How Mohammed Built Militant Islam
In 622 AD, when it looked as if Mohammed was about to be murdered in his home town, Mecca, he and a handful of believers fled 280 miles through wild hills and desert to a tiny city with only a thousand inhabitants—most of them Jews[203]—Medina. There Mohammed and the Meccans who followed him lived on the food and lodging provided by their Medina-ite hosts.
Mohammed instinctively knew the rules of the learning machine: he who gets gets more. He who loses is left out. Mohammed needed camels, sheep, land, date palms, oases, slaves, swords, and armor.[204] And he needed a constant stream of military wins. He needed these things to feed his followers, to give them the best weapons, and to give them pecking-order status, to give them prestige.[205] He needed consumer goods to make sure that the meme-team he preached would spread. He needed wealth and earthly possessions to build solidarity in the Muslim community. And he needed luxuries and the good things in life to pay his Medina-ite hosts back for housing and supporting his “believers.”
Mohammed also needed a flood of treasure and triumphs to take advantage of another rule of the learning machine, that allies flock to the beast on top. The first technique the One True Prophet chose to score wins and to bring in the booty was simple: raiding passing caravans then divvying up the loot.[206]
God himself backed Mohammed in this policy. As the Quran says, “Allah made it binding on the Muslims to fight in His way. Warfare is ordained for you, though you dislike it.”[207]
Mohammed led his desert raids literally dressed to kill. As one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the 20th century, the Ayatollah Khomeini, put it, Mohammed, “would place a helmet on his blessed head, don his coat of chain mail, and gird on a sword.”[208] Mohammed had nine swords in his personal weapons collection, many of them stripped from the hands and bodies of slain enemies.[209] Ibn Ishaq, who wrote the first and most definitive Islamic biography of Mohammed just 150 years after Mohammed’s death, explains that to down foes at a distance, [210] Mohammed also carried a bow and a full arrow case.[211]
In 624 AD, the year of the “permission” to make jihad, Allah offered the Muslims and their Medina-ite helpers a special treat. Mecca, the Muslims’ hometown, had humiliated the Prophet and his first followers. Now a Meccan camel caravan bringing home the profits of a luxury-goods-transport mission to Syria[212] was about to pass near Medina. The owners of this caravan and of its cargo of treasure were Mecca’s leading citizens, the folks whose ridicule and threats had turned Mohammed into a fugitive. This was a brilliant opportunity for plunder[213]… and for revenge.[214]
When Mohammed and his followers attacked the string of Meccan cargo camels, one of the caravan’s leaders, a Meccan aristocrat, sent home for help. An army of a thousand men, 700 camels, and 100 cavalry horses[215] heeded the caravan’s call for military backup. This forced Mohammed to switch from mere raiding to full-scale war.[216]
According to Mohammed’s Islamic biographers, the Muslims “were in a difficult test, they were going to face their own brothers, sons and relatives”[217]—they were about to go toe-to-toe with the people they’d grown up with back home in Mecca. And Mohammed was apparently gut-wrenchingly scared. He prayed his heart out, but his words were haunted by fear of defeat: ““O Allah, bring about what Thou hast promised to me. O Allah, if this small band of Muslims is destroyed. Thou will not be worshipped on this earth.”[218]
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 Muslim 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 Muslim fighter did his best, but, to use his words, his fellow Muslims, “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 Muslims 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.