It's All About Muhammad

Hey Bud, can you spare me 10,000 hours?

This is not a boast. It’s an admission: It took me 10,000 hours to research and write It’s All About Muhammad. That’s everything included, starting from the moment when I first picked up on bits and pieces about Muhammad and got pissed off: What! This guy slaughtered people who refused to join his religion? What! This guy forced women into marrying him after he murdered their husbands? What! This holy man looted everything from his victims that wasn’t nailed down?

These bits and pieces motivated me to know more. I began spending my spare time reading about Muhammad on the few websites back then that had information about him. I followed up by reading several of the conventional biographies such as Muhammad, His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings, The Life and Times of Muhammad, by Sir John Glubb, and Muhammad, by Yahiya Emerick. What a disappointment. They give biographical details, but they are not honest books. They are exercises in spinning evil to make it look like good. They are rationalizations. They offer smoke.

The authors—two of them Western academics who converted—were strangely blind. The literature they studied abounds in evidence that Muhammad committed almost every crime listed by the International Criminal Court as a crime against humanity, including mass murder, yet they write about him with the awed reverence due to the saintly. They seemed incapable of applying something as simple as the duck test to what they studied. You know how the duck test goes: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then surely it must be a duck. The duck test for Muhammad goes: If it talks like a mass murdering thug, slaughters people like a mass murdering thug, and is as remorseless as a mass murdering thug, then by God, it must be a mass murdering thug! Certainly, he was anything but the most perfect man ever to exist, as he claimed about himself.

“The use of the word ‘revelation’ in a book about Muhammad establishes that the author believes or gives credibility to the idea that Muhammad was divinely inspired. This, of course, is nonsense. If there truly were a God capable of coming up with what is in the Koran and transmitting it to a someone like Muhammad, all creation would rise up in rebellion.” — from the introduction to It’s All About Muhammad, A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet.

You don’t get the duck test get out of people like Lings and Emerick and so many others, and it is unfortunate because they have influence, and through their influence they perpetuate the dangerous nonsense about Muhammad that they themselves have blindly fallen for: that God talked to Muhammad through an angel and dictated the stuff of the Koran to him as a guide for humanity; that his example in all things is the path to follow to reach paradise; that he will be the intercessor for you with God on Judgment Day provided you continually pray to God to give him the right to intercede for you, etc., etc.

There have also been books that question if Muhammad ever existed. Such works dismiss the vast body of the original literature about him as compilations of contradictory and dubious legends that self-destruct like matter and anti-matter. Sure, there’s a lot of nonsense that bulks up the original materials, but the literature is like a vast tapestry, and if you step back enough to get a good look, the nonsense and contradictions get absorbed into the background and you can clearly see the picture. It’s not possible to invent someone like Muhammad. Along with him, you would have to invent a Hollywood epic cast of cronies and enemies. You would have to invent people like Ali, Umar, Abu Bakr, Uthman, Aisha, Zubayr, Zayd, Khalid, Abu Sufyan, Hind, Yazid, Muawiyya, and hundreds more—most if not all of them demonstrably historical characters.

Something had to be done to counter these deceptive biographies and the dead end scholarship. The weird ideas Muhammad spread about himself through terror have destroyed entire civilizations. A real, honest biography needed to be written. And better yet, illustrated. Pictures speak louder than words. At first I hesitated because I figured someone was going to beat me to it. It seemed so obvious: an honest, illustrated biography about the guy that started Islam and all of the horrors that came with it. A culprit story. A true crime story.

But year after year went by and nobody wrote it, and so I set my mind on doing it even though the effort seemed daunting. A big part of the early learning had to do with figuring out what I needed to learn, and I found that what I needed to learn was almost entirely in the original source material, not in secondary literature and other people’s biographies. Over the course of several years I acquired all of the foundation documents of Islam that have been translated into English.

On a part-time basis, it would take 10 years to complete a book like this. I finally arranged to work on it full time by giving myself a three-year sabbatical, clear of any distractions. I devoted my time to writing and studying what needed to be studied, namely the works of Ibn Ishaq, Tabari, Waqidi, Ibn Sad, Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, and others. These names won’t mean anything to people who haven’t delved into this subject, but they are important in that these people provided the core of the original literature. Through them, I parachuted into 7th century Western Arabia and lived the life of an itinerant enquirer, notebook in hand. I came across a lot of interesting characters, people you can identify with once you get to know them. Muhammad became three-dimensional. Hugely interesting, but armed and dangerous, capable of having your head cut off with the snap of his fingers.

Muhammad flees for his life from Mecca with his sidekick Abu Bakr. After putting up with his subversive cult for ten years, the Meccans finally decided they had to kill him to preserve their way of life. He escaped their dragnet and made it to Yathrib (Medina) where he created a base of operations–his al-qaeda–and waged war, first on the Meccans, then on everyone who opposed him.

The sabbatical is over and here finally is the illustrated true crime story, pictured in the upper left sidebar: It’s All About Muhammad, a Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet. I am now employed as a carnival barker for it, the guy standing outside a chamber of horrors, megaphone in hand, inviting you to buy a ticket for a ride into hell on earth. “Climb aboard, folks. If there’s ever been a ride you need to take, this is it!”

This is a default book. It fell to me to write it because no one else did, yet it is a book that needed to be written. This is not to lay a guilt trip on anyone. After plowing through all of that literature and doing everything that was necessary to put this book together, I can understand why no one else wrote it: It took 10,000 hours. How many people have 10,000 hours to devote to something like this?

I have made it easy for you. You can get the benefit of all that work. You can learn everything that I learned the hard way just in the time it takes you to read the book.

Hey Bud, can you spare me 10,000 hours?

You bet.