A Quick History of Islam for History Ignoramuses |
By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper (tm) |
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. |
A Quick History of Islam for History Ignoramuses |
By T.L. Winslow (TLW), the Historyscoper (tm) |
© Copyright by T.L. Winslow. All Rights Reserved. |
Please, do not be alarmed, this broadcast is now being controlled for your viewing pleasure by the Historyscoper (tm), the Iron Chef of World History (tm). Hit the stop button on the video above if you don't like cool music to play while you're reading.
Westerners are not only known as history ignoramuses, but double dumbass history ignoramuses when it comes to Islam. Since I'm the one-and-only Historyscoper (tm), and my giant spongelike brain is well-versed in all of the last 6K years of world history like nobody else, I could publish a New York Times bestseller and rake in the dough like Sarah Palin, but it's getting so dangerous to wait any longer that I'm doing it for free, so please allow me to quickly bring you Islam history ignoramuses up to speed. There's 1400 years to cover, so expect it to take a couple of hours, so turn off your TVs and other distractions, get serious and relive your past and change your destiny, you can be both beautiful and smart. Knowledge is power, and this is pure concentrated gold bricks, with links provided to check my facts so you don't have to take my word for anything. Sorry if you don't have a giant sponglike brain like me, you'll just have to force yourself to open it up to all this new knowledge and get used to being more aware about the world than you used to be, grin. I have nothing to hide or cover up, rather, I'm trying to uncover the truth. So take the red pill and come down the rabbit hole with me and see how deep it goes. Seriously, this is the most powerful historyscope of Islam yet devised, because Master Historyscoper TLW rules. What is a historyscope? TLW's trademark Internet-powered sequential word map technique for history, laying out the map points, structure and flow in your mind to guide you afterward when you want to go deeper, like a real map does. Muslims will go nonlinear if they read it without permission of their mental overlords, and may try to spread disinformation to keep you from reading it, so enjoy it all the more, it's A-List with Rollover. Ouch, I burned my ass with my finger.
This is your brain on TLW.
A couple of hours on the first read, that is. The recommended way to study it is to read through it four times, slower each time, starting by paging quickly to the end to see how much there is to read and how cool it will be to read it, the shocking power of TLW to open up a crystal ball of history to you, you want to read it, you need to read it, go read it, followed by your first read, a speed-read of each paragraph and the images to fix the map points in your mind, then the second read at normal speed to obtain full comprehension, how's he doing, I don't want to look, then the third read, slow and deliberate for memorizing as much as possible and trying to see the flow of time in your mind, your wonderful mental activity has some fuel. Another read would be nice, in which you go backwards paragraph by paragraph, hindsight is 20/20. Finally you are ready to begin going deeper, clicking all 1K+ links, and coming back without clicking links in the links until you've gone over all the top links, after which you can go as deep as you want, see ya in a couple of years. Just kidding, I've been working on it well over a decade, and my job is to give you enough info. that you don't need to click the links unless you really want to. Not that you have to read it in the first place. You're born not knowing history and can die not knowing history, but if you want to learn history you've come to the right place. Think of it as a complete course without a diploma, rewarding you with the wisdom that comes with real knowledge not hazy generalities. You're the ping pong ball, serve yourself to me and I'll smack you right back, like Brooke Shields with a mullet, all business up front, party in the back.
It all started with an Arab dude out to do some last minute Christmas shopping named Muhammad (570-632). That much everybody knows, right? The problem is that he lived 1400 years ago, and a lot has happened since he dropped his atomic bomb on the world.
