CHAPTER TWO

To understand the secrets of the Koran we must begin by learning something of the life of the man who, according to Islamic history, originated it. His name was Mohammed.

The most commonly accepted year for Mohammed’s birth is A.D. 571. He was born in Mecca (sometimes spelled Makkah), a major center on a north-south caravan route roughly paralleling the Red Sea in western Arabia. Mecca also guarded the Ka’aba—a shrine sheltering 360 idols representing the 360 gods that various pagan Arab tribes worshiped.

Orphaned in childhood and raised by an uncle, Mohammed never became literate. Still, he worked his way up to managerial status in a Meccan caravan company owned by a wealthy widow, Khadija. He and Khadija married. Khadija was several years Mohammed’s senior, yet she bore him four daughters.

Early in the 600s, Mohammed began to follow the ways of Arab seers seeking spiritual enlightenment. He resorted to a cave on Mount Hira, near Mecca. Soon he claimed to be experiencing visitations from Gabriel, an archangel mentioned by Jews and Christians. Gabriel, he said, appeared to him on behalf of the same God that Jews and Christians worshiped. Mohammed called that God Allah.

This entity identified as Gabriel began explaining what Mohammed must do as a servant for Allah. He had to oppose the idolatrous worship of pagan idols wherever they were found—especially the idols in Mecca’s Ka’aba. Much to the displeasure of wealthy keepers of the Ka’aba, Mohammed proclaimed himself a prophet and began preaching vehemently against pagan idolatry. Eventually, in A.D. 622, Meccan hostility to his ardent monotheism forced Mohammed to flee with a few followers to Medina, another caravan stop located some 200 miles north of Mecca.

The few Meccans who fled with Mohammed were those who readily accepted, at face value, his claim that the God of the Jews and Christians had appointed him as a prophet for Arabs. Some Arabs who disbelieved Mohammed’s message did so because they quite frankly preferred to worship idols. Others simply demurred, saying in effect, “You claim to be a prophet like the prophets Jews and Christians believe in, but we Arabs have never had prophets like that, so we don’t know how to determine who is or isn’t [sent by God] to be that kind of a prophet. . . . But Jews know how to recognize that kind of a prophet. So if they confirm your claim, we will believe you. Otherwise, we retain our own beliefs.”1

Wanting to win followers in Medina faster than was possible in Mecca, the center of Arabian idolatry, Mohammed found himself burdened with an urgent public relations need to have Jews affirm his claim to biblical prophethood.

The relatively few Jews who resided in Mecca—less literate than their better-read compatriots in Medina—apparently preferred to leave judgment regarding Mohammed’s claims to the latter. Jews in Mecca—a tiny minority in that city—understandably preferred not to become embroiled in the festering “Mohammed problem.”

Jews in Medina, however—much to their later regret, no doubt—did find themselves increasingly pressured by curious Arabs in Medina to voice their opinions regarding the so-called prophet from Mecca.

The Problem of Finding Support for Mohammed’s Claims

In Medina, Mohammed offered his services to the city as an arbiter of disputes. In that role, he constantly sought to ingratiate himself with fellow Arabs and, at first, with the city’s sizable Jewish population.

Watching him arbitrate disputes, the Jews also observed Mohammed closely, looking for any signs that he had received prophetic gifting from God. The ability to work miracles would have been one proof, but Mohammed could not offer a single physical miracle as evidence of prophethood. In fact, passages in the Koran express his dismay over people who kept demanding miracles as support for his claims. Sans miracles, what else could Mohammed offer?

Demonstrating prowess in offering revelations confirming the Old Testament was very likely Mohammed’s only other way of impressing Medinan Jews. However, the Koran itself shows that his knowledge of the Jewish sacred books was shockingly deficient. Even what he claimed to be divine inspiration could not compensate for Mohammed’s personal lack of knowledge of Scripture.

A Glaring Omission

If the first 89 chapters of the Koran, compiled years later, offer any clues to the content of Mohammed’s early revelations, he probably treated the Jews in Medina to a narration he surely felt would spellbind them: the Exodus story! The Koran would later feature Mohammed’s renditions of Moses’ confrontation with the pharaoh, a ruler of ancient Egypt, 27 times in his first 89 chapters. In other words, Mohammed repeated that same story once every 3.3 chapters! It surely must have been one of his favorite pulpit pieces.

