How Much Earth Can You Eat In 100 Years?
Any nonreligious [i.e. non Islamic] power, whatever form or shape, is necessarily an atheistic power, the tool of Satan; it is part of our duty to stand in its path and to struggle against its effects. Such Satanic power can engender nothing but corruption on earth, the supreme evil which must be pitilessly fought and rooted out. To achieve that end, we have no recourse other than to overthrow all governments that do not rest on pure Islamic principles, and are thus corrupt and corrupting, and to tear down the traitorous, rotten, unjust, and tyrannical administrative systems that serve them.
Ayatollah Khomeini—the founding father of today’s Islamic Republic of Iran
At the height of the Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness. Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, [and] the whole world of ideas...”[647] Eisenhower was right about the potential power of what he described, a totalitarian superorganism, a massively conformity-enforced social beast battling for top predator status. But he was wrong when he said that this totalitarian social strategy was “unique in history.” He overlooked the fourteen-century-long history of militant Islam.
By 629 AD, when the battle of Khaibar was over, Mohammed had invented precisely what Eisenhower described…a new form of superorganism—a totalitarian military dictatorship with a full-time army, an army paid with taxes and loot sucked from the unbelievers. Mohammed had crafted the first dictatorship with a meme-team that covered every aspect of life from the direction in which you urinate and your daily schedule to what you believe, a dictatorship that came complete with a new picture of the invisible world. Mohammed’s new squad of memes demanded perpetual war[648] and “dawa”—conversion by persistent, peaceful persuasion. Mohammed’s new worldview also that said you won more prizes if you died “fighting in the way of Allah” than if you remained alive.
Every new form of superorganism is a gamble, a guess on the best way to mine a niche in a rapidly evolving world. Mohammed’s guess turned out to be one of the best in history. His new form of social organization proved its fitness for the top predator slot with deeds that no previous superorganism on this planet—no matter how hungry and brutal—had ever achieved.
When Mohammed died in 632 AD, there was a squabble over who should take his place. Mohammed’s best friend, Omar, won. He became the “caliph,” the “successor” of Mohammed. And he took Mohammed’s global ambitions seriously—very seriously indeed. For good reason. Without its Prophet, the Islamic community was in danger of falling apart. Battle is a bonding mechanism, a way to give a superorganism the social glue it needs to survive. It’s also a way to test your new social structure by gambling your males on growth. Omar apparently sensed the adhesive power of us versus them, especially when it’s strengthened by bloodshed. After Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, says sociologist of Islam Reuben Levy, “war… was the normal state, ...peace ... was the period of the year when campaigning was not possible.”[649]
The victories early Islam achieved were staggering. In 634 AD, a mere two years after the Prophet breathed his last, the armies of Islam conquered Iraq.[650] In 637 AD, five years after Mohammed’s death, the Muslim forces toppled the emperor of Persia, sacked the Persian capital, Ctesiphon (the home base of Nestorian Christianity), and took over the massive Persian Empire. That same year, 637 AD, the desert Arabs of Islam snatched the city most holy to Jews and Christians, Jerusalem. Mohammed’s new meme-team was on a road test in the real world and was proving that it had remarkable horsepower!
In 640 AD, eight years after Mohammed’s demise, the Muslims went multi-continental. They conquered Syria outright and began their penetration of the Sudan in Africa. In roughly 642 AD, the Caliph Omar, the friend of Mohammed’s who took over when the Prophet died, reportedly issued the following order to his governor in Syria—”Strike terror into wrongdoers and make heaps of mutilated limbs out of them.”[651] This psyche-slamming strategy—Mohammed’s strategy of terror, like the rest of militant Islam—worked.
