“You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night’s sleep.”
Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani,
reporting on the instructions he allegedly received from his former
boss, the commandant of Afghanistan’s Secret Police under the
Taleban, 2001
Why was Islam so successful despite the fact that it killed its diversity generators and gave enormous power to its conformity enforcers? Why was the Muslim system so good at trouncing other collective intelligences, other communities, when complexity theory says that as a “Stalinist system” it should have been an utter botch? Because Islam was about to take advantage of an open niche in the global social system, a power vacuum that opens in the biological eco-systems of the ocean, the forest, the field, and in the world of human beings. That open slot was the opportunity to become top predator.
Social learning machines work on a simple rule: he who gets gets more. He who loses is left out. In species from bower birds and strutting stags to Thai fighting fish, that rule translates to this: he who gathers the most goods and who can show those earthly treasures off the most flagrantly wins. He who can display the most control over the world around him comes out on top. He gets luxury, safety, power, influence, allies, and sex….lots and lots of sex. Islam was about to take a big leap upward in the business of exerting control and of grabbing goods and flaunting them. But before we sail into the tale of Islam’s great leap upward, let’s take a small detour and go back to the question of how a totalitarian dictatorship that kills its critics can possibly be a winner.
When a barbarian tribe—a tribe without big cities and without urbane sophistication, a tribe that specializes in violence, a tribe that’s’ expert in weapons-use and in raiding, a tribe that practices the techniques of war month after month and year after year, a tribe that elevates killing to a virtue, and a tribe that idealizes its mass murderers—goes up against a settled community, a community that’s built a civilization, the barbarians all too often win. Why?
If this were a just universe, it should be the other way around. The civilized, those who contribute the most to the enrichment of human lives, should be the victors. The civilized should have the sharpest, most sophisticated mass minds. The civilized should trounce the rabble and carry on their business in peace. But that’s not the way it happens. Instead, human history is littered with the results of one of the nastiest of mother nature’s tricks.
Pecking order squabbles don’t just take place between beasts and between nations. They dominate entire ecosystems. At the top in a natural ecosystem is not a Prophet, a Pope, a conqueror, or a king. It’s a meat-eater and killing machine called the top predator[569]. A top predator is the descendant of the replicators in the earth’s primordial seas roughly 3.5 billion years ago that invented a shortcut to gathering the goods they needed to make copies themselves.
If you’re on the bottom or middle of an ecological food chain, you spend a lot of your time nosing around trying to find stuff to eat. And once you’ve swallowed your food, you may need a huge and energy-consuming gut to turn it from seaweed, leaves, and grass to muscle mass, to meat. The bellies of cows, goats, sheep, camels, giraffes, llamas, buffalo, deer, wildebeest, and antelopes, for example, have stomachs with four separate chambers and have to take the time to eat their food twice. On the first go-round, these beasts yank, mash, and grind the grasses of the fields with their lips and teeth. They swallow these tough blades of greenery, and deposit them temporarily in the first two caverns of their four-chambered stomachs—caverns called the rumen and reticulum. There the grass blades are saturated with saliva, the easy-to-get-at nutrients—the starches—are dissolved by digestive enzymes,[570] and the resulting natural Gatorade is sent to the two back-end stomach chambers for final processing.
But the much tougher fibers are kept on hold in the stomach’s two preliminary processing chambers, the rumen and the reticulum, until the animal gets a substantial dollop of spare time. Then the beast brings the ball of stems, stalks, and remaining greenery back up into its mouth for a second bout of chewing. This burdensomely long second pass at grinding, slicing and mashing is known as rumination, the treatment technique from which these animals get their name: ruminants.
Even after an acid bath and a second go at chewing, when the twice-mulched food is returned to the four chambers of the stomach it’s still too tough for the cow, camel, antelope, or sheep to digest on its own. The ruminant needs the aid of massive bacterial and single-celled protist colonies in its four-fold stomach to wring the fuel it needs from the grasses it eats... and re-eats.[571]
If you’re a top predator you do not take this long and difficult route to food. Instead you pounce on others who’ve already gathered the ingredients you need, then you feast on the treasure they’ve managed to pre-assemble as protein, rumps, loins, and ribs—their meat. The predatory strategy is a short-cut to riches. And with riches you can ride the social learning machine others have created, making the collective intelligence of those you prey upon work for you.