Alas, not even once in 27 tellings of the Exodus saga did Mohammed include the most integral component of the story: the Passover! How could the Jews accept as a prophet a man who—if he even knew about the Passover—had no sense of its importance?

More Gaps in Mohammed’s Knowledge

Omitting the Passover from the Exodus story was not Mohammed’s only lapse. The Koran would later reveal that he thought Adam and Eve sinned, not in an earthly garden, but in paradise. Mohammed had the erring couple cast to Earth only after they sinned (see Koran 7:19-24 or 7:20-25). Some Muslim translators try to veil his error by using the word “garden” instead of “paradise,” yet even they let the truth out a few verses later, when God, after the test, said to Adam and Eve, “Get you down . . . earth will for a while provide your dwelling” (Koran 7:24).

Mohammed further taught that Haman, a Persian in the Bible’s book of Esther, was an associate of the pharaoh in Egypt 900 years earlier in the days of Moses (see Koran 28:5-6,8). Of course to accept this Muslims must assume that a Persian name, Haman, was coincidentally also a male name in Egypt centuries later.

Mohammed also confused King Saul—mentioned in the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel—with Gideon who, in Judges 7:1-7, chose 300 warriors out of 10,000 men by observing how they drank water (see Koran 2:249 or 250).

M. Z. Khan translated the Koran with English rather than Arabic forms for the names of biblical characters, yet strangely replaces Saul with its Arabic spelling, Talut. Why? To hide Mohammed’s error from non-Arab speakers? M. M. Ali, another Muslim writer, argues that there were two different parties of 300 men each. His basis: Gideon’s men camped near a spring; Saul’s army drank from a river. But Judges 6:33 reveals that the Jordan River was nearby. Would Gideon have waited upon 10,000 men to drink from a mere spring or from a river?

A Whimsical Legend Canonized

Somewhere Mohammed heard a curious Jewish legend. Whoever concocted it claimed that when God gave the Law to Israel at Mount Sinai, Israel initially refused to promise to receive it. How did God compel them to obey and open their eyes? He lifted the entire mass of Mount Sinai up from Earth and held it in the sky above the camp of Israel. Thinking God was about to drop the mountain on their heads, Israel quickly relented!

How startled Medinan Jews must have been to find Mohammed treating one of their legends as a valid part of Old Testament Scripture.2 How could Mohammed expect Jews to accept his “revelations,” riddled with these and numerous similar outright errors, as confirming the Old Testament? More to the point: How could he continue offering erroneous renditions of Old Testament stories in a city where literate Jews would be forever correcting his errors—probably even guffawing over them publicly?3

How did Mohammed respond to Jewish ridicule? He had three options: confess he was not a prophet, relocate to a city with no Jews or purge all resistant Jews from Medina. To his shame, Mohammed presaged the catastrophic choice another world leader would make centuries later—he chose to purge the Jews.

Troops of modern Muslim apologists, whitewash and brush in hand, strain their brains trying to justify the original minigenocide that Mohammed was about to unleash upon the Jews in Medina. They also try to disconnect his murders there from the numerous copycat atrocities that his followers, honoring his example, were to perpetrate down through the subsequent centuries of Islamic history.

I call them modern Muslim apologists because during most of the 1,400 years since Mohammed’s time Muslims have enjoyed such total control in North Africa and the Middle East that few people ever dared ask them to justify anything. Times are different now, and Muslims are trying to develop apologetic skills. But they have yet to encounter the full weight of critical investigation of which free Western minds are capable. In other words, the ground has just begun to warm up under Islam’s feet.

Some apologists label the horrors that were about to occur in Medina as a just defensive war against the Jews. Could it have been that? Repeatedly in the Koran, Mohammed criticizes some Jews for dismissing his claims, others for selling bits of their Scriptures “for a paltry price” (Koran 2:41) or for hiding Scripture from Arabs. Yet nowhere in the Koran does Mohammed accuse the Jews of a single act of physical aggression against him. In fact, a larger collection of Islamic literature—the hadiths— discloses that Jews in Medina taunted, criticized or opposed Mohammed and his followers on intellectual grounds, but there is no mention of any Jew threatening physical action.

Arabs in Medina were asking Jews for their honest evaluation of Mohammed. Medinan Jews were freely offering their opinions. Little did they know that exercising the freedom of speech they had always enjoyed prior to Mohammed’s arrival would seal the doom of many among them.

