The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (27 page)

According to medieval historian K.S. Lal
⁶⁶³
, a total of 80 million Hindus died or were converted at the hands of Moslem 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, Moslem Arabs turned the African area of Mombassa 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 Moslem 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, Moslem 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 Moslem 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 Moslems 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 Moslem “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 9
^th
century Moslem 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 Moslems 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 Moslem 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 Moslem 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? [^^but most top predators—like the vikings and the Mongols of China—
did
accept the memes of the natives]

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 Moslem conquerors or converted by Moslem 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.

***

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.