Muhammad did not invent monotheism. The Jews had been worshipping a single god for centuries, so had the Christians. The Pharaoh Akhenaten in Egypt's eighteenth dynasty had put a single sun deity at the centre of worship two thousand years before Muhammad.
Monotheism makes totalitarianism and intolerance much easier. If there is a single god then only one way of doing things is right, so people can be judged quickly and easily as good if they are believers or thoroughly evil if not. Monotheism is probably responsible for more human suffering than any idea ever thought up by man, with the possible exception of the idea that faith is a virtue, but we can't blame Muhammad. Whatever his myriad faults are originality of thought is not one of them. I have been racking my brains for a few days trying to come up with any original thoughts invented by Muhammad but I have drawn a blank.
Muhammad did not invent slavery. Slavery had been universal across Africa, Asia and Europe for as long as anybody knew. Slavery was considered to be totally normal. We can't blame Muhammad for inventing slavery. However we can say that he thoroughly endorsed the practice and engaged in the trading, keeping and taking of slaves himself. It is absurd to think that somehow slavery, which we acknowledge to be profoundly evil could somehow have been perfectly reasonable at another time in another place. This is nonsense. Simple human empathy tells us very clearly that we would not want to be enslaved and so we should regard making, keeping and trading of slaves to be totally abhorrent. If we were introduced to a man who lived in the desert who traded slaves we would not show him respect, we would be right to be seeking his arrest and that was not possible then we should consider the possibility of killing him if that would lead to the freeing of slaves. Slavery is in some ways a very clear black and white issue: slavery is wrong, no ifs or buts, and anybody who is involved with it deserves the maximum legal penalty available, after a fair trail if it is practical to do so, but an active slaver needs putting out of business at once however this is achieved. |
an active slaver needs putting out of business at once however this is achieved |
Muhammad did not invent the practice of marrying very young girls. Men had been demanding virgin brides for centuries, and they had got them. A man's fear that his wife might be carrying another man's child, or that she would have experience of sex with another man so as to find her husband inadequate had long been a force in society which had led to the practice of marrying off very young girls. Muhammad married Aisha at the age of six, he watched over her until the age of nine when he took her into his household as his wife, with all that this normally entails. He did not invent the practice. This was what men did when they wanted a wife who had literally never even thought about having sex with another a man.
Of course it's barbaric and primitive, but it was not invented by Muhammad. He wasn't that original.
Ironically despite his best intentions Muhammad was not secure in his utter ownership of his child wife Aisha. She was accused of being unfaithful to him. Muhammad declared that Aisha was innocent after a convenient divine revelation and decreed that from then on all accusations of adultery (which includes rape) require four reliable witnesses, which of course means men. To this day women are being thrown into prison or even stoned to death in places where sharia law is applied for the sin of being raped without enough reliable witnesses.
The common claim that Muhammad was a paedophile is unfair, at least in the sense of a man who was particularly attracted to young girls, a man whose principle sexual orientation was to young girls. If this had been the case he could have had a lot more children in his tent. His first marriage was to an older widow, which lasted twenty five years during which time he had no other wife. Muhammad had something in the order of sixteen wives (it gets complicated when you look at concubines and slaves) and a large proportion of these were widows and older women. It seems Muhammad had only the one virgin wife, Aisha, his favourite and only child bride. The picture is not pretty, having sex with a child of nine is not something which can ever be excused, but it is clearly nowhere near as ugly as many rabid Muslim-haters try to make out. It also seems that Aisha did not come to any great physical or emotional harm, probably more through luck than judgement, as she had healthy children and they remained a loving couple until his death. As a matter of simple good husbandry you don't let the bull in with your heifers, both my grandfathers could tell me that, one from bitter experience. Just because a heifer is capable of getting in calf it doesn't follow that she can safely deliver. The statistics on the safety of childbirth among the under fourteens give strong support to the idea that marriage at the first hint of puberty is an extremely bad example for any potential role-model to set. You would have thought an Angel could have told him this.
Muhammad did not invent the ritual sacrifice of animals. The Hebrews had done it for thousands of years. Animal sacrifice was also done by many other civilizations, the Greeks did it too, but they also sacrificed pigs, a practice that the Hebrews didn't like because the sounds and smells of a sacrificial pig are too close to the sounds and smells of a sacrificed child. After all, it was only their refusal to sacrifice children which made the Hebrews stand out in any way among the other primitive bronze age semi-nomadic herders around the Middle East, they were not in any way that we recognize civilized, scientific, advanced or moral people. They were polygamous, genital-mutilating, animal sacrificing, women-oppressing, wine guzzling slave owners just like their neighbours, but they made their sacrifices only to the jealous god, so that was alright then, wasn't it?