Still, before Mohammed could retaliate against Medinan Jews for causing him to lose face, he had to win the collusion of Medinan pagans, a majority of whom respected the Jews. To lull suspicion and buy time for plotting, Mohammed and the relatively few followers he had led from Mecca ratified a seemingly benign treaty with both pagans and Jews in Medina. It was called the Constitution of Medina. It granted to Mohammed the sole right to arbitrate disputes. It also bound all parties involved—Muslims, pagans and Jews—to peaceful coexistence.

Every rational person knew that someone—a Muslim, a pagan or a Jew—by accident, carelessness, human folly, drunkenness or in a fit of temper, would eventually do something that violated the treaty. When a breach finally happened, everyone would expect Mohammed, the arbiter, to step in, adjudicate the wrong and preserve the peace. Little did anyone guess that Mohammed would bide his time, awaiting the day when a Jew would finally be found guilty of abusing the treaty. When that fateful day came, Mohammed would suddenly show no interest in arbitration. Instead, he would immediately declare the constitution horribly violated and exploit the offense of one Jewish person as a cassus belli against an entire community of Jews. Thus his appointment as de facto keeper of the constitution—a seemingly benign pact—would actually afford Mohammed leverage at a later time to avenge himself upon the Jews with an appearance of legality.

The fact that Medinan Jews signed the treaty confirms their willingness, at least at that stage, to trust Mohammed as an arbiter, if not as a prophet. They may even have hoped that keeping him occupied in politics might be good for him. Stir up a little political ambition, and maybe it would distract him from his other career, the one the Jews knew he was not cut out for: biblical prophethood.

But Mohammed was not about to devote more than a small portion of time to Medinan politics. Denied the public-relations advantage that Jewish endorsement for his claims would have brought—Mohammed turned to other enticements he was sure many pagan Arabs would relish: military prowess, plunder and sex.

Taking their swords, Mohammed and his band began venturing out from Medina as a base. They marauded caravans traveling between Mecca and Syria. For author Ibn Warraq, a former Muslim, Mohammed during this period was “no more than the head of a robber community, unwilling to earn an honest living.”4

Was Mohammed merely an Arabian Jesse James? Or was he something far more sinister? As quotes in the next chapter show, Mohammed distributed women and girls he captured on raids to be sex slaves for his male followers. He kept some for himself, of course.5 Otherwise reticent pagan men were thus enticed to become Muslims.

Of course some of Mohammed’s male followers would complain that if they were killed while marauding, they would not get to enjoy the promised extra sex. Unabashed, Mohammed was ready with a shameless retort that is still taken seriously by hundreds of millions of credulous Muslim men, even in today’s world.

In the Koran, he repeatedly redefines Judeo-Christianity’s heaven as an enormous God-owned bordello in the sky. In that heavenly brothel, loyal Muslim men—especially those paying the door price of martyrdom—would find a host of virgins, called houris, who would forever satisfy all their sexual cravings (see Koran 38:51; 44:54; 55:55-74; 56:22,34-36). In fact, sex with beautiful houris in heaven was guaranteed to be far more enjoyable than any sex Muslim men might miss by being killed while serving God or by trying to have promiscuous sex here on Earth.

If a follower complained sardonically that early martyrs would get to deflower all the virginal houris, leaving later Muslim martyrs with used goods, Mohammed had an answer for that as well. Rodwell’s translation describes the houris as “a rare creation . . . we have made them ever virgins” (Koran 56:34- 36). Ahmed Ali translates “God’s” description of the houris in the same passage: “Maidens incomparable. We have formed them in a distinctive fashion, and made them virginal.”

Muslim scholars tend to find a deeper meaning behind these words. One interpretation: heavenly houris are a rare, incomparable and distinctive kind of virgin precisely because, once deflowered, they become physically virginal again for the next sex act.

This gave Jews and any Christians living in Medina even more cause to feel appalled at Mohammed’s claim to biblical prophethood. For a male in Judaism, marrying one wife is the ideal. The idea of promiscuous sex, in this life or beyond, is abhorrent. As a guide for Christians, Jesus taught that people welcomed into God’s holy presence “will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25).

What happens to a married couple’s sense of the sanctity of their marriage if thoughts of future sex with houris keeps distracting the husband from cherishing his wife and the wife from enjoying her husband because she knows he’s thinking about them? For anyone who takes the Koran seriously, there is probably nothing more corrosive to true marital bliss than this bit of mischief.