In 642 AD, a mere ten years after Mohammed’s death, the Muslim armies conquered Egypt, began to take Afghanistan, and started sending delegations to China, winning Chinese converts, and building China’s first mosque.[652] In 654 AD, 22 years after Mohammed’s departure unto paradise, a Muslim fleet of over 200 ships clobbered a Byzantine navy of 500 vessels in the Mediterranean, [653] demonstrating that a tribe of camel-herding desert traders and Sinbad-the-sailor type Indian Ocean seafarers could be deadly both on land and on sea. In 674 AD, Islam established a colony in a place so far away that no previous Middle Eastern or European conqueror had even tried to add it to his package of real-estate—the Pacific Rim island of Sumatra—5,000 miles east of Mecca.[654]
But this totally-against-the-odds conquest of an immense territory was just the beginning. From 642 to 705 AD, Islam grabbed the entire Mediterranean coast of Africa—Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. In Africa, the wives of indigenous kings killed themselves so that they wouldn’t become sex toys—slave girls—in the hands of the Muslim invaders. One of these queens, the Western African Sudanese ruler Dahia-Al Kahina, died in 705 AD after leading her troops against the Arabs and driving the growing hordes of Allah north to Tripolitania. [655]
From 711 to 714 AD, The Islamic governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj bin Yousef, a man who called himself “The Bone Crusher,” went on a campaign to expand the empire of Islam even further. He ordered his generals to conquer a breathtaking swath of territory—Central Asia’s Turkestan[656] (including today’s Chinese province of Xinjiang),[657] swatches of India, all of Spain, and to tighten control of North Africa. His orders for the treatment of unbelievers was simple: infidels should either be converted, killed, or enslaved.[658]
The armies sent by “The Bone Crusher” into Europe were led by an ally won over to Islam’s victory-generating military and political strategy, a newly converted Berber slave, Tarik ibn Ziyad.[659] Ziyad’s troops crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, toppled the Christian King of Spain—the Visigoth Roderick—seized his entire kingdom, then advanced into Southern France. [660]
In 712 AD, a mere 80 years after the death of the one true Prophet, the Bone Crusher’s Arab troops and their rapidly expanding cohort of foreign allies took Mohammed’s example of non-stop military expansion even farther and conquered Sind in Western Pakistan. This was a perfect base for more attacks on an only partially-conquered India.[661] And attack is exactly what the armies of Islam did. Said one Sufi Muslim, Amir Khusrau, “The whole country, by means of the sword of holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. Had not the Law granted exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax the very name of Hind[us], root and branch, would have been extinguished.”[662]
According to medieval historian K.S. Lal,[663] a total of 80 million Hindus died or were converted at the hands of Muslim invaders.[664] Then, as in most of their new territories, the Arabs capped their victories with colonialism[665]. Massive clans of Arabs left the Middle East and settled in the conquered swatches of India,[666] lording it over the natives, hoarding the wealth, wiping out indigenous cultures, and imposing Islamic law.
A hungry meme team was having a feast.
750 AD was the year in which the Empire of Islam seized a broader swath of land and ocean than any previous empire had ever grabbed—broader than the empires of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, or the Chinese. Islam penetrated further into the Pacific Rim by taking Indonesia’s Aceh province and faced its first showdown with a Chinese army. The warriors of Islam defeated the unbeatable Chinese at the Battle of Talas in Kazakhstan,[667] and reportedly learned paper-making from their Chinese captives. Islam also seized the vital Asian Silk Road trading city of Samarkand…a town through which super-high-end Chinese goods flowed to Europe and to the Middle East.
Mohammed’s totalitarian meme and his picture of the invisible world worked military wonders. No empire in history had ever shown such astonishing multi-continental capabilities. In 750 AD, 5,300 miles and a continent away from Aceh, Muslim Arabs turned the African area of Mombasa into an export center for two upscale luxury goods from Africa’s distant heartlands—ivory and black slaves. Eventually Islam’s African empire would cover roughly six million square kilometers,[668] and the multi-continental Muslim trade in African slaves would uproot over 112 million blacks from their homes, would kill 84 million of them, and would put over 28 million blacks on sale in slave markets from one end of the empire of Islam to the other.[669] This outdid the Western slave trade’s eleven million black Africans displaced and a million killed by a staggering multiple of more than ten to one. At the same time, in 750 AD, Muslim armies grabbed a traditional source of snow-white slaves, the Caucasus mountains.[670] The enslaved women of the Caucasus were so prized as trophies and sex toys in Muslim harems that they became known as “Circassian beauties.”[671]
From the victim’s point of view, the Islamic conquest was Armageddon, the end of the world, apocalypse now. Egypt was a thoroughly Christian land that gave birth to Christianity’s monastic movement and to legendary Christian heroes of piety like St. Paul of Thebes. St. Paul of Thebes was credited as Christianity’s First Hermit. He lived in Egypt’s southern mountains and ate only fruits and water.[672]. But John the Bishop of the Egyptian island of Nikiou, says that when:
The Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, [and] pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found…. It is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed.[673]
Mohammed’s strategy of “casting terror”[674] into the hearts of those who refused to see the truth of Islam was demonstrating just how effective it could be. At the Armenian town of Dvin in 642 AD, a mere ten years after Mohammed’s death, Sepeos writes that a Muslim “army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword…gorging itself on booty.” Then, writes Sepeos, “After a few days’ rest, the Ishmaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”[675]
One Islamic source, Dr. A. Zahoor, claims that the reports of war crimes and atrocities in Islam’s world-sweeping days of imperialism and colonialism radically misrepresent history. The armies of Islam, says Dr. Zahoor, showed such mercy, such concern for those they attacked, and such “lofty moral principles” that entire cities surrendered happily to the soldiers of Islamic justice.[676] That claim seems debatable.