First, a little background. Arabia, his home, had gone throughout history without any foreign power, including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, Israelites, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Parthians, Germans, anyone ever conquering it, I guess it must be hard to perfect desert warfare on the fly. By 2000 B.C.E. the camel was domesticated, and a nomadic culture based on goat and sheep herding developed in madass N Arabia, while the sandy deserts of interior Arabia were linked by camel carvan routes to the N and S, and the S mountains employed terracing for cultivation. By 1000 B.C.E. the N had a priestless polytheistic religion, while the S had a temple-based religion with a pantheon of gods including Athtar ("fertile"), Ilmaqah (Almaqah) (moon god), and Wadd ("love"), insert your tasteless English sex jokes here. The Hadrami tribe ruled the Wadi Hadramaut in S Arabia from Shabwa, and controlled the production of frankincense. The Mineans controlled the E foothills of the Sarat (Sarawat) Mts. on the W coast, with capital at Ma'in. Saba (Sheba) (Heb. "promise, oath"), home of the Sabaeans, with capital at Marib (Ma'rib) was the wealthiest S Arabian kingdom, with palaces and temples dedicated to the god Ilmaqah at Sirwah, Yithil and Sa'ana. The N used Aramaic as its written language, and the S used Sabean and Minean. Migrants from Iberia (Spain) brought their magnificent war horses to North Africa as far back as 3000 B.C.E., which spread to Arabia, becoming the super duper Arabian horse, although horses were rare prior to the rise of Islam and they may have been acquired with the conquest of Persia, if so, their use in war must have been overhyped. By the 1st cent. B.C.E. the Arabs of N Arabia developed a special saddle that allowed them to use camels for military purposes, which helped them to control trade in Arabia and earn enough money to buy metal weapons, cinching their sand warfare superiority. The net result by the time Muhammad was born was a bunch of proud camel-riding sheep-herding bedouins, who liked to wear beards and turbans (which originated in Sudan way before Muhammad was born) and swing big swords and eat sheep eyes, and had the ancient code of honor system of An Eye for An Eye and all that jazz. Women were treated like property, as in a man owns so many sheep, so many goats, and so many women, pass the tits, er, sheep eyes. Not that most humans weren't barbarians living under chieftains who were forever at war with neighboring tribes, or slaves of an all-powerful emperor like in China or Persia, or a pharaoh like in Egypt. Civilization started in the East way back around 3,000 B.C. with the Chinese Yellow Emperor (Huang-Di) and the Egyptian Scorpion King, and spread West, but went too far, turning people into insects with no individuality, causing government to become a threat not a blessing, an eternal problem that's still with us today and will be with us tomorrow. It was precisely the resistance of the Wild Wild West to enslavement by emperors and kings that defined it and still does, think King Lear and M*A*S*H, I feel like I'm special here, hi everybody, give me a seat at the table games.
Government and religion grew up side by side, and one tried to control the other, the princess and the frog, forever playing. Religion naturally started out with worship of everything that moves, then everything that doesn't move, especially elaborate idols that let a professional priesthood live high on the frog, and finally the celestial bodies, too far away to reach and smash like an idol yet able to reach out and touch them, it must have been confusing like when teenies first discover sex and have to get around their parents. Finally Egyptian pharoah Akhenaten (Akhenaton) (d. -1334) (Amenhotep IV) cut to the chase and abandoned polytheism for monotheism, or at least a good approximation, there's no way I'm kissing a frog and being a bug on the same day, see any Walt Disney film. Of course, if you believe the Jewish Torah then the Jews invented it first, indeed, didn't invent it, were taught it, by their god Jehovah, who wouldn't let them have any other gods or they were outa there, and also created the Universe and was holy, meaning untouchable by anything he created, who were all forever too unclean even to see him without instant death, people don't listen, don't take things from strangers. Too bad, he chose the Jews as his people, and only revealed his Bible to them, leaving everybody else in utter darkness without a drop of his crackalackin' mamajama Creator think to give them a clue about how to deal with the Devil, who had a world monopoly on pagan gods and goddesses, deal with the Devil, who had a world monopoly on pagan gods and goddesses, who were really his demons in disguise, how can something so little do something so big. Even the Egyptians, who had monotheism were so clueless that they took the Sun as the chariot of God and thought that their pharoah was the Sun of, er, son of the Sun, which is the meaning of the name Rameses (Ra-Moses), and figured that since the Moon kills the Sun each night, which is then reborn, and the winter kills the summer each year, which is then reborn, worthy, especially godlike people should also be reborn or resurrected, but since they didn't know squat about science, they thought that resurrection required the dried husk to be preserved in a giant pyramid complete with food, clothes, weapons, tools and slaves, defacing Egypt while consuming humongous manpower that could have been used to advance science and technology, so that Egypt spun around in a hamster cage for millennia until Persia conquered it in 525 B.C.E. At least Egypt didn't have racism, that seems to have been invented later, partly fueled by a feeling that Egypt started its downward slide when it let blacks become pharaohs, but I'm digressing. Did I mention Moses? The Bible claims he was an Egyptian prince who moled into the nobility even though he was really a Hebrew and was planted as an infant using the old floating reed basket trick, then decided to come out and show that Jehovah could kick any Egyptian god's ass with his hands tied behind his back and create a New World Order complete with the Ten Commandments and a whole new religion that requires males to have their foreskins sacrified to Jehovah, sounds gay but it's not, it was in place of their entire bodies, if you believe their version that is, maybe the Egyptians taught the Jews monotheism and circumcision too, and they made it all up, but I'm digressing again. Although Moses liberated his Hebrew nation from the Egyptians, they ended up wandering around in the wilderness for 40 years after being bad and creating a Golden Calf, and Moses died having never set foot in the Promised Land of Israel, after which the 200-to-400-year Period of the Judges followed, sex should be the last thing on your mind.