Interestingly, I have not found anything in either the Koran or the hadiths that denotes angels as sexual beings. Yet fallen angels, i.e., demons (called jinn in Arabic), are clearly described as capable of having sex with houris. For example, Ahmed Ali’s translation of the Koran describes houris as “undeflowered by man or by jinn” (55:74).

How strange that Mohammed leaves Muslim men in heaven below the more exalted angelic state. Instead of blissfully worshiping God, casting their crowns at His feet, apparently Muslim men must spend eternity doing exactly what demons would do if given a chance: couple with one houri after another forever.

Ruthless enticement of the male sex drive, combined with the prospect of bountiful earthly plunder, soon brought a majority of Medina’s pagan men to Mohammed’s side. Indeed, the allurement of Mohammed’s promise of eternal sensuous pleasure in paradise could have a strange effect on male followers. Historian Maxime Rodinson recounts that an Arab man named Umayr Ibn al- Humam, hearing Mohammed promise immediate access to Paradise for anyone martyred in battle raging at the time, shouted:

“Fine! Fine! Have I only to get myself killed by these men to enter into paradise?” . . . Grasping his sword, [he] plunged into the thick of the battle and was soon killed.6

Umayr Ibn al-Humam was perhaps the first among uncounted thousands of death-courting Muslim martyrs who over centuries—and still today—mislay their faith on Mohammed’s pernicious fantasy. Thus do they waste the precious gift of life—their own and others’—even in suicide bombings.

Long-Term Side Effects of Mohammed’s Use of the Sex Lure

Islam’s strong cultural preference is to keep Muslim women and girls so completely covered that virtually nothing of their femininity is evident when they venture outdoors. In Saudi Arabia even a woman’s face and eyes must be veiled. Newsweek gave the world a shocking example of how rigid this obsession can be. For the full report, see Newsweek (July 22, 2002). Here is my summary:

In Mecca, a fire broke out in an intermediate school housing 750 Muslim girls. Every window was covered with iron bars to assure that no male prowler or lovesick boyfriend could ever steal in. Every door was locked. As girls rushed down a flight of stairs toward the only door that was used for exit/reentry, 15 were trampled to death and some 40 others injured. Alas, the one door was locked. The Muslim religious policeman who was supposed to be on duty to unlock the door in an emergency was off on an errand. Finally, someone managed to open the door and hundreds of terrified girls rushed into the street to escape the suffocating smoke and encroaching flame. In their hurry to escape, however, they did not have time to go to their rooms to get the obligatory head coverings they needed to venture out-of-doors. A score of Muslim religious policemen (called Mutawas), outraged at seeing bare-headed girls swarming openly in a public street, converged on the scene with one intent—to guard the decency of the community by forcing the girls back into the burning building! Thankfully the civic police had more sense. But they had to beat some of the Mutawas senseless to keep them from pursuing their fanatic goal of pushing girls back into the burning building just because males in the street might see their uncovered faces.7

Granting that some other cultures allow excessive public exposure of the female form, something at Islam’s beginning stimulated core Islam to its strong insistence on total covering. What could that have been?

Consider what must have been the social effect of Mohammed’s constant bandying of the promise of increased sex with extra wives and female slaves in this life plus even more and better eternal sex with bevies of virgins in paradise. Understandably, pagan Arab men, snagged into Islam by this almost irresistible lure of sex, had sex on their minds even more than before their “conversions.”

This presented a dilemma. No Muslim man wanted his own wives and daughters to become objects of so much increased male sexual desire in the general community. So Muslim men felt obliged to cover and even hide their wives and daughters from view even more than pagan Arab culture originally required. What began as a practical safeguard soon became an entrenched cultural imperative.

The Problem of Female Genital Mutilation

Islam’s widespread practice of amputating the clitoris and sometimes part or even all of the vulva from the genitalia of Muslim women, affirmed in a hadith by Mohammed himself, most likely also traces back to the founder’s deliberate abuse of sex to lure pagan males into his cult.8 The more the male sex drive is purposefully aroused, the more the female sex urge may have to be proportionately suppressed, lest orgiastic hell begin to spread.