Entire cities—like the 40,000-population Jewish metropolis of Caesarea whose “terrible scenes” John of Nikiou noted—disappeared entirely. Forty-one cities in just one small portion of the Jewish Holy Land, Sharon, were sand-blasted off the face of the earth. Or, to put it in the more delicate words of the 9th century Muslim historian Abu Al-Abbas Ahmad Bin Jab Al-Baladhuri,[677] after “the Arab conquest…all trace of them is lost.”[678]
In Celicia, adds Michael the Syrian, “when [the head of the Islamic empire, the Caliph] Mu’awiyah arrived he ordered all the inhabitants to be put to the sword…. After gathering up all the wealth of the town, they set to torturing the leaders to make them show them things [treasures] that had been hidden.” Thus did the new generation of Muslims follow their founder’s example when he had ordered a captured Jewish leader tortured to discover where the town’s treasures were hidden. Then Mu’awiya’s troops followed another of Mohammed’s examples and “led everyone into slavery-men and women, boys and girls.” [679]
The citizens of Egypt’s most glorious city, Alexandria, were spared this slaughter. But they lived to regret it. Their Arab conquerors levied a tax that John of Nikiou says brought them, “to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month.”[680]
These taxes went to pay, feed, and equip the growing armies of Islam. The Caliph Omar,[681] the man who took over as head of the Muslim community two years after Mohammed’s death, said that once the infidels were defeated, those who were still alive should be left to till their expropriated farms[682] so that the ummah—the global body, the superorganism—of Islam could levy the taxes necessary “to pay the wages and food of the warriors…” Why was this vital? Said Omar, it would give Islam’s “troops… the necessary means to carry on the holy war [jihad]” without cease and to support the “soldiers and mercenaries” needed to make sure that “the infidels would [not] return to their former possessions.”[683]
Conquered peoples were the fingers of the growing Muslim superorganism, and were put to work feeding its jaws and teeth. And those jaws and teeth were not just the tribal bands Mohammed had led. They were full-time armies dedicated to cleansing the world of idolatry, to eradicating indigenous legal, political, and religious systems, and to replacing false beliefs, false governments, and false laws with the God-given “complete system” [684]—the totalitarian system—of Islam.
A key Greek island symbolized the manner in which Islam cut out the heart of each local culture and planted the meme team of Islam in its place. That island was Rhodes—home to the ruins of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—a colossal eleven-story-high, 936-year-old statue of the Greek God of the Sun, Helios, a monument that had once straddled Rhodes’ harbor, with one enormous foot standing on one side of the inlet to the port and the other gigantic foot planted on the opposite bank. The armies of the One True faith “went to Rhodes, and devastated it.” They sold the remains of the Colossus of Rhodes to a scrap merchant who carted the stone, iron, and bronze off to Turkey on 900 camels.[685] That’s the top predator’s secret strategy. Why make riches when you can take them? Why accept the memes of the natives when you can replace them?
Equal tales of atrocity could be told about every major civilization on the planet, including the civilization of the West. In fact, they have been by Western authors like Noam Chomsky[686] and Howard Zinn.[687] But European and American imperialism have come nowhere near Islam’s achievement. Within 110 years of Mohammed’s death, Islam, the first modern religion created by a holy-war-maker and political dictator with global ambitions, had taken a territory the size of seven United States and of five Roman Empires. Yes, five Roman Empires!!!
What’s more, Islam possessed an advantage few other top predators had even imagined—a system that covered every aspect of life, one that came complete with a worldview, a governmental structure, a judicial system, laws, a military philosophy, and a routine of daily discipline—an all-encompassing meme team with which militant Islam could assert mind-control over its shattered victims.
The result—through violence, terror, trade, and persuasion, Islam implanted its memetic heart with far more permanence than any imperialist power had achieved before or since. As we’ve seen, the citizens of the lands subjugated by Muslim conquerors or converted by Muslim traders have remained faithful to the religion of their conquerors for as long as 1,300 years. That’s what the founder effect can do when your founder is hell bent on digesting every empire of his day, on giving it a new soul, and on utterly changing its mass mind.
