Boreal
Remembering Uzza
If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub
A Strategic Massacre
Uzza:
After the Meccans lifted their siege of Medina, Muhammad went looking for those who had provided him with many of the shovels and implements with which he had dug the ditch that
apparently stymied the Meccans.
Bob: To thank them?
Uzza: No, to kill them!
Bob, Gerry: WHAT!
Bob: Why kill them? They had proven useful.
Gerry: And why did you say "apparently stymied" them?
Uzza: As mentioned earlier, it was the Arab way, before Islam, to try, in conflict situations, to avoid bloodshed, usually by a simple show of force.
Gerry: That would explain why the Meccans did not make a serious attempt to cross what Archie pointed out should have been a minor obstacle.
Uzza: And why the remaining Jews of Medina did not attack the believers while they were looking the other way.
Bob: Did the Jews finally put up a fight?
Uzza: There was no battle. Muhammad marched on their fortress just outside Medina with three thousand jihadists. When he neared the fortifications, he called out to its defenders: “O brothers of monkeys and pigs! Fear me, fear me.” This dehumanizing simian reference would make its way into the Koran[214].
Archie: Didn't Hitler do the same thing?
Uzza: Please no more comparisons to Mein Kampf.
Archie: Maybe Allah told His Messenger about evolution, the monkey part I mean that we are all descendants of monkeys.
Gerry: Don't be funny, this is serious. What happened next?
Uzza: Adopting that civilizing influence of the pre-Islamic Arabs of not fighting a losing battle to avoid bloodshed, the Jews asked for a negotiator. Muhammad sent Abu Lubabah. He matter-of-factly informed the assembled men and weeping women and children that he was the emissary of a man who had slaughter on his mind by pointing at his throat[215].
Bob: And they surrendered anyway?
Uzza: The holy warriors outnumbered the fighting men of the Banu Qurayzah by at least four to one. The Jews may also have counted on Muhammad's reputation for mercy.
Archie: After what he did after the Battle of Badr, that was wishful thinking.
Uzza: He did ransom most of the prisoners of Badr, and that may have given hope to the men who laid down their weapons and appeared defenceless with their wives and children before Muhammad, offering to go into exile and leave all their possessions for the believers to plunder at their leisure.
Archie: But that wasn't enough for the Prophet this time around, was it?
Uzza: Perhaps to protect a dubious reputation for mercy, Muhammad called upon one of the less than a dozen Muslim casualties of the Battle of the Ditch to decide the fate of the helpless, hapless Jews. The mortally wounded Sad bin Mu’adh could be counted upon to render the expected verdict, and he did, declaring that the men should be killed, and their wives and children parceled out among the believers to do with as they please[216].
Gerry: How did they determine who was old enough to die?
Uzza: Any boy who was unlucky enough to show signs of pubic hair was herded with the men next to a ditch Muhammad had dug in the marketplace. Then, he sat down to watch as, in orderly fashion, the more than 700 men and boys of the last Jewish tribe of Medina were beheaded[217], their decapitated bodies tumbling along with their severed heads into the ditch dug for the occasion.
Bob: Why did they dig another ditch? Couldn't they use the one that had already been dug to defend the place, or was it just not deep enough?
Uzza: Like the Islamic State at Raqqa, the marketplace or public square is where you carry out these types of executions, in part to demonstrate your ruthlessness. That is how it was done in the idealized time of Muhammad by kings and others who claimed to rule by divine right.
Archie: The ditch and lining up those you intend to murder on the rim so that they simply fall in or simply require a nudge after you have executed them reminds me of how the NAZIs processed the Jews of Poland and Ukraine; remember Babi Yar, before the gas chambers became available.
Uzza: HOLY WARRIORS ARE NOT NAZIs, they only do what God approves of. There is a difference!
Archie: If you say so.
Uzza: Those who kill in God's name are not like those who commit murder in a man's name.
Gerry: Sad was a man.
Uzza: Sad knew his duty as a believer, and that is to rid the world of those who will not submit to Allah's Will. He knew what it means to be a believer to the very end.
Archie: Doing what God would do if He were here, His own dirty work.
Bob: How do we know God approved of the mass execution of the men and boys of the last Jewish tribe of Medina?
Uzza: When Sad bin Mu’adh died later that day, Muhammad told the believers that Allah’s throne shook, so moved was God by the death of a man who had the courage to cold-bloodedly send His enemies to their death, and their wives and daughters into slavery. A revelation would follow making it official[218].
Archie: The Chosen People are actually God's enemies. You learn something new every day.
Bob: Allah doesn't sound much like the compassionate and merciful god I keep hearing about on TV.
Uzza: That is what the preachers want you to hear and believe. It is an insider joke.
Bob: An insider joke? I don't understand.
Uzza: The flattering invocation “In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful” headlines 112 of the 114 surahs of the Koran, and in hundreds of revelations, Allah unabashedly brags about His compassionate and merciful nature. But the joke is on those who cannot be bothered to read the Koran, for if they did, they would soon realize only the believers are entitled to Allah’s mercy and compassion, which He makes abundantly clear. If you had read the Koran, you would understand why Allah was impressed by Sad's decision and by anyone who kills unbelievers wherever they find them, and the more the merrier. If the West had understood this simple message as to whom Allah considers compassion-worthy, they would never have let the Islamists in. Mass public executions are about to become much more commonplace. There was a lesson to be learned in what happened to the Jews of Medina.
Archie: Yes, be careful who you welcome to stay with you because you think they are just like you.
Uzza: It is a lesson that was lost in the painting of Islam's violent history as a defensive struggle or as bringing peace to a supposedly violent region when it did exactly the opposite.
