It's All About Muhammad

LEAVE IT TO ISIS TO BOAST about its exploits in videos that end up on You Tube for the world to see. These people are like gangbangers who use social media to flash their gang signs, display their guns, and show the world what total badasses they are.

In a recent video, a gaggle of ISIS jihadis, fresh from the slaughter of innocents, await their reward: captive Yazidi females to use as they wish, part of Allah’s bounty for fighting for the cause. They’ve already gotten their share of the physical booty—the cash, weapons, and personal belongings of their victims. Now comes the human booty—“what the right hand possesses,” as Muhammad phrased it in his Koran.

Take a good look at these guys: sex-starved young men, some of them still wearing combat vests with bulky pockets, some sporting the bandages of recent wounds. They wear bushy beards and trim mustaches, the hirsute style of the true believer. They’ve assembled in a room to buy themselves some women, their pockets full of the money they got as their share of the spoils of war. Cash on the barrel, or guns as barter. When one of the jihadis demands, “Where is my Yazidi girl?” a dealer steps forward to announce he is there to sell.

Slave market scene: A buyer inspects the merchandise.

These are a fun bunch of guys. They smile, they giggle, they banter, they elbow one another: “The price depends,” says a smiler who offers to buy a woman for a gun, but concedes he would pay more “if she has blue eyes.” Says another, “If she is 15 years old, I have to turn her around and check her teeth.” A third man wonders, “What would I need her for if she has no teeth?” “Then shoot her,” replies the other jihadi. One of the men is very young and very bashful and very embarrassed by all the crude talk. One girl would be enough for him, he admits.

We don’t see the girls. Each one has a horror story of loved ones murdered and their stories don’t matter, not to their captors anyway. This video is a captor-raptor production and it began showing up on the Internet in late November of 2014. The women were captured after the ISIS assaults on Sinjar in the northern Iraq province of Ninevah, a town that had a large Yazidi and Shiite population. Most of the people fled into the mountains, but the men who were captured, young and old, were machine gunned or beheaded. The women and children were rounded up and triaged according to age and looks. The Daily Mail reported 5,000 Yazidi males of the region were murdered and 5,000 to 7,000 women and children taken captive and disposed of as slaves. Some of these women are now the property of the beaming young fighters of the video.

Muhammad: “Women are like domestic animals.”

There has been a lot of commentary about ISIS and sex slavery, and plenty of videos have been produced in which experts give their informed opinions about these barbaric practices. What is curiously lacking in all of this is that none of these commentators make any connection with the origin of the Muslim sex-slave practice. Or answer the question: Why do these people do what they do?

These ISIS types are not original. They follow the pattern laid down by Muhammad in matters of sex slavery and in everything else they do. Abu Bakr al-Bagdhadi, the self-declared caliph of the so-called Islamic State, is a scholar of Islamic literature and can quote chapter and verse all of Muhammad’s precedents that allow him and his jihadis to do what they do. This is Muhammad’s Sunna, his way of doing things and therefore legitimate for them.

La perla del mercader (The Merchant’s Pearl) (1884) by Chilean painter Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma. Muslim slave markets were the subject of numerous paintings by classical artists.

Islam is all about Muhammad. In the case of sex slavery, he set the example on numerous attacks on enemies where captured women were part of the spoils of war. Three of his wives were taken as booty: Their husbands were killed either while fighting Muhammad’s people or were slaughtered on his orders after their surrender.

Muhammad, who ended up with 13 wives and concubines and was said to have attempted marriage with at least another 20 women, viewed women as little more than animals, as shown in his Farewell Sermon on Mt. Arafat outside of Mecca–his Sermon on the Mount–a few months before his death. “Treat women well,” he advised the men among the 40,000 pilgrims who gathered to hear him talk, “for they are like domestic animals with you and do not possess anything for themselves. You have only taken them as a trust from God.” (1)

So it is of no surprise that he handed out female captives to his followers following raids and battles as booty. They were chattel, property to be bought, sold, or exchanged. One raid netted 600 captives and the girls and women were awarded to his fighters, who then took them to their tents for sex. “Celibacy was hard on us,” noted one of the fighters. The battle of Hunayn, which took place after the fall of Mecca, netted 6,000 captive women and children. These were distributed as slaves, and Muhammad gave many of the prettiest to the Meccan leaders as a way injecting enthusiasm into their recent forced conversion.

Islam is all about Muhammad and his Koran and the example of his behavior and it always will be as long as Islam is allowed to continue. These deluded ISIS goons who giggle and rub their hands at the prospect of getting their share of the captive women are no different than the jihadis of Muhammad’s day.

Muhammad used sex to motivate ignorant young men to fight and die for him. His successors follow in his footsteps.

(1) The History of al-Tabari, vol. IX, p. 113.

This article may be reproduced in whole or in part provided the following attribution is given: Article by F. W. Burleigh, author of It’s All About Muhammad, a Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet. www.itsallaboutmuhammad.com