Or, to put it in human terms, why build a civilization from scratch when you can take over the helm of a civilization others have spent hundreds of years piecing together? And, while you’re at it, why not go further and highjack a whole bunch of civilizations? Predation is efficient. It also often sews what it swallows together in new ways.
Top predators in the world of humans have advantages others lack. They focus on the glory of killing and war. They aren’t held back by what us settled folk call scruples. When the Jews of the Banu Quraiza had held out for over three weeks against Mohammed, they concluded that extending the war would give Mohammed an excuse to exterminate them utterly. So the Jews weighed their options. Said their leader, the men of the Banu Quraiza had three choices.
Choice one: reject the Torah, the holy book of the Jewish people, and accept [572] Islam and Mohammed as a legitimate…and final…prophet. This is like asking Christians to shred the New Testament and to toss away their belief in Jesus. The Jews answered that they, “will never abandon the law of the Torah.”[573]
Choice two: “Kill our wives and children and send men with their swords drawn to Muhammad and his companions leaving no encumbrances behind us.... If we conquer we can acquire other wives and children.”[574] The Jews replied, “Should we kill these poor creatures? What would be the good of life when they were dead?”[575]
And choice three: try to “take Muhammad and his companions by surprise.”[576] How? By attacking on a Saturday, a day consecrated to rest. The Jews refused to “profane” their Sabbath. [577]
These are scruples. Because the men of the Banu Quraiza refused to abandon them, they lost their heads.
A second advantage of barbarians is often their delight in war and their distaste for peace. The Vikings loved hacking and chopping their fellow humans so mightily that their version of paradise was a Valhalla[578] in which they woke up each morning, donned their armor and their weapons, then rode to the battlefield and spent the day glorying in the pleasures of combat, in the thrill of their favorite sport, killing.
And many of the Christian Crusaders loved fighting so much that when they had to abandon the killing fields of the Holy Land, they went off looking for other pagans they could slice into submission—and found them in the as-yet-unchristianized Slavic tribes of Prussia.
These are just a few of the reasons why nomadic peoples who luxuriate in the use of weapons, why enthusiastic removers of limbs and of lives, often go down in history despite their atrocities.
But there’s more. Some top predators suture together the civilizations they conquer in new ways. The Indo-Europeans spread from China to Scandinavia and left us our language. The Vikings terrorized and blitzkrieged the Holy Roman Empire, brutalized—and revitalized—Normandy, upgraded England.[579] and did the same for Asia, where the Norse raiders established the nucleus of an entirely new empire, a gaggle of princedoms that some say got its name from the Vikings’ russet hair, a gaggle that would slowly evolve into the Empire of Russia[580].
The violent, nomadic Mongols conquered the Chinese Empire, introduced paper money, standardized China’s weights and measures , and established massive free-trade zones in Asia.[581] The barbarians known as the Manchu ruled China from 1644 to 1911. These Manchu invaders took China to greater heights than it had ever seen before, giving it control over 13 million square kilometers of land,[582] including an island China wants back today—Taiwan.[583] In addition, the barbarian Manchus revived a critical element of Chinese administration that had fallen into disuse, the State Examination System,[584] the system that guaranteed that China’s bureaucrats would not be the random sons sired by nobles, but would be hired on the basis of merit and would be among the best-educated in the world—masters of “music, archery and horsemanship, arithmetic, writing, and knowledge of the rituals and ceremonies.”[585]
The nomadic armies of Islam sutured together an empire in which an ambitious traveler like the fourteenth century master of curiosity Ibn Battuta could travel from Spain to China, could speak a universal language—Arabic—wherever he went, and could accept a position as a judge in any of the central cities he stopped in. Why? Because every capital’s ruling class used the language of the conquerors, Arabic, the protocols of the Arab peoples, and the codes of Islamic law, codes in which Ibn Battuta was an expert.[586]
All of these empire-builders and empire re-makers, these top predators in the human eco-system—the Indo-Europeans, the Vikings, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Muslims—began as barbarians. Few of them started out literate. Few of them initially knew how to build a city. But all idealized violence.
And all put themselves in the saddle, raiding, breaking, then riding superorganisms originally organized and infrastructured by others. So did another folk who made war with the gleam of blood lust in their eyes, a sedentary people who followed the top predator strategy to the nth degree—sewing together an empire that nurtured cultural diversity, one in which cities could tear down their defensive walls and open themselves to the world. That highly disciplined gang of gore-lovers, warriors who attacked with a disciplined rigor the rest of Europe could not believe, was…the early Romans.