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Mohammed was driven by memes...a team of them that assembled themselves in his head in 22 years of inspiration, revelation, and thought.[688] Mohammed pulled together a superorganism. That superorganism entered the pecking order and pecked its way to the top. It proved itself in the real world. It showed an ability to grab the top predator slot in a way that no imperialist power before or since has demonstrated. Today Islam has been briefly pecked back toward the bottom. But Islam’s memes are still trying to feed new peoples and new nations to the superorganism of Islam and to raise that superorganism ever higher in the pecking order.
Meanwhile both the pecking order and its combatants are evolving. Evolving into new forms of emergent collective intelligences, new forms of learning machines, new forms of mass mind. And preparing to fight with new weaponry. Weaponry that can eradicate our species. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry.
The problem for you and me is that militant Islam’s global jihad has never stopped. From the 7th century onward Islam isolated, encircled, besieged, and terrified the West in ways that we moderns prefer to forget. John Esposito, former president of the Middle East Studies Association, like many other writers on the topic, justifies the ferocity of today’s Islamic anti-Western sentiments by reminding us that, “Many in the Arab and Muslim world view the history of Islam and of the Muslim world’s dealings with the West as one of victimization and oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power.”[689] He is right about the modern Islamic perception. But he is wrong about the facts.
It was the Islamic empire that held the upper hand in the struggle between East and West for over 1,100 years. The Muslim conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century AD gave Islam the land of the Jews and, more important geopolitically, the land of Christianity’s birth. Islam became the permanent occupier of territory that gave birth to most of the Fathers of the Church, territory that included Galatia, Bithynia, Pontus and Cappadocia—where St. Paul established many of the first Christian churches. These are the cities to which St. Paul wrote the letters, the epistles, central to the New Testament.
Islamic Imperialists took Syria, whose capital, Damascus, was one of the earliest major Christian centers. Damascus was the city St. Paul set out for when he fell off his ass and was smacked by a vision of blinding light. Four hundred years later, Syria was the land of Christian ascetics like St. Simeon the Stylite, who lived on a 60-foot-high, custom-built masonry column in the desert for 36 years to demonstrate his dedication to Christ.[690] Four Christian basilicas were built around the pillar of St. Simeon when he died.[691] St. Simeon’s act of sacred endurance took place in a Christian and Jewish land that’s remained in Islamic hands for over 1,200 years.
Christianity counter-attacked in the twelfth century with the Crusades. The Crusades were imitations of an Islamic invention, Holy War. They came only after Europe had been pounded and surrounded for 384 years by the forces of jihad. And they were a miserable failure.
The Crusaders’ battles were over a postage-stamp-sized piece of territory, primarily the land where Christ had lived and preached—land Christ was able to reach on foot. And the Crusaders were initially greeted with enthusiasm by many of the region’s Islamic rulers, who had divided the Middle East into tiny Muslim principalities, then gone to war with each other. To some of these petty sultans, princes, atabegs,[692] and emirs, the foreign invaders seemed like superb allies with whose help they could crush a rival or two.[693]
The knights of the cross—the Western Crusaders—were hideously barbaric and bloody. When they besieged Jerusalem in 1099, they promised safety to many of the city’s communities if those communities would help them breach the city’s walls. But once they penetrated the city’s defenses they broke their promises and killed every man, woman, and child they could find. One ancient historian[694] says that the blood became a flood that swelled up to the Christian warriors’ ankles.[695]
But these European butchers did not retain their reconquered fiefdoms in the Christian and Jewish Holy Land long. They were expelled by 1187…giving them a total stay of 88 years, a flea’s sneeze compared to Islam’s nearly 1,400-year grip on North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and much of the Pacific Rim. Nonetheless, according to historian Amin Maalouf, the author of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes,[696] modern Arabs tend to see today’s world events as a continuation of the Crusades. And so do many of us.