Muhammad did not introduce animal sacrifice to Arabia as his tribe and many others had been sacrificing to their Pagan gods for centuries and the younger Muhammad himself had both sacrificed to pagan gods and eaten the meat of that sacrifice.
Muhammad did not invent homosexuality, paedophilia, pederasty, the oppression of homosexuals nor hypocrisy over homosexuality. He merely carried on the traditions of persecuting homosexuals while extolling boy love and offering the cheap promise of plentiful supplies of fresh young boys for those who would die fighting for his cause. What exactly does a martyr with 72 virgins need young boys for? The Qur'an is silent.
Muhammad did not invent the circumcision of boys. Neither did the Jews, who probably copied it from the Egyptians. Circumcision was carried out across large parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It is a strange barbarous practice, of little obvious merit and yet it survives very well, it seems that men who have been circumcised have to believe it was done for a good reason even if logically they know the reasons given by their parents are bogus. Perhaps there is simply too much cognitive dissonance in the idea that your parents who say they love you would amputate part of your genitals, without either consent or anaesthetic without there being a sound reason behind it somewhere, if only you could find it. Many circumcised men have devoted their lives to a retrospective justification for this barbaric practice. Time after time these excuses have been dismissed, time after time the circumcisers come back with new ones. The latest argument is that circumcision reduces the spread of Aids, a man with Aids will give it to almost every person he has vaginal or anal sex with whether he is circumcised or not but a circumcised penis is less effective at acquiring the virus in the first place. A bit less. Of course condoms give far more protection to the man and so much more protection to his partner that even to hint that such surgery is an effective option is bordering on the obscene.
Muhammad did not invent female circumcision either. This too was widely practised across Africa and Arabia before his time. Today the butchery of the genitals of young girls is widespread across Africa, practised by Muslims, practitioners of African traditional religions and Christians. Female Genital Mutilation is very common in Egypt and Ethiopia among Christians, it is nonsense to blame this on Muhammad.
However, female genital mutilation is now happening in Britain, and that is something we can blame Muhammad for. Of course it is thoroughly illegal to do such a thing to a girl and the law should deal with it as on a par with kidnap, rape and criminal mutilation. But it is a matter of cultural and religious sensitivity.
Cultural sensitivity be buggered. Anybody involved in this practice, including teachers and neighbours who fail to report it, should be charged with conspiracy to commit sexual assault and malicious maiming.
As far as it is physically possible to remove the potential for sexual pleasure from a woman with a bit of a sharp stone this is what they are trying to do. Calling it circumcision is a euphemism. It does not cut around the sex organs, it excises them. As a minimum the clitoral hood and the tip of the clitoris is removed. There is no tissue in the human body with as many touch-sensitive nerve cells in it as the tip of the clitoris. The only function of this tissue is to give sexual pleasure and to trigger orgasm. So to the mind of the control freak this has to go. A woman who enjoyed sex might want to do it, and if she wanted to do it she might want to do it with the wrong man. And if a woman had sex with the wrong man the sky might fall in.
Why would a god design something in order for it to be removed by people wielding chips of flint while holding down a struggling child? That is clear evidence that religion and gods are man-made. Men benefit from multiple wives who endure sex rather than enjoy it. Just men. There is no benefit to the woman at all, she has her potential for sexual pleasure removed and gains nothing in return, not even the respect of her husband, who regards her as his sexual property. I have come across Muslims trying to argue that female genital mutilation somehow protects woman against rape, how this is meant to work is beyond me.
I cannot hide my contempt for any man who would allow his daughter to be surgically altered in order to make her a more pliant and easily dominated wife. The whole concept is disgusting on so many levels.
As for the women who do this many of them buy into the lie that it is essential to curb "immorality". Just like Jewish doctors in the USA it is the victims of genital mutilation who so often go on to become the perpetrators of these assaults on children.
But as I said, Muhammad didn't invent this barbarity either.
In fact Muhammad didn't do much original thinking at all. He took a people who were child-marrying animal sacrificing polygamous genital mutilators who marched around a fallen meteorite using a crescent moon symbol for their goddess and he turned them into theocratic monotheistic child-marrying animal sacrificing polygamous genital mutilators who marched around a fallen meteorite and marched off to war under a banner of a crescent moon.
Muhammad stole the god of the Jews along with several of their prophets. He even stole their genealogy with the absurd claim that he was descended via Ishmael from Abraham.