But not all predators are alike. When it comes to strategies for grabbing the lands and goods of others, the Muslims have made all the top predators of history—all of the world’s barbarian conquerors—look like amateurs. As we’re about to see, they seized a swatch of land five times the size of the Roman Empire and seven times the size of the USA. And the Muslims kept up these territorial conquests. As we’ll soon see, they pursued a path of unprecedented imperialism and colonialism for over twelve centuries straight.
Why was Islam able to pull off this radical increase in the magnitude of conquest? Because militant Islam has a weapon the Mongols, the Vikings, the Indo-Europeans, and even the pre-Christian Romans lacked—a worldview prefabricated to make war, to win, to rake in the riches, to reorganize captured societies, and to install the earliest believers—usually Arabs—at the top, then to take a deep breath and go out to conquer more.
Even more important, militant Islam has a belief system that, like that of the Hindus, cements the captured people in their place. It inserts into its victims a picture of the invisible world that makes voluntary subservience, utter submission (a core meaning of the word “Islam” [587]), permanent. Muhammad Ali Al Hashmi in his book The Ideal Muslimah[588] gives a description of how complete and overwhelming this submission can be. Though Al Hashmi is describing the perfect faith of a woman, he is also presenting the stooped-and-chastened attitude toward fate that is basic to all those Islam subjugates:
“One of the most prominent distinguishing features of the Muslim woman,” writes Al Hashmi, “is her deep faith in Allah (SWT), and her sincere conviction that whatever happens in this universe, and whatever fate befalls human beings, only happens through the will and decree of Allah (SWT); whatever befalls a person could not have been avoided, and whatever does not happen to a person could not have been made to happen. A person has no choice in this life but to strive towards the right path and to do good deeds—acts of worship and other acts—by whatever means one can, putting all his trust in Allah (SWT), submitting to His will, and believing that he is always in need of Allah’s (SWT) help and support.”[589]
In other words, no matter how dire your situation in life, no matter how much you are humiliated and kept low, live with it. If you are a man and you want to take revenge for your fate, do a good deed: vent your hostilities on an unbeliever by “fighting in the way of Allah.” Do your best to pick an unbeliever whose earthly goods you can steal, whose wives you can expropriate, and whose lands you can force your victim to farm until harvest time comes and he is forced to split the fruit of his labor with you.
Mohammed insured this subservience by using a conformity-enforcer and enemy-crumbler called terror. Terror, in fact, was a weapon Mohammed wielded with delight. He used the word over and over again:
I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy), and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand.[590]
I have been helped by terror (in the hearts of enemies): spoils [the plunder looted from enemies in raids or in war] have been made lawful to me: the earth has been made for me clean and a place of worship; I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me.[591]
Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers[592] … Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): “I am with you: give firmness to the believers: I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.”[593] … Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power including steeds of war to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah.[594] … ye are stronger (than they) because of the terror in their hearts (sent) by Allah.[595]
Mohammed knew the psychology of conquest. Unrelenting terror produces the “learned helplessness” [596] we saw over a hundred pages ago when we visited the research of Martin Seligman. Endless terror generates a physiological and emotional passivity that leaves an animal or a human too will-less to leave his torture chamber even when the door is left wide open.[597] Horrible as it may be, overwhelming fear can be a bonding mechanism, one of a growing superorganism’s most potent forms of social glue. It can make the loser a voluntary lower class in the social system of the victor, an underdog trying to rise in the eyes of his overlord by following the overlord’s ways.[598] This explains why people abducted by force and mistreated by their prison-masters often go through “The Stockholm Effect.”[599] They fall in love with their captors, and some become fervent converts to their captors’ beliefs. Long-term terror triggers a physiological, emotional, and perceptual change in its victims. It reduces its targets from proud competitors out for top status in the pecking order to obedient subjects grateful to simply be allowed to remain alive, despite their new status at the pecking order’s bottom.
This neural[600] and emotional switching process also explains why Germany and Japan, fascist nations that fought the European and American democracies tooth-and-nail in World War II, eventually rolled over like puppies, adopted the very forms of democratic government they’d been battling, and became America’s closest allies.