Frankly, we are blind to the blunt facts of history. We forget that for 700 years after the fall of the Crusader states, Islamic forces returned to the attack, crusading against and capturing Greece, parts of Italy, and chunks of Eastern Europe, raiding towns in Sicily, the coasts of Italy, Cornwall, Ireland, England,[697] France, Brittany, Ile de Groix, the Biscay coast, Portugal, and Spain. We forget that in 1625 the naval forces of the Islamic jihad established a base on the island of Lundy off the coast of England to support its raids on towns in Britain.[698] We forget that seaborne Muslim Crusaders took more than a million Europeans as slaves.[699] We forget that these Muslim Holy Sailors followed the principles of jihad established by Mohammed in his land-based military campaigns. The Islamic sea-warriors seized the citizens of entire villages as slaves and took the goods of these captives as loot, just as the Quran’s chapter eight, “The Spoils of War, The Booty,”[700] says they should.
One night in 1631, for example, the Islamic raiders silently slid their warships onto the Irish beach near the town of Baltimore.[701] In the morning Baltimore was a ghost town. All the citizens had been taken captive or killed. Those allowed to live were destined for sale in the slave markets of cities like Algiers,[702] Damascus, Baghdad, and Mecca. And their homes were stripped of everything of value. This is the “booty” and the “loot” the Quran and the biographies of Mohammed promise to the faithful.
Twelfth century Islamic military tactician Abu Bakr of Tortosa[703] went through the Quran and the Hadith to derive Allah’s own dictates for combat methodology. He wrote, “In the battle he [a commander] must urge his men to victory, by ...promising those who are steadfast the rewards of Allah if they should reach the next world, and, if they remain alive in this world, tribute and an extra share of booty.”[704], [705] Towns like Baltimore provided that extra booty. And they provided this sanctified loot in the beginning of the modern era, fifteen years after William Shakespeare had gone to his grave. No wonder Shakespeare wrote of Muslim warriors and of Islam’s gargantuan navies in his play about a converted Muslim general, Othello[706].
There’s much more that we forget. We forget that for 1,094 years—from 711 AD[707] to 1805 AD[708]—much of the Mediterranean was an “Islamic Lake,”[709] a private sea that Christians sailed at their peril. We forget that the forces of Islam gathered over 300 warships and close to 30,000 fighters for just one epic Mediterranean battle against the combined navies of Christendom, 1571’s Battle of Lepanto. It was one of the very few sea-borne showdowns the Muslims lost.[710] And we forget that a mere six months later, the followers of the one true prophet took their revenge and chased the Christian fleet back to its homeports.
We forget that Islam’s naval guerrilla raiders preyed on Mediterranean commercial shipping, capturing, enslaving, and chaining Europeans like Miguel Cervantes—the author of Don Quixote—to the oars of their galleys.[711] We forget why the Muslim “corsairs” could afford to pounce at will. To quote the Wikipedia, the Empire of Islam “made the entire coast of the Mediterranean from the Straits of Gibraltar to Croatia and Slovenia–––two thirds of its total shoreline–––a nearly unbroken stretch of” Muslim “territory more than ten thousand miles long.”[712]
We forget that back on land Mohammed’s militant followers were just as successful. We repress the brutal fact that until 1826 the rulers of the Islamic empire forced Christian parents in Albania, Serbia, Greece, and Hungary to give up their male children to Muslim overlords, who brought up these ten-year-olds on the Quran, killed the kids who would not accept Islam, then turned the remainder into crack Muslim soldiers known as Janissaries.[713]
We forget what Islamic historian Dr. Mohsin Farooqi makes plain when he reminds his fellow Muslims that from roughly 1530 to 1780, in his opinion, “Europe [was] under Muslim Rule”—the rule of what Farooqi calls with great pride a reign of “terror of Muslim invaders”[714].
And we forget that militant Islam’s 1,200-year-long imperialist push landed it more of the world than Mohammed had ever heard of. Islam colonized Africa’s Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Uganda, and Ghana. Islam swallowed all of Spain, took Eastern Europe’s Bulgaria,[715] Albania, Serbia,[716] Macedonia,[717] Bosnia, and Herzegovina.[718] Muslim armies seized and held the birthplace of Zoroastrianism—Iran. As we’ve seen, it grabbed the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism, India. Militant Islam also bagged the South Caucasus,[719] Asia’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, Dagestan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Kyrgistan, and Uzbekistan. Militant Islam invaded China’s Xinjiang Province and snatched the Pacific Rim islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, Sumatra, Aceh, Brunei, and parts of the Philippines. That means militant Islam gripped and still holds over 15,000 islands on the seas east of China.