Consider then what frequently happens when even a modestly clothed young Western woman walks alone in broad daylight down a street in, for example, a non-Westernized area of a city in Pakistan. Muslim men around her can see her face, hair and neck—maybe even her ankles. Some of them perceive that much exposure as intent on her part to arouse them. The fact that she is not accompanied by a male relative confirms their suspicions. Knowing that she, a Western woman, has not been subjected to that cruel amputation which Islam forces upon millions of Muslim women, some males may even imagine that she must feel sexual desire for them.

They tend also to perceive themselves as not responsible to exercise decent social restraint. Rather she is responsible not to tempt them! Whatever lewd thing Muslim men around her say, do or feel as a result is regarded as her fault alone.

Little wonder that thousands of Western women in such situations have complained of being groped, leered at and insulted. In major cities of Malaysia and Indonesia, where cultures mix, such problems are less likely, but if rioting breaks out in Indonesia, the world’s most populous predominantly Muslim nation, anything can happen, even in a major city.

During a major upheaval in Indonesia in the late 1990s, sex-crazed Muslim men gang-raped dozens of Chinese women in shops, homes and even in the streets, shouting in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!).9

Author Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor exceeds even Betty Mahoody’s Not Without My Daughter in documenting the horrors that women frequently experience in the Middle East. Goodwin records hundreds of instances of Muslim women beaten into submission, harassed in their homes and even subjected to public molestation. For example:

Working women in Cairo have long complained of being sexually assaulted on buses by men who take the opportunity of rare proximity to the opposite sex to knead, rub and fondle female commuters. . . . Since being manhandled is so shameful [to report] decent women suffer in silence rather than be accused of having encouraged the man.10

Goodwin then writes of Shahinaz, a young woman raped on a bus in Egypt: “Fundamentalists began saying it was the girl’s fault. She was wearing a skirt . . . not a hijab. The media also began to blame her. . . . Even women said it was her fault . . . she was working, not staying at home.”11 Still, Goodwin lacks the awesomely needed courage to lay the blame for such horrors right where it belongs—on Mohammed, the Koran and Islam. Millions of modern media people are like doctors describing horrible symptoms but failing to identify the virus.

Consider another symptom traceable to the same virus: The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2002, on page A4, reported a strange example of the perception of justice in a Muslim tribal area of Pakistan. I summarize: A male youth was seen walking beside a girl from another tribe. A local tribal council ruled that this outrage had to be punished, but no one handed the young man over to Pakistan’s civic police to be punished by civil law. No, this “crime” was deemed an offense against Muslim Sharia law and against the dignity of those offended. A local council of elders decided to punish the young man by decreeing that his 18-year-old sister be gang-raped. Apparently the sentence was carried out. Pakistan’s civic police reportedly were seeking to arrest the rapists. There seemed to be no mention of arresting the elders who decreed the boy’s punishment.

In later chapters I explain more of the dire effect Mohammed’s teachings have had upon women. Now back to Mohammed’s buildup for a day of vengeance against Jews in Mecca.

The Battle of Badr

The larger Mohammed’s force became in Medina, the bolder he grew in shattering the previously existing peace by raiding caravans moving to or from Mecca. One day Mohammed, en route to raid a caravan, was intercepted by an armed force from Mecca near a well called Badr.

Mohammed’s 330 fighters defeated the larger Meccan force, killing 49 men. Sir William Muir and Rodinson opine that the Meccans, recognizing some of their own clansmen in Mohammed’s contingent, lost the battle because they did not have the heart to kill relatives.12 Mohammed, on the other hand, constantly taught his followers that loyalty to Islam overrode all other human bonds (see Koran 9:23-24; 58:22-23). Thus his men did not hesitate in battle, even when swinging the sword at Meccans whom they recognized as relatives.

An omen of deepening moral darkness fell that day. Someone cast the severed head of a slain Meccan at Mohammed’s feet. Ibn Warraq describes Mohammed’s response: “It [the severed head] is more acceptable to me than the choicest camel in all Arabia.”13

Researchers overwhelmingly agree: Mohammed’s victory at Badr enhanced his ability to believe (some imply to feign belief) in his own claim to prophethood. It also encouraged him to think that his plan to wage war against the sizable number of Jews in Medina was closer to fulfillment.

Having shattered the peace between Mecca and Medina, Mohammed next set out to destroy the commendable concord that Arabs and Jews in Medina had enjoyed for centuries.

The wolf was in the fold.

