“The leaders of our religion were all soldiers, commanders and warriors. …They killed. … This idea of turning the other cheek has been wrongly attributed to Jesus (peace be unto him); it is those barbaric imperialists that have attributed it to him. Jesus was a prophet, and no prophet can be so illogical.”[310]
Ayatollah Khomeini
Mohammed had established the collective personality of his people, a personality that would call for justice, charity, and care for the poor—as long as those poor, those widows and orphans, were obedient Muslims. These were important memes. But Mohammed’s “complete system of life,”[311] would also encourage five less admirable emotions, five less admirable memes:
• anger, a word that shows up 63 times[312] in just one of the Hadith—one of the six holy books of eyewitness accounts of Mohammed’s life. The characters who show the most anger in the Hadith are Mohammed…and God.
• Fear, a word that shows up 126 times[313].
• Punishment—the word “punish” shows up 284 times[314].
• Obedience—”obey” appears 141 times[315].
• and fighting—”fight” pops up 291 times[316].
There was yet another character trait Mohammed—the key man in Islam’s founder effect—would bequeath to his followers. The Prophet had a problem with laughter. Satan laughed.[317] Mohammed’s enemies laughed—usually when they were mocking him[318]. But Mohammed spoke sternly to his followers, damned them when they displeased him, and discouraged anything that looked like humor.[319] Said he,
O followers of Muhammad! By Allah! If you knew that which I know you would laugh little and weep much.[320]
Mohammed had been the butt of many a joke in his first years preaching Islam. He may also have been given a rough time when he was a kid. After all, he was an orphan being raised by an uncle so lacking in ambition that he’d only mounted one trading expedition in his life. So to Mohammed, there was nothing funny about humor. In fact, humor, he said, was a form of attack: “hostility” he proclaimed, “begins with joking.”[321]
When Mohammed had taken Mecca in 630 AD,[322] one of the town’s citizens had two slave girls, two “singing girls.” Research has shown that adolescent girls often mount vicious pecking order attacks. They don’t plot violent wars of spears and swords, but prefer onslaughts of putdowns and of cutting words.[323] The hottest news topic in Mecca in 630 AD was the invasion and takeover pulled off by Mohammed, the man remaking the town in his own image. So the two girls improvised songs on this headline topic, uplifting their voices in what early Islamic historian al Tabari calls “satire about the Messenger of God.” Not a good idea.[324]
Mohammed ordered that both girls be killed. When one ran for her life, a brave companion of Mohammed’s took off after her with his war horse and trampled her to death. Just for good measure, Mohammed had the owner of the adolescent satirists executed, too.[325]
Humor—a device for airing society’s problems in a new light, a device that often involves not-so-hidden criticism of manners, mores, and leaders—was something Islam ruled out of the picture.[326] In an act that impoverished his culture further, Mohammed also forbade the use of musical instruments.[327]
Mohammed was a harsh man creating a harsh culture. But his severity wasn’t entirely his choice. He needed it to survive in a hostile world. In 625 AD, [328] five years before Mohammed took Mecca and reworked its memes to please his tastes, the Meccans, grieving over their losses at the Battle of Badr, put on their helmets, donned their armor, strapped on their swords, and headed toward Medina bent on revenge[329] against the holy gang-leader they called “the highwayman”[330]. The women of Mecca, deeply embittered over the loss of their husbands, fathers, and brothers at the Battle of Badr, came to stand in the back of the battlefield and literally cheer their men on.
Mohammed was up for the challenge. “It is not fitting that a Prophet who has put on his armour should put it aside until he has fought,” [331] he said. But Mohammed didn’t win this battle. Far from it. He stationed his troops with their backs to a mountain—the mountain of Uhud. But this position had a critical weakness. Behind the Muslims was a pass through which they could easily be attacked from the rear. Mohammed positioned 50 archers to block this gorge, then turned his attention to the enemy. [332]
Early in the battle, Mohammed’s troops drove their foes into what looked like a panicky retreat. Since plunder is one of the rewards of violence, especially for makers of jihad,[333] Mohammed’s men stopped to pluck as many clothes,[334] arms, and treasures as they could from the bodies and from the abandoned equipment of the fleeing enemy. The archers stationed at the pass ran down to the battlefield to scoop up their share of the prizes before the battlefield could be picked clean.[335] This was a big mistake. The enemy cavalry doubled around, threaded through the abandoned pass, and descended on Mohammed’s troops from the rear.
Mohammed was only 44 years old,[336] but he was overweight, was weakening with age, and was born down by the two coats of mail he’d donned before the battle.[337] None of that reduced his appetite for bloodshed. He fired arrow after arrow at the Meccans until his bow broke.[338] Then he was hit in the face with a rock that smashed both of his front teeth, drove two links of his helmet’s iron strap deep into his cheek,[339] knocked him off his feet, and sent the blood pouring down his cheeks and chin[340]. “How can a people prosper who have stained their prophet’s face with blood,”[341] he complained angrily.
A rumor that the Prophet had been killed spread among the fighters of Islam, and the Muslim soldiers lost their nerve, panicked, and fled. After most of the Muslims had left the field, one of the Meccan enemies discovered that the Prophet was still alive and charged on his horse toward Mohammed, determined to finish what the rock had begun.
Mohammed, weak and tottering, but with a legendary grip of steel[342] rammed a spear at the attacker’s neck and sent him tumbling from his horse’s back with a wound that would kill him shortly after the battle was over. [343]. Despite this gesture, the Muslims lost the battle, and lost it ignominiously.
To celebrate their victory and to literally taste revenge, the women of the Meccans, who had stood behind their men playing drums and cheerleading them on during the fight, went through the battlefield cutting the ears and noses off of Muslim corpses and turning “them into anklets, collars” and “pendants”[344]. One cut the liver out of the corpse of one of Mohammed’s uncles, Hamza,[345] Islam’s first military commander, whose ferocity in caravan raids and in battles against the Meccans[346] had earned him the nickname The Lion of Islam. The Meccan matriarch chewed on The Lion of Islam’s liver, tried to swallow it, found it too tough, and was forced to spit it out. [347] But she made her point. The beaten Muslims were too weak to stop this gruesome humiliation.
This is the world in which Islam was born. The brutality of the Arab desert’s culture, along with Mohammed’s humorless, rigid, kill-em-if-they-sneeze personality, may explain why early Islam was one heck of a mean meme team.