The aims of the life of Muhammad…, as the Last Messenger of God on this earth, were:
to destroy idolatry and polytheism;
to proclaim the absolute Oneness of the Creator;
to deliver the Creator’s Message to mankind;
to complete the system of religion and law;
to purify the souls of men and women;
to eradicate injustice, iniquity and ignorance;
to establish a system of peace with justice;
to create an apparatus in the form of a political state for the realization of all the foregoing aims, and one which would also maintain the momentum of his work.
Within the 23-years of his ministry as God’s Messenger, Muhammad had achieved all these aims.
Sayed Ali Asgher Razwy
The holy books of Islam, the Quran and the Hadith, are not the only religious founding volumes that revel in violence. Killing is at the core of the Jewish and Christian Old Testament. It is at the heart of the Hindu Vedas. And it is at the center of the founding books of Western Civilization, The Iliad and the Odyssey. But modern Hindus, Christians, and Jews have rejected…or forgotten…the genocide and mass murder preached in their holy books. What we call fundamentalist Islam, militant Islam, jihadism, Islamism, or Islamofascism has not.
There’s good reason. The meme-weave of Islam is unlike that stitched by any other major modern religion. Buddhism was a worldview laid out in 500 BC by a man who rejected war and who tried to relieve mankind of its suffering. Christianity was founded in roughly 30 AD[612] by a small-town savior who recommended turning the other cheek to violence. Both Christianity and Buddhism eventually went global. And both eventually inspired armed conflict. But neither Buddha nor Christ would have approved of the murderous deeds launched in their names.
In tune with the founder effect, both Christianity and Buddhism have ever so slowly inched back to activism on behalf of the goals of their founding fathers—peace. We’ll see how this unlikely turn in ethics and morality has happened in a few chapters.
Meanwhile, Islam’s founder, Mohammed, was, unlike Buddha and Jesus, a shaper of a new political order and a man who built holy bloodshed into his belief system. As Mohammed said about his addiction to warfare on behalf of a weave of memes, “By Allah, I will not cease to fight for the mission with which God has entrusted me until He makes me victorious or I perish.”[613] When Mohammed used the word “fight” he was not talking about internal struggle or impassioned persuasion. He was talking about war.
More important for you and me, Mohammed built global government, a global law code, and a global military policy into the roots of his religion. And the 21st Century is ripe for memes built on a global scale.
This may explain why as early as the 1980s a thoroughly modern, Westernized Cairo constitutional lawyer, Dr. A.K. Aboulmagd, expressed a widespread point of view in the Muslim world,[614] “I even venture sometimes to say that Islam was not meant to serve the early days of Islam, when life was primitive and when social institutions were still stable and working. 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. ...The mission of Islam lies not in the past, but in the future.”
In other words, a good-hearted, modern, liberal Muslim wearing a Western suit and tie was telling us that the time for the Islamic meme to expand its superorganism is now. What does that mean for you and me?
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I was sent with the sword…. My sustenance has been made below the shadow of my spear. Humiliation and abasement have been laid upon the one who opposes my command.
Mohammed[615]
Islam has enjoined Muslims to establish not only a society based on Islam but also expects Muslims to establish a government based on Islam. It fact, it has promised true believers to make them rulers on the earth.
Sarwat Saulat—a moderate Muslim biographer of Mohammed[616]
How did Islam go global? How did a picture of the invisible world conceived in an obscure corner of an equally obscure desert turn into a “complete system” [617] that aimed to girdle the planet with just one legal code, just one set of manners and morals, and just one god? By harnessing the founder effect, the top predator trick, and the primitive power of picking on the little guy. By molding a culture on the example of a prophet of conquest, a man who made religion, government, and war synonymous, a man who dared to dream outrageously big—Mohammed.
In 629 AD, thanks to the lucrative victories over the Jews of the Banu Qaynuqa, over the Jews of the Banu Nadir, and over the Jews of the Banu Quraiza, the Muslims were wealthy[618]…wealthy enough to grow ambitious. And wealthy enough to make their superorganism and the memes that drove it voracious. As one of Mohammed’s Islamic biographers puts it, after the “destruction of the [Jewish] Banu Qurayzah …All Arab tribes admired Muslim power, dominion, and the new prestige of Muhammad as sovereign of Madinah.” The biographer is no ordinary writer. He’s Muhammad Haykal a man we’ve referred to often. Haykal, who died in 1956, graduated from France’s most prestigious university, the Sorbonne, then went on to become the Minister Of Education for Egypt, the Minister Of State for Egypt’s Interior Ministry,[619] and the editor of the newspaper Al Siyasa. His biography of Mohammed is endorsed by the Arab Republic of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs,[620] is published in English by Indonesia’s Islamic Book Trust,[621] and is brought to you online by the Muslim Witness-Pioneer organization, dedicated “to spreading and establishing the message of Islam.”[622] In other words, Haykal was a mainstream Egyptian Muslim whose words are still being actively spread today.