Mohammed knew he could not attack Medina’s Jews without the complicity of Arabs who had long lived as their neighbors. Riding a wave of heightened prestige after his victory at Badr, he still needed a way to test if he could murder Jews without triggering a reaction of horror among Medinan Arabs. Arab public conscience, though pagan, was still too moral to be Mohammed’s ally. It was an enemy he had to degrade.

Mohammed found a way to keep measuring how much mind control he had achieved among Medinan pagan Arabs. After the Battle of Badr, he began ordering a series of heinous assassinations of individual Arabs. If Arabs could bear to see a few of their own people slain for offending him, surely they were not far from consenting to the wholesale slaughter of Jews for the same reason.

The self-proclaimed prophet’s first victim was a hapless Meccan named al-Nader—killed because “he had scoffed at Mohammed . . . and told better stories than the prophet himself.”14

His next prey was Ocba, a captive taken at Badr. Ocba, about to be slain, asked:

“And my little girl. Who will take care of her?” “Hellfire!” exclaimed the Prophet; and on the instant the victim was hewn to the ground. “Wretch that thou wast!” [Mohammed] continued, “and persecutor! Unbeliever in God, in his Prophet, and in his Book!”15

Al-Nader and Ocba were Arabs—from Mecca, not Medina. To see if he could order an actual citizen of Medina slain without triggering repercussions, Mohammed turned with lethal malice, not to condemn a man, but a woman.

An Arab poetess named Asma bint Marwan wrote couplets chiding Arab men of Medina for gathering like seduced women around the treacherous stranger from Mecca. She likened them to “men greedy for meal soup when it is cooking,”16 perhaps referring to their hope of gaining plunder and sex slaves via Mohammed’s continuing raids. When her poem was read to him,

Muhammed said aloud, “Will no one rid me of this daughter of Marwan?” There was a man present who belonged to the poetess’s clan . . . Umayr ibn Adi . . . that very evening he went to the poetess’s house. She was sleeping with her children about her. The youngest, still at the breast, lay asleep in her arms. [Umayr] drove his sword through her, and in the morning he went to Muhammad. “Messenger of God,” he said, “I have killed her!” “You have done a service to Allah and his Messenger, Umayr,” was the reply.17

Rodinson’s and Warraq’s sources have the murderer asking if he should fear retaliation. Mohammed, apparently knowing that Asma’s outnumbered clan could not risk a blood feud, assured Umayr that not even two goats would bother to butt heads over Asma’s murder.18

Outnumbered and apparently terrorized into abject submission, Asma’s entire clan, Banu Khatma, converted to Islam. In the history of Islam, Muslim teachers tend to interpret such a result as justifying the crime that led to it. This is one of radical Islam’s rationalizations for terrorism—slaughter a few; reap the conversion of many.

One month after Asma was murdered, another of Mohammed’s accomplices killed another Arab poet who had dared to criticize Mohammed: 100-year-old Abu Afak.19

The indefensible absence of Arab public protest to these outrages persuaded Mohammed that he could at last begin to move against Medinan Jews. Their knowledge-based criticisms stung him far more gallingly than intuition-based barbs from Arab poets. As keeper of the constitution mentioned earlier, Mohammed needed a default on the part of the Jews—a default he could use to justify retaliation.

A foolish Jewish goldsmith of the Banu Qaynuqa clan gave Mohammed exactly the excuse he needed. The goldsmith publicly embarrassed the wife of a Muslim. Another Muslim overreacted by killing the goldsmith. The Jews killed the Muslim who killed the goldsmith. What would arbiter Mohammed do to restore the peace?

Nothing.

The man who until then had served Medina as an arbitrator decided to drop the “arbi” and become just a traitor. In violation of his appointed duty, he in effect declared the Constitution of Medina no longer valid and attacked the Banu Qaynuqa Jews.

Why didn’t the arbitrator arbitrate instead of laying siege?

Scores of Muslim apologists—and some naive non-Muslim scholars who take Muslim scholars’ word on almost anything—claim that Medinan Jews were guilty of aggression against Mohammed and justly needed to be opposed. But they supply no examples—beyond the Jews’ very justifiable intellectual confrontation.

Some scholars claim that Jews were about to attack Muslims physically. Shouting in denial stand two striking facts: First is that Medina’s other two Jewish clans did not rush to take sides with the one that Mohammed chose to attack. Common sense would have dictated opposing him in unison if in fact it was their plan to physically oppose him at all.