Both countries were fire-bombed until their cities were ruins, their citizens’ normal lives had been utterly stripped away, and they were threatened with starvation and with the dread of planes approaching to drop yet another load of explosives.
You’d think that inhuman treatment of this kind would evoke a never-ending hatred of the victor. Instead, it triggers the response that brings peace to pecking orders [Like early Muslim’s militants, the Iroquois Indians used the bonding power of terror…and worse. They marched enormous distances to make war on unsuspecting Native American villagers. Once they’d conquered a settlement, they took the inhabitants who remained alive as prisoners, tortured them until they broke them, then distributed them as slaves. The Iroquois approach showed the hunger of one superorganism to swallow another in a particularly graphic way. If the Iroquois warriors failed to crack the will of a captive and make him or her suitably subservient, they took another approach to digesting their victim. They literally ate him. (see: Daniel Richter. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1992.)] the bowing and scraping that researchers of animal and human behavior call “submission gestures.”[601] It resets your mind and your body, flooding you with an internal cascade of chemical poisons and passivity inducers—glucocorticoids, your stress hormones. [602] And it triggers what psychoanalytic theorist Anna Freud calls “identification with the oppressor”[603].
Since 624 AD, militant Islam has used the Stockholm Effect, learned helplessness, and identification with the oppressor to cement its occupied territories in place as tissues in its growing superbeast.
Once terror has done its job, the militant Muslims of the last fourteen centuries have rammed down the throats of those they conquered a picture of the invisible world with some of the sharpest and most un-spit-outable meme-hooks humanity has ever seen. If you abandon Islam, the punishment is swift and brutal—death. A deep dive into the eternity whose God—as we’ve seen before—will roast you over a spit while you scream for mercy. Then, when your skin is finally burned to a crisp and falls off, Allah will give you a new skin so you can be roasted and scream with pain all over again.[604]
“Merciful” Gods can be very unforgiving!
This hell is not a relic of an antique belief smoothed and gentled by time. The death sentence for leaving Islam is as vigorously alive today as it was in Mohammed’s day. No other modern religion dares impose a death sentence for apostasy—for changing your mind and for leaving your old faith behind.
Then there are the positives, the memetic seducers. Explains Muhammad Haykal, a member of Islam’s overclass, its Arab conquering race, “Mohammed, the pure Arab and pure Semite, was calling men to the monotheistic truth with strong and emphatic words which penetrate to the nethermost depths of consciousness. His revelation overwhelmed and intoxicated the soul. It caused men to transcend himself.”[605] What’s more, says Haykal, “The system of principles Islam elaborated came nearer than any other to enable man to attain perfection and to realize the absolute, or the highest ideals in time-space.”[606] And Haykal says there’s yet another memetic lure that draws men and women to Islam. Mohammed,” says Haykal, “achieved…political and worldly power.”[607] And so do those who follow in his footsteps, his followers.
Meme-hooks like these have kept conquered societies in the Islamic fold, bowing five times a day to Mecca, far longer than any peoples conquered by the Romans ever bowed to pagan Rome.
In an August 2, 2006 appearance on the Charlie Rose Show, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harvard historian Caroline Elkins[608] proclaimed bluntly that no empire in history had ever won the hearts and minds of those it conquered. She was wrong. Islam won the hearts and minds of its victims so completely that conquered peoples from Algeria to Indonesia—a stretch of 14,265 miles—still embrace the Middle Eastern belief system that was beaten into their ancestors with terror or that seduced their forefathers and foremothers with the possibility of winning Islam’s rewards. Algeria, Malaysia, and 55 nations in between were once conquered peoples, yet today they are passionately Muslim.
Studies of ecological systems show that when the top predator changes, the social system, the system of who preys on whom and how, shifts utterly.[609] For example, Charles C. Mann cites anthropologists and archaeologists who believe that when Native Americans entered the Americas, they created two new forms of ecosystem. They used fire to clear the land of central North America and gave birth to something brand new on this continent, something utterly man-made… prairies. And they used botanical artistry in South America to create another new kind of cradle for life—the rainforest. [610] The rainforest favored new plant species. And the prairie encouraged the spread of bison, elk, and mule deer.[611]
But a new top predator changes more than the food web. Among humans, the top predator changes the web that generates the collective intelligence. Barbarian conquerors—human top predators—can change the very nature of mass mind.