Before he turned forty when he turned to propheteering for fun and profit Muhammad the merchant travelled quite widely and met Jews, Christians and Greeks, whose ideas emerged later in the inspiration he claimed to receive from Allah or the angel Gabriel. He also had companions who were Jewish and others who knew the beliefs of Christians. It is likely that Muhammad was epileptic, he died after complaining of head pains for several days and many accounts of him seem to suggest somebody whose brain activity was at times lightly fried. This may explain why information he had taken in over a lifetime of international business emerged in this form. On the other hand he might have been as much of a conscious fraud as convicted conman Joseph Smith the founder of Mormonism or L Ron Hubbard the founder and first CEO of Scientology. There's no way he can be dismissed as being too stupid or ignorant to have been deceitful, he might have been illiterate, or dyslexic, but he was obviously both charismatic and intelligent. Idiots don't build empires. They sometimes run them, the names Caligula and George W Bush spring to mind, but they never build them. Founding an empire requires talent, intelligence, application, often charisma and ruthlessness: just think about Hitler, that is the kind of man who builds an empire. No halfwit or ignoramus has ever founded a civilization or started an empire. The smarter a person is, the less likely it is that they didn't know what they were doing. Sincere holy man or cynical manipulative despotic charlatan? We will never know but how many people have a problem with that choice when thinking about L Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith? I suggest it is simply patronizing to suggest that people of that earlier era were more honest and too innocent to be manipulative. There is only ever the here and now, nobody believes that they live in the era when mythical heroes can do miraculous things.
From the Christians he stole the useful ideas of the afterlife, heaven, and hell. If you read the Old Testament you should notice that nobody before the time of Daniel thought for one moment that there would be any experiences at all beyond death. The Muslim version of the afterlife is taken clearly from the Christian version of those two places, with a suitable adaptation to the tastes of desert nomads: more emphasis on exotic water features and more sex.
Muhammad was a camel-mounted pirate, a warlord, a slave trader and the murderer of defenceless prisoners. His trial for crimes against humanity can stop there as he has done more than enough to justify a life sentence without prospect of parole. It really is not necessary to charge him with being a coward on the battlefield or being a paedophile and as far wiping his arse with his hand or drinking camel's piss we don't need to bother with such trivia. The briefest outline of his biography reveals that here is a man who invented a religion for his own benefit, a religion which has grown out of control due to the overkill of its own memetic ruthlessness. If we as a species wish to remain free we have to combat the spread of this dangerous religion.
It is not possible for a religion to arise which does evil and nothing more. Nobody would join it or bring their children up in it. Islam offered some improvements over the previous situation in pagan Arabia. The status of women improved, or so Muslims have claimed, they were no longer treated like field slaves to be whipped mercilessly, they rose in status to that of house slaves, to be patronized and whipped mercifully.
Muhammad also swept away much of the old order's rigid structures of class, he had some tendencies which you could almost describe as egalitarian. Not democratic socialist of course, let's not get carried away, but he did institute a taxation system which worked to alleviate absolute poverty. So, when you compare him to tyrants he stands alongside those tyrants who while conquering a lot of people, slaughtering his enemies, selling their children and raping their women did manage to do a few things to add to the positive side of the ledger. Like Alexander the Great, or Hitler, who loved dogs and built the autobahns and encouraged Germans to go on seaside holidays to the Black Sea. [To murder Jews.] But when you compare him to great spiritual leaders like Guru Nanak, Confucius, Laozi, Jesus or Buddha, well, he looks like a ruthless tyrant.
It is nonsense to declare than any bunch of ideas once discovered to be based upon unprovable superstitious bollocks thereby gains the status of a religion and so is automatically deemed to be A Good Thing and worth having in whatever amounts it is served up in. Religions vary from the Mostly Harmless such as Anglicanism to the hideously dangerous such as those which declare that all outsiders are an abomination and should be killed. While it is conceivable that a more overtly threatening religion could be devised which was even more hostile to the freedoms we hold dear in the western world than Islam it would almost certainly have to feature many of the dangerous elements collected by Muhammad the plagiarist.
Note:
The claim that the status of women improved under Muhammad is hotly disputed by many who say that the status of women went down under Islam. Women lost the right to own and control property. Muhammad's first wife, Khadijah, who was a wealthy widow and trader in her own right employed Muhammad before marrying him. Perhaps years of being the husband of one older wife who was wealthy and powerful in her own right contributed to his rather extreme treatment of women. It is difficult to give credence to the idea that the status of women before Islam could possibly have been so low that the Islamic rules would actually be an improvement, however the crux of my argument does not require Muhammad to be a paedophile, a coward or a misogynist, we already have more than enough evidence to convict him of being a mass murderer, armed robber and slaver trader as well as being the cynical creator of scriptures that he must have known were faked for his own convenience and personal aggrandizement.
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