Modern Western Imperialism is a blip by comparison. Western Civilization is extraordinary at expanding human powers with computers, cellphones, and satellite TV. But outside of the Americas, it’s been a failure as a top predator. Most of the heavy-handed European and American imperialism in the Middle East, the “oppression at the hands of an expansive imperial power” [720] that’s so resented by today’s Arabs began less than a century ago, after the First World War. Syria was only under Western control for 21 years, and Egypt for 67. On the other side of the scales, Southern Spain remained under the Muslim yoke for 781 years, and Christian Greece was under Muslim dominion for 381. More important, St. Augustine’s North African homeland, the Christian monastic movement’s birthplace, Egypt, and the capital of Christian Eastern Orthodoxy, Constantinople, are still in Muslim hands today.
Mohammed generated a radically new and ravenous social learning machine. The achievements of the Prophet’s militant followers showed that that heavily armored collective intelligence—a totalitarian military dictatorship shored up by a religion and endowed by its founder with planet-spanning ambitions—could work wonders. It could create a superorganism that persists for fourteen centuries in its global aspirations, a superorganism that fights for fourteen centuries to “liberate” its fellow humans and to bring them the “truth” of the legal, political, military, and religious system dictated to Mohammed by God Himself.
Why was Islam so rip-roaringly successful? Because to Islam’s militants, slaughter and pillage—earmarks of the top predator strategy—have often been a mark of holiness and virtue. They’ve been hallowed by the Founder Effect. They follow the examples set by Mohammed. They obey the Prophet’s order to “instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” [721] And they carry out God’s commandment to bring the one true belief to all the world, God’s commandment to take control of all humanity and its property on behalf of a hungry meme.
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The result has been the longest world war in history…a nearly 1,400-year-long planetary struggle that subsides for a century or two, then flares up again on a frontline 17,000 miles wide—from the Philippines, Thailand, Kashmir, India, Chechnya, Dagestan, Bosnia, and Kenya, to South Africa, Nigeria, the Sudan, Algeria, Israel, Paris, London, Madrid, Trinidad, Amsterdam, Washington, and New York.
Militant Muslims view the world very differently than you and I do. We divide the world into North and South, developed and underdeveloped, rich and poor. Long ago, Medieval Muslim scholars also divided the world into two zones, Dar el Islam (the abode of Islam) and Dar el Harb (the abode of war).[722] The abode of Islam was the Arab homeland and the conquered territory whose spirit had been broken and whose inhabitants had submitted to life under the yoke of Islam. The abode of war was the land of the unbeliever, the land of those who had not yet been terrified, overwhelmed, beaten, and converted to utter submission, to the state described by the literal meaning of Arabic word “Islam.”
These two territorial spheres, explained the Muslim scholars, are in a state of perpetual combat.[723] The very words “Dar al-Harb” mark the land of the unbeliever—your land and mine—as a battle ground. They literally say that the territory of those of us who do not submit to Islam is the abode of bloodshed until the day of judgement.[724] A Muslim statesman is only allowed the temporary expedient of peace with us infidels if his forces are not yet strong enough to beat our pants off.[725]
If you and I refuse to believe that there is only one god, Allah, and that Mohammed is his prophet, we set ourselves up for preemptive war. As Maulana A. S. Muhammad Abdul Hai writes, “where ever a danger to Islam emerges, it should be curbed before it could galvanize itself into a big force against Islam. Islam is a system of life, a complete code of life and to safeguard it, it is not enough to defend [it] in case of an attack by the anti-Islamic forces. Rather, it is also essential to make efforts to undermine anti-Islamic systems, to establish Islam…to plunge into the arrays of [the] enemy to remove their threat. That is why the Holy Prophet… said, ‘Now it will not be so that people attack us, rather we will come out to attack them.’”[726]
Preemptive war is a strategy the United States employed in its second Iraq War. It’s also a strategy the Spanish, the French, and the English used in conquering the New World and that the Dutch, the Portuguese, and the English used when they grabbed a slew of Pacific islands from their Islamic masters starting in roughly 1602[727]. It’s a strategy the U.S. may well employ again in response to Iran’s nuclear threat. But it is not a strategy we invented. Militant Islam beat us Westerners to preemptive war by 876 years.
In reality, the fourteen-century long struggle of Islam against the unbelievers is a battle of mass minds, of emergent collective intelligences testing their powers against each other. One uses the strategies, structures, and beliefs dictated by Mohammed. The other now uses a secular meme scheme fashioned a mere two centuries ago in the Age of Enlightenment, in the days of the American Revolution, and in a series of bloody meme-driven internal wars—Europe’s revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. How long will it take before this competition produces a clear winner? That we shall have to see.