The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (29 page)

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. [^^what about Napoleon’s conquest?] On the other side of the scales, Southern Spain remained under the
Moslem
yoke for 781 years, and Christian Greece was under Moslem dominion for 381. [^^get some of the more than a thousand year figures in here] More important, St. Augustine's North African homeland, the Christian monastic movement’s birthplace, Egypt, and the capital of Christian Eastern Orthodoxy, Constantinople, [^^get length of time in here] are still in Moslem 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.”
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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.

***

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 Moslems 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 Moslem scholars also divided the world into two zones, Dar el Islam (the abode of Islam) and Dar el Harb (the abode of war).
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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 Moslem scholars, are in a state of perpetual combat.
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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.
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A Moslem 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.
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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.’”
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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
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. 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.

.[^^put this up front and at the conclusion] 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.

"The same God, who has already given thee

so large a portion of the Roman empire, will not deny the remnant, and the capital [Constantinople]. His providence, and thy power, assure thy success; and myself, with the rest of thy faithful slaves, will sacrifice our lives and fortunes.”

Amurath

Vizier to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II
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“
Beware of the gold and silver of the Romans: in arms we are superior; and with the aid of God, and the prayers of the prophet, we shall speedily become masters of Constantinople.”

Mehmed II’s reply
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One lesson history is whispering to us involves the importance of multi-generational projects, projects designed to deliver their fruits in the time of our great-great-grandchildren and beyond, projects like those that slime mold evolved long ago.

This planet’s competition between collective intelligences—its clash of civilizations--now poses a critical question. Can one collective brain outrun others when it is obsessed with quarterly profits, exit strategies, isolation, overnight wins, and instant gratification? Can it be more nimble than its rivals if it fails to focus on long-term goals, very long long-term goals indeed?

Islam’s meme has proven to be an utter failure at producing wealth for the majority of its citizens in the 20
^th
and 21
^st
centuries.
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In fact, it’s lowered the standard of living in the Moslem Middle East to that of the world’s poorest portion of the globe—sub-Saharan Africa. But Islam’s focus is not short term. It zeroes in on long-term goals and on multi-generational projects—primarily long-term military projects. And in those, it has had overwhelming success.

As one
Al Qaeda Manual
puts it, the warrior of Jihad “should be patient in performing the work, even if it lasts a longtime.”
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And patient the forces of Islam have been. After the right to Jihad was revealed to Mohammed in 624 AD
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, one of the Hadith says, "The Prophet Muhammad was asked: 'What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya [Rome]?' He answered: 'The city of Heracles will be conquered first' -- that is, Constantinople.”
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For 776 years the Moslems then tried to take Constantinople.
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They began to strip the city of the bulk of its enormous empire within just 10 years of Mohammed’s death—in 642 AD. And they methodically nibbled at what was left for centuries. But Constantinople—the city--held firm.

Why was taking this one city worth so much multi-generational effort? Constantinople was the New Rome
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, the heir to the Empire of Rome itself. It was also the capital city of Eastern Christianity. Its emperor claimed to be in direct contact with God and to speak on his behalf to the entire world. His only rival as the voice of Christianity was a Roman who seemed poverty-stricken by comparison—the Pope. Ever since its fall to the barbarian Visigoths nearly a thousand years earlier, the Pope’s Rome had been half-deserted and had been stripping the marble from its ancient buildings and pavements to build new, far shabbier structures or to simply to make lime
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.

But Constantinople glittered with riches.
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The clothes of its leading citizens were woven with threads of gold. The dishes on which those leading citizens served formal dinners were gold as well. The chamber in which the Emperor deigned to see delegations of high-level visitors from lands as distant as the princedoms of a land newly established by the Vikings, Russia, had walls of gold many stories high, walls studded with the golden heads of mechanical lions and birds, heads that roared and sang.

The aisles of Constantinople’s churches were paved with silver.
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Constantinople’s artisans filled the city with ivory carvings of biblical themes, from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho. What’s more Constantinople was rich in export revenues. It had stolen the secret of silk-making from the Chinese, then had poured out silks of its own, exporting them at a mind-boggling price to kings, queens, and to the super-rich thousands of miles away. And Byzantine glass bottles and tiles were exquisite, world-famous,
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and fetched a pretty penny on the international luxury market.