam then took a stab at an answer to their own question. Mohammed, they said, “certainly would not be a moderate or liberal since he ordered 600 – 700 Jewish males to be beheaded in Madinah…. He also fought in 27 battles for the sake of Allah. Are we now going to call him a terrorist as well?” [81]
Good question!
Holiness, righteousness, and decency in extremist and in most of mainstream[82] Muslim culture are based on the example set by Mohammed.[83] According to one of Mohammed’s many Islamic biographers, “Sincerely tread the footsteps of Allah’s final Messenger [Mohammed]… observe his glorious actions and attitudes, and most important of all follow them, as the faithful among his companions did.”[84], [85] Another Islamic biographer titles his book, “The Last Prophet [Mohammed]: A Model For All Time.”[86] And today’s Muslim biographers agree that Mohammed is not just a paragon whose actions Muslims should imitate. He is a model of virtue for you and me.[87]
Though Islamic literature occasionally refers to Mohammed as a “Prophet of Peace,”[88] he was anything but. Mohammed called himself by many names. One of those was “nabiyyu ‘l-malhamah,” “the Prophet of War.”[89], [90] Mohammed’s followers have also praised him as “he who was sent with sword”[91] and “Mohammed the Conqueror”[92]—one of Osama bin Laden’s phrases. “Your brothers at Azzam Publications” point out with pride that Mohammed was a man who used weapons and went into battle, a man who killed. And Mohammed was a military dictator, a totalitarian[93] who used executions and assassinations on a regular basis.
In 624 AD, Allah told Mohammed that he and his followers had permission to wage jihad[94] to Crusade, to make Holy War.[95] Mohammed said that terror, killing,[96] and trickery[97] would be jihad’s three basic tools. And Allah backed him up. Said Allah in the blessed book, The Quran, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks [decapitate them] and smite all their finger tips off them [mutilate their bodies].[98] ... Slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them beleaguer them and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).”[99] In the next eight years, Mohammed, commanded 65 military campaigns. As “your brothers at Azzam” said with pride, he personally led 27 of them.[100]
If we are all supposed to follow Mohammed’s example, it’s incumbent upon us to battle, kill, and subjugate. Or, as one of the 20th Century’s most important interpreters of Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the founding father of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary State, put it: “...Muslims have no alternative... to an armed holy war against profane governments. ...Holy war means the conquest of all non Muslim territories. ...It will ...be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Koranic law in power from one end of the earth to the other.”[101] This duty is not the obligation of serial killers or madmen. Thanks to Mohammed’s example, Islam became and remains the most successful imperialistic enterprise in the modern world. And it wants its stature as top-player in the empire game back. It wants its prestige, its superiority, its ability to reprogram other societies, its ability to subjugate, and its sheer power. It wants what we want. It wants the form of control—the form of cultural self-replication—we call saving the world.
Adds a biography of Mohammed from the Islamic Universal Sunnah Foundation in Pakistan, the Prophet started with an army of only four Muslims, but grew that force to an army of thirty thousand.[102] Explains the Foundation’s biography, during Mohammed’s eight years of “conquest” he, his “Islamic army,” and his “undaunted soldiers of Islam…took control” of all “the vastness of the Arabian Peninsula” and forced Arabia’s citizens “to convert to Islam or to accept the supremacy of the Muslims as their rulers.”[103]
Mohammed’s biographers are proud of the Prophet’s role as what they call a “military leader.”[104] The most telling mark of Mohammed’s war-making and empire-founding prowess may be one simple statistic. According to the Universal Sunnah Foundation, under Mohammed’s generalship, “Islam spread on an average of 822 square kilometres per day.”[105]
Mohammed won that land with a series of what would be regarded today as war crimes. How did Mohammed become a killer? What was his story? What was his personality? How did he make his life the epitome of truth, virtue, and holy obedience? And how did he establish one of the three most successful belief systems in the history of mankind.
Most important, what was the example he left for you and me to follow if we want to avoid the fires of hell and see the women of paradise?