Bob: Even after the massacre, people still believed the Prophet to be a nice guy?
Uzza: News of the massacre spread like wildfire and like terrorist attacks today, led to a conversion bonanza. Many converted to Islam, not only because they believed that a man who would do such a thing could not be stopped, but to join in the general pillage of unbelievers’ property. All you had to say was “I declare there is no god except God,” and you could with impunity kill the men who refused to do so and abscond with their wives and their daughters for your troubles, and still be guaranteed a place in Paradise.
Gerry: What about the part about Muhammad being the Messenger of God?
Uzza: That would be added later.
Archie: You still haven't answered Bob’s question: why kill the Jews? Was it to instill terror?
Uzza: Probably not at this stage. It was killing them now or killing them later. Killing them now, when they were at his mercy, was the best strategy when you consider the mission Allah had given Muhammad.
Gerry: You mean the one about killing the unbelievers, even your friends and benefactors?
Uzza: The only friends of believers, Allah said, are other believers[219]. Believers who took unbelievers as friends, He warned, would join them in Hell on Judgment Day[220].
Gerry: Does that mean we can't be friends?
Uzza: For those who swear by the Koran, this is definitely the case.
Gerry: Then we can be friends, you and me that is.
Uzza: Yes.
Bob: [something dawns on Bob] I GET IT. The Prophet was about to go on the warpath and could expect that many of the Jews he had exiled would join the opposition. When put that way, the massacre actually makes sense.
Archie: To a sociopath maybe.
Uzza: Muhammad was committed to doing God’s Will and fighting and killing the unbelievers until everyone worshipped Allah and only Allah[221] or, if they were Christians or Jews, accepted Muslim suzerainty by humbly paying the Jizya. Whom you mistake for a sociopath was a man on a mission from God to make Islam the dominant religion[222] because God would not accept any other religion. By his ruthlessness − a sociopathic ruthlessness wholeheartedly sanctioned by Allah[223] − Muhammad saved thousands of his brethren from burning in Hell for an eternity. His example has probably saved billions over the centuries from a similar fate.
Archie: At least you admitted that the Prophet was a sociopath.
Uzza: I admitted to no such thing. Behaving like a sociopath in a god’s cause does not make you a sociopath.
Archie: It does where I come from.
Bob: Uzza, what did you mean by Muslim suzerainty? That can't be good!
Uzza: Muslim rule, as was the case in Spain during the Caliphate.
Gerry: Sam Harris, in a book he wrote about a conversation he had with a former radical by the name of Nawaz, said that "the vaunted peace of Andalusia is largely a fairy tale, first presented in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli and others who romanticized Muslim rule, [that] it was good only by comparison with the most murderous periods of medieval Christendom... [that] the general reality was a world absolutely suffocated by religious stupidity and violence.”
Uzza: I would not know.
Footnotes
2:65 And you surely know those of you who violated the Sabbath; We said to them: “Be [like] dejected apes.”
2:66 Thus We made that an example to their contemporaries and to those after them, and an admonition to the righteous.
7:166 Then, when they disdained arrogantly what they were forbidden, We said to them: “Be miserable monkeys.”
When they saw him (Lubabah), the men rose to meet him, and the women and children rushed to grab hold of him, weeping before him, so that he felt pity for them.
They said to him, “Abu Lubabah, do you think that we should submit to Muhammad’s judgment?”
“Yes”, he said, but he pointed with his hand to his throat, that it would be slaughter.
Tabari
Abu Lubabah would not be a witness to the result of his negotiations with the Jews. It was probably just as well. Abu Lubabah felt guilty that he had broken his promise of secrecy with Muhammad. To atone for his ‘misdeed’ he went straight to the mosque and bound himself with ropes to one of the pillars.
This pillar is known as the ‘pillar of repentance’ or the ‘pillars of Abu Lubabah’. Abul Kasem Lubabah spent six days chained to his pillar. He was freed by the Prophet after God's Messenger received the following revelation.
8:27 O you who believe, do not betray Allah and the Messenger, nor betray your trust knowingly.
Some people (the Banu Qurayzah) agreed to accept the verdict of Sad bin Mu’adh so the Prophet sent for him.
He came riding a donkey, and when he approached the Mosque, the Prophet said, "Get up for the best amongst you." or said, "Get up for your chief."
Then the Prophet said, "O Sad! These people have agreed to accept your verdict."
Sad said, "I judge that their warriors should be killed and their children and women should be taken as captives."
The Prophet said, "You have given a judgment similar to Allah's Judgment."
Bukhari, 58.148
The messenger of God commanded that furrows should be dug in the ground for the B. Qurayzah. Then he sat down, and Ali and al-Zubayr began cutting off their heads in his presence.
Tabari
33:26 And He brought those of the People of the Book who supported them from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts, some of them you slew and some you took captive.
33:27 And He bequeathed to you their lands, their homes and their possessions, together with land you have never trodden. Allah has power over everything.
5:55 Your only friends are Allah, His Messenger and those who believe, performing the prayer and giving the alms, while they bow down.
4:144 O believers, do not take the unbelievers for friends, instead of the believers. Do you wish to give Allah a clear proof against you?
[221] Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)"
Bukhari 52.196
48:28 It is He Who sent forth His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may exalt it above every other religion. Allah suffices as Witness.
9:73 O Prophet, fight the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be stern with them. Their abode is Hell, and what a terrible fate!
Just so we are clear on the concept, when Allah demands that the believers “be stern with them” (or harsh), He means kill them, as He does here in a revelation where He insists the hypocrites be murdered wherever you find them.
33:61 Accursed, wherever they are encountered they will be seized and slaughtered.