Haykal explains that after the beheading of the men of the Banu Quraiza, Mohammed was at a turning point…a very big one. Islam’s next challenge was to fight its way up the pecking order of nations. “The Islamic message,” Haykal says, “was not meant for Madinah alone, but for the whole of mankind. The Prophet and his companions still faced the task of preparing for the greater task ahead, namely bringing the word of God to the wide world….”[623]
Mohammed had nurtured global ambitions for a long time. In 627 AD, when he was supervising the building of the ditch that saved Medina in the Battle of the Trench, one of his soldiers wore himself out attacking a rock that would not give in to his pick. The Prophet climbed down into the trench, took the man’s iron tool by the handle, and hit the stone with three blows so hard that “lightning showed beneath the pick.” [624] Then he explained to the amazed digger that each blow had a meaning. Said the Prophet, “The first means that God has opened to me the Yaman; the second [blow means that God has opened to me] Syria and the West; and the third [blow means that God has opened to me] the East.”[625] “Yaman,” Yemen, was the Arab link to the ocean trade with India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China. “The East” included India, the steppes and mountains of Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asian island nations of the Pacific Rim. And “Syria and the West” referred to Iraq, Turkey…and Europe.
Just in case the planetary scope of his words wasn’t clear enough, Mohammed declared that, “Allah drew the ends of the world near one another for my sake and I have seen its eastern and western ends. And the dominion of my Ummah [body of followers] would reach those ends.”[626] Added one of Mohammed’s soldiers, “The Prophet used to promise us that we should eat the treasures of [the Persian emperor] Chosroes and Caesar [the Roman Emperor].”[627]
In other words, at the very least the Prophet guaranteed those who rallied to his cause the land and goods of the two massive empires that controlled the Middle East, parts of Asia, North Africa, and nearly all of Europe.
In 629 A.D. thanks to his easy wins over the Jews, Mohammed had more than treasures aplenty. He also had the confidence to make his first move toward establishing the continent-swallowing mega-empire he had promised his followers. Mohammed sent letters to the major world leaders of his day.[628] The list of these you-have-won-the-lottery recipients included six superpower sovereigns—
the Persian Emperor Chosroes II,
the Eastern Roman1 emperor Hercules (also spelled Heracles or Heraclius),
the Negus of Abyssinia,
the governor of Egypt,[629]
the Governor of Syria,[630] and
the ruler of Bahrain.[631]
Says Muhammad Haykal, “Heraclius and Chosroes” alone “were at the time the chiefs of …the greatest states of the age and the makers and arbiters of world policy and world destiny. …No state or community could think of opposing them.”[632] Yet each letter was a carefully worded “invitation” to Islam.[633] As you may have guessed, Mohammed’s “invitations” were actually military ultimatums in disguise.[634] Islamic sources are very insistent on “punishment for…denying the invitation to Islam”[635]. In his letters, The Prophet demanded that the kings convert to the religion of Allah or suffer the consequences. Those consequences were what Ibn Ishaq calls the “onslaught” of “war.”[636]
By sending his letter to a head of state like the Byzantine Emperor Hercules, Mohammed demonstrated an audacity that Haykal calls “amazing”[637]. And amazing it was. When Hercules was puzzled and asked where Mohammed’s letter had come from, he was told that it was from a people too backward for Hercules to bother his head about: “from the Arabs, people of sheep and camels.”[638] It had come from insignificant barbarians.
What’s worse, Mohammed still ruled only one flyspeck, one unheard-of city—Medina, a town of a mere thousand souls lost in the vastness of the Arabian desert. He hadn’t even conquered Mecca. Hercules, on the other hand, ruled one of the biggest empires of the day, an empire that held territory on three continents and that spanned so many cultures that it dizzies the imagination.[639] Yet Mohammed-the-insignificant told Hercules-the-mighty:
“I invite you to Islam and if you become a Muslim you will be safe, and Allah will double your reward, and if you reject this invitation of Islam you will be committing a sin by misguiding your subjects.”[640]
In other words, if you refuse to impose Islam on your citizens, you’ll be hung out to dry on one of Islam’s meme-hooks. You’ll send all of those you rule to torture in an eternity whose endless centuries make our few fleeting years on this planet seem insignificant. What, according to the Quran, happens to you if you sin by dooming your subjects to the never-ending fire? Military defeat and an endless sizzle on the coals of the inferno. Says the Quran, “Say to those who reject Faith: ‘Soon will ye be vanquished and gathered together to hell an evil bed indeed (to lie on)!’”[641].
The Quran adds that Allah gives his armies “permission…to annihilate [their]enemy.”[642] “How many towns,” says the Quran, “have We destroyed (for their sins)?”[643] Or, as the 13th Century Islamic scholar Imam Ibn Taymiyyah[644] summed it up, “whoever has heard the summons of the Messenger of God… and has not responded to it, must be fought.”[645]
What did this mean in reality for the lands of the six rulers who received Mohammed’s invitations? A good deal more than any of them imagined. Writes Mohammad Haykal, “within barely thirty years of the time he sent those missions, the kingdoms of these kings were conquered by the Muslims.”[646] And those kingdoms would simply be Allah’s appetizers. The entrees were yet to come. How in the world did such an outlandish reversal of world power, a total change in the pecking order of nations, occur?