CITAP: Muhammad Part 5

If all land belongs to Allah, as Muslims claim, why does he need humans to do his dirty work to claim it?

The answer is obvious: Allah is just a rock idol in the middle of the desert. He can’t even act as a paperweight unless someone were to first lift him up.

As stupid as Muhammad was, he did comprehend Allah’s impotence. Thus, he knew that he wouldn’t get very far with his religion unless he could motivate men to fanaticism.

Thus, Muhammad developed a two-pronged approach. First, if his men conquered, his men got spoils of war, with Muhammad usually claiming one-fifth for himself. But if his men died while in battle to further Islam, they would be granted an express ticket into heaven, and they’d be granted a heavenly brothel of 72 virgins in addition to the usual heavenly reward.

The Islamic heaven also has music and wine, which is interesting considering that those are among the many things that Muhammad’s religion forbids on earth. Kind of makes me wonder whether the Islamic heaven also has bacon and beer.

The Islamic heaven obviously sounds more carnal than spiritual, but it does motivate carnally-minded half-wits to go out to battle to further Islam. Though that Muslims themselves want a way out of their own religion’s suffocating strictures, mind-numbing ritual, and ridiculous legalism probably has something to do with it.

When you understand this, you know why Muslims are so fanatical about spreading their religion. As they see it, they get something even if they die trying.

And so it was with the first Muslims. With Medina now under Muhammad’s control, Islam’s expansionist push can gain serious traction.

Basically, any nearby city that Muhammad could conquer, he did. And he considered caravans to be fair game.

Interestingly, he would make a peace treaty with the Meccans, a few years after his flight from there. But it was a treaty that he would eventually break. As part of the treaty, Muhammad would put aside his prophet status in his dealings with the town. As we’ve already seen with the Satanic Verses incident, Muhammad was certainly willing to put aside significant aspects of his identity if it meant he stood to benefit.

One of the towns that he did attack was Khaybar, which was not at war with the Muslims. The Muslims snuck up on them and took the town by surprise. Like with the Banu Qurayza, many of the men were slaughtered and women, boys and girls were taken as slaves. However, Muhammad allowed some of them to live as long as they payed tribute.

And I’m sure that many Muslims today claim that they were done a favor, just by being kept alive.

If you border anything Islamic, you have to stay alert. There’s an expression: The Islamic world has bloody borders.

If you have any doubt that Muhammad was motivated by money, consider that a Khaybar treasurer was tortured because he was suspected of hiding treasure from Muslims. Muslims set a fire on his chest until he confessed, and said where the treasure was hidden. He was then beheaded and his wife was raped by one of Muhammad’s men. Then the woman was immediately made to marry the monster himself.

Never lose a war against Muslims. Being killed by them is better than being captured by them, and to die is better than seeing the kind of world they want to bring about.

Muhammad played fast and loose with his treaty with the Meccans, especiallywhen he wanted a pretext to attack them. This came when a tribe allied with the Meccans attacked a tribe allied with the Medinans. So, in he marched, treating his hometown as he did others.

With Mecca under Muhammad’s control, he set out to destroy all the rock idols of the Kaaba, except for the black stone that represented his god. Because in Muhammad’s book, idolatry is bad, except for the idolatry he considered halal. Also, he would ban anyone who wasn’t Muslim from Mecca, a ban which Muslims honor to this day.

As Muhammad gained more power for himself, he required less justification for attacking neighboring towns and cities, and just attacked them to expand his growing empire. Many of those attacked simply converted in an effort to avoid Muhammad’s wrath.

Muhammad also had people assassinated if they criticized or satirized Muhammad. If there’s one thing a tyrant hates, it’s being satirized. That’s because that’s their weakness. A tyrant inspires fear in an effort to control people. If they are ridiculed, the fear goes away, and the control along with it. European kings understood this, which was why they preferred not to execute their own jesters, knowing the bad optics that could come from doing so, instead granting them permission to ridicule even the king, if desired.

One person who was assassinated had a nursing child pulled from her right before killing her. Another was killed by multiple Muslims, so Muhammad decided that the one who got the killing blow had to be the one whose blade still had traces of food the victim had previously consumed.

Muhammad reportedly laughed so hard at the account of one assassination that his back teeth could be easily seen, in case you wondered at the kind of thing that he found funny. It’s easy to see why he kept company with assassins rather than jesters.

However, Muhammad faced financial problems. It seems as though the funds raised from conquered non-Muslims, such as in Khaybar, were far greater than the relatively small tax collected from Muslims.

What would Muhammad do? Go out conquering, that’s what. But having become the undisputed king of Arabia in about a decade, where would he go?

Muhammad set his sights on the Byzantines and the Persians. He sent out notices that they convert to Islam, or else. They pretty much declined, so the Muslims attacked them.

One could almost pity them. It’s as though they had no idea what else they could do.

However, because the civilizations just outside Arabia were far more developed, they did a much better job at repeling the Islamic invaders. The invasions of the surrounding cultures would be measured in centuries, rather than days, weeks, or years.

Islam would provide a strategy: send wave after wave of young men, who would die in the meat grinder of war in all the time it would take to conquer.

That sounds like a bad strategy, and it is. But the Islamic world could feed into it.

Fecundism describes the practice of encouraging high birth rates, usually to the end of increasing political influence held by ethnic groups, but it can be used for other purposes.

The high birth rates among Muslims is due to a discouraging of birth control, and also due to polygamy.

Where polygamy is practiced, it heavily favors high-status males. In Islam, men are permitted up to four wives. Assuming the most affluent 25% of men marry 100% of women, that would mean that three-quarters of the men wouldn’t know a day of marriage.

But Islam tells them about a way out: die in battle furthering Islam, for 72 heavenly virgins. Considering that their religion doesn’t give them any earthly hope, this is quite a motivation.

And if 75% of the male population were to be wiped out in war, they’d be quickly replaced as the surviving 25% continually impregnate their multiple wives.

It’s been estimated that, due to the prevalence of polygamy, two-thirds of all men who have ever lived have never married. Not only would Islam have been a significant contributor to this statistic, it also means that many of those men lived brief, heavily-indoctrinated lives which ended in a violent and sustained push to expand the worst religion to have ever been imagined.

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2 thoughts on “CITAP: Muhammad Part 5

  1. Pingback: CITAP: Muhammad Part 4 | Magnetricity

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