It's All About Muhammad

REVIEW OF IT’S ALL ABOUT MUHAMMAD, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS PROPHET, by Alan Caruba

It took the gruesome videos of two American journalists being beheaded by a masked Islamic State (ISIS) butcher, followed since then by more victims, to finally wake Americans to the threat that they face from Islam, but the beheading of a Moore, Oklahoma victim by a man who had been trying to get his co-workers to convert to Islam that brought the threat to the homeland.

The memory of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon have long since begun to fade, but Islam has returned to page one with a display of the violence that is the heart and soul of a cult based on the life and teachings of Muhammad.

Don’t call it a religion. And surely do not call it the “religion of peace.” There was nothing peaceful about Islam from its earliest days when the citizens of Mecca came to the conclusion that Muhammad and his followers were a threat to them. That was 1,400 years ago.

If it were in my power, I would require every American to read “It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet” by F.W. Burleigh ($16.95, Zenga Books).

Instead, I will only highly recommend it as the best way to understand the man who literally invented a so-called religion based on his own pathologies and then, through terror, ensured it spread to the entirety of Arabia in his lifetime.

As the author notes in its introduction, the biography is based almost entirely on the original literature of Islam as well as early biographies, histories, and collections of traditions. Twenty thousand pages of material were given line-by-line scrutiny “because what is written about him in the original literature is disturbing.”

“More than two-thirds of the canonical biographical materials have to do with the violence he used to spread his religion.” It was a short step from Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet who later called himself the messenger of Allah, to Alton Nolen, the Muslim convert who is alleged to have beheaded a former co-worker.

What is little known about Muhammad is that he suffered from epileptic fits throughout his life and had had a troubled youth that would have unhinged anyone. A fortunate marriage at age 24 took him out of a life of low status and poverty. His wife was twenty years his senior, a woman of wealth. Though a grave concern in an era when the fits were seen as demon possession, Muhammad began to interpret them as the voices of Allah and his angels, particularly Gabriel.

“It was during this period of emotional and intellectual upheaval that his overcharged brain, wracked by doubts and suffering, came to his rescue in the form of a series of spectacular hallucinatory experiences that convinced him he was unique and had been singled out by God for a special purpose. This took place in A.D. 610 when Muhammad was forty years old.”

“His belief became unshakable and later became content of much of the Koran and his later ruthless behavior as pillage, rape, the enslavement of men, women, and children, and other atrocities he perpetrated—make such a belief beyond ludicrous.”

“It was sufficient for Muhammad to think something for it to become the truth. He was convinced that whatever came into his head came from Allah.” For ages insane asylums have been filled with such people.

As Muhammad drew followers to himself and to the exacting rituals he created for Islam, he enriched himself and them with acts of banditry, attacking caravans and then attacking tribes, particularly Jewish ones, to build a mountain of stolen wealth. Burleigh notes that the Koran has a chapter “entitled ‘The Spoils of War’” that “transformed Muhammad’s religion into an organized-crime enterprise for its approval of plunder.” He told his believers “Enjoy what you take in war” for it is “lawful and good.”

Again, it is a short step from his era to the present one in which believers have united to create the Islamic State (ISIS) by war and to begin to steal the wealth of Syria from the sale of its oil on the black market. Imposing themselves on a large area of Iraq, ISIS is simply an extension of al Qaeda and al Qaeda is an expression of Muhammad’s demand that Islam become the sole religion of the world, exacting a subjugation tax from any who would not convert.

Burleigh concludes his book saying “Muhammad was a diseased genius, an epileptic psychopath with a clever tongue who believed God talked to him, a toxic mixture that transformed him over time into a mass murderer and a despot pushing a delusional religion.”

It should surprise no one that he “divided the world into lands conquered and lands yet to be conquered, into lands that submitted to his delusions about himself and lands yet to submit to his delusions.”

Following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Islam was in decline, but the discovery of oil in the Middle East provided the funding to spread its message. That message, dependent on violence and terror has created such a problem in the Middle East that Islamic nations there are joining in the effort to defeat ISIS.

Burleigh asks “Who will defend you against the encroachment of what Muhammad created and the very real threat that it could eventually destroy all that you cherish?” He does not recommend the man who said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” That man is President Barack Hussein Obama.

And now you know why the murders committed by Major Nidal Hasan in 2009, killing his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, or the murder in Oklahoma were both deemed “workplace violence” by law enforcement authorities reluctant to challenge the White House to the reality that both were inspired and approved by Islam.

(How many people remember these murders? They happened only recently, and they foreshadowed the mass murder that took place on Dec. 1 in San Bernardino. What does this fresh massacre portend?–F.W. Burleigh)