Second, when an army from Mecca responded to Mohammed’s caravan raiding and to the loss at Badr by attacking Medina itself, several thousand Jews uprising within the city would have given Mecca the victory. That occasion—called the Battle of the Ditch—was a day of golden opportunity for the Jews if in fact they were plotting against Mohammed. Why did they not exploit it? Clearly they had no military plan. They were merchants who wanted peace.

Fifteen days later, cut off from supplies of food, the Banu Qaynuqa surrendered. Mohammed planned to slay every Jewish male, but a sufficient number of Medinan Arabs objected to so utterly cruel a plan. So Mohammed settled for evicting all Banu Qaynuqa families from their homes, even from their own hometown.

With only what they could carry, Qaynuqa Jews fled on camel or on foot toward Christian Syria. Muslim despoilers looted the goods that remained and claimed all Banu Qaynuqa homes and land. Mohammed himself took one-fifth of everything.20

Next to die by assassination was another poet, Kab ibn al-Ashraf.21 Mohammed then ordered, “Kill any Jew you are able to kill.”22 Muhayyisa, a Muslim, responded by killing a Jew named Ibn Sunayna.

Victory over the Banu Qaynuqa brought Mohammed to a second phase of his plot to extinguish Jewish freedom of thought and speech in Medina. He attacked, defeated and banished the wealthy Nadir. Their riches, houses and lands made Mohammed even more financially secure. Two years later and in another location Mohammed massacred the Nadir anyway.

Finally, Mohammed besieged the last major Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayza. Warned that Mohammed this time wanted blood, not banishment, the Jews offered to surrender on condition that their fate be decided by the one group of Medinan Arabs that Mohammed had not yet totally seduced—the Banu Aws. At worst, the Jews must have thought they would be banished from their homes, as were the two other Jewish clans.

It was not to be.

How the Banu Qurayza must have regretted that they and the second clan expelled had not sided with the Banu Qaynuqa when Mohammed launched his first attack. Apparently there was no Winston Churchill-like leader to warn the three Jewish clans: “If we do not hang together, we will each hang separately.”

Refusing the Banu Aws as mediators, Mohammed feigned compromise by appointing Sa’d, an Arab who was secretly Mohammed’s accomplice, to decide the fate of the third Jewish clan. Sa’d waited until all the Banu Qurayza men gave up their weapons. Then, as Sa’d knew Mohammed required, he ordered every Jewish man beheaded.

Multiple unabashed Muslim sources varyingly describe Mohammed himself presiding over the beheading of at least 500 Jewish men, five at a time.23 Their bodies were buried in a long ditch. Other Muslim sources place the number of Jewish men slain as high as 900. Their wives and daughters became sex slaves for Muslim men. Jewish boys not needed for labor (or old enough to perhaps desire later to avenge the fate of their parents) were sold for profit. Mohammed seized Rihana, widow of one of the Jews he had slain, and forced her to be one of his concubines.24 Thus did Mohammed validate the Jews’ refusal to accept him as a prophet—then and forever!

These are just a few of the violent deeds that form the context of 109 war verses in the Koran. Historian Bat Ye’or asserts: “During his Medina period, Mohammed undertook no less than thirty-eight raids.”25

Notes

1. Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p 161.

2. I can only wonder if Mohammed’s subsequent advocacy of the use of force to compel conversion to Islam, Koran 2:257 notwithstanding, can be traced back to his mistaking this peculiar legend for an accurate description of divine behavior.

3. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 185.

4. Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 92.

5. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 196; Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 96.

6. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 167.

7. Paraphrased from Newsweek (July 22, 2002), n.p.

8. Jean Sasson, Daughters of Arabia (London: Bantam Books, 1994), p. 207.

9. “Chinese Woman Forced to Watch Gang Rape and Burning Death of Her Sisters,” June 1998, colorq, http://www.colorq.org/humanrights/indonesia/Jakarta.htm (accessed August 25, 2002).

10. Jan Goodwin, Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence on the Islamic World (London: Warner Books, 1998), p. 339.

11. Ibid.

12. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 167.

13. Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 93.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., p. 94.

18. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 174; Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 94.

19. Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 94.

20. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 174; Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 94.

21. Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 94.

22. Ibid., p. 95.

23. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 213; Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 96.

24. Rodinson, Muhammad, p. 213.