North Arabia was mainly madass tribal Arabs, and civilization in the Arabian Peninsula was concentrated in the south, AKA Yemen, which ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy described as "Arabia Felix" (Happy Arabia), based around the city of Sana'a, which was allegedly founded at the foot of Djebel Nuqum at 7.2K ft. altitude by Noah's eldest son Shem (Hebrew for name, but also somebody's fame or essential reality, as in the Messiah's shem is Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, etc.), father of the Middle East's wonderful Semitic race, which is why they're called Semites, they're all hung up on who they is. The Hebrew word for Arab is 'rab, which means a mixed multitude, not pure like them Jews, maybe they'll never get that chip off their shoulders. Yemen had six straight civilizations between the 12th cent. B.C.E. and 6th cent. C.E., when Islam messed it up permanently, so that today the situation is reversed, and Yemen is full of madass tribal Arabs. The famous Queen of Sheba (Hebrew for promise or oath, coincidentally the name of King David's babe Bathsheba, whose name means daughter of promise) described in the Jewish Bible might have been from there, or from Axum in nearby Ethiopia, which is what the modern Ethiopians believe, their kings long claiming descent from Jewish #1 king Solomon (allegedly from the Hebrew word shalom for peace, although those in the know think it's really Sol-Om-On, the Sun, Moon, and Stars or Venus) through her when she visited Jerusalem once around 1000 B.C.E. and he knocked her up, he couldn't resist hot shebas, which would even have been more interesting if she were black, beats jail. The Ethiopian story is that he gave her a tour of his rich palace to wow her, then waited until she touched one of his treasures to jump her bones, telling her that gives him the right to touch her treasures, becoming the #1 Jewish pickup line. Allegedly Solomon at first disowned his half-breed son, then embraced him and sent him back with the Lost Ark of the Covenant, see the Steven Spielberg movie and see what a history ignoramus he is. Solomon was the son of King David ("beloved"), who ruled the kingdom of Israel from the Holy City of Jerusalem (Salem) ("peace") (same as Islam?), which was founded way back in 2300 B.C.E. or earlier by the Canaanite (Hittite?) (Hurrian?) (Amorite?) Jebusites (Shem and Eber, ancestors of Abraham?) on the ridge of the Judean Mts., surrounded by thick green forests of almond, olive and pine trees, and went on to be sieged 40 times, destroyed or partially destroyed 32 times, and change hands 26 times, ending up divided with walls and fences from May 1948 to June 1967, some city of peace. Too bad, Solomon, the smartest and richest Jewish king of all time had one weakness, poontang, which got him in trouble with Jehovah, and after he died the kingdom of Israel agreed to disagree and split into the northern kingdom of Israel based in Samaria and the southern kingdom of Judah based in Jerusalem, and in 722 B.C.E. the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom and sent the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel into captivity in Khorason in W Afghanistan and E Iran, after which it's anybody's guess where they went, ask Mormons Donny and Marie Osmond or trivia king Ken Jennings, could be the difference between life and death, chachacha. Only two tribes were left, Benjamin and Judah, the key line later resulting in Jesus Christ, proving that you know who was guiding the course of his-tory. The landless tribe of Levi that produced the Levites manning Jehovah's temple in Jerusalem was also saved, that's why we have Levi's Jeans today.
Too bad, the Jewish religion was a sick intolerant totalitarian theocratic cult that forced everybody to follow a zillion daily rules, actually the 613 Mitzvot (Commandments) (248 positive, 365 negative), with draconian punishments such as stoning for adultery or blasphemy, yet its Bible claimed to be written by the Creator of the Universe via some kind of Ouija Board transmission to special inspired writers, so no wonder that a movement to let everybody be a "spiritual Jew" that didn't have to obey all them rules, especially circumcision, eventually resulted in Christianity, which latched onto the Bible and inherited the holier-than-thou mentality of the Jews even while condemning real Jews for not keeping up with their new improved Savior Christ, I was shocked to be honest with you, whoa, that was my sister. No surprise, the Israelites kept falling away from worship of the true god Jehovah in favor of Baal, Astarte (Astharte) (Isthar) and other false gods, and after numerous prophets he sent to warn them to get right with him were rejected and usually killed, Jehovah sent the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar ("Oh god Nabu, preserve and defend my firstborn son") II (-634 to -562) to conquer Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. (607 B.C.E. if you believe the Jehovah's Witnesses) and enslave the Jews, and cart them off to Babylon for 70 years in the Babylonian Captivity, which couldn't have been all bad with them Hanging Gardens and all, but they got all the false gods they could stomach, since the Babylonians had zillions of them, tracing back to Babylon's alleged founder Nimrod (great-grandson of Noah via Ham and Cush), the "mighty hunter of the people of the Lord", i.e., an enemy of Jehovah, who built the fabled Tower of Babel that pissed-off Jehovah so bad that he rewired all human brains from speaking the one true language of Adam and Eve into all the language groups we know today, not to mention all the false gods, although Big J sent prophet Daniel to keep the true believers happy, after which he figured he'd punished them enough and sent monotheist Zoroastrian Persian Cyrus II the Great (-600 to -530) to conquer Babylon on Oct. 7, 540 B.C.E. under their last king (-556 to -539) Nabonidus ("Nabu is praised") (who worshipped Sin itself), then released the Jews so they could go back and set up shop again after rebuilding the temple, but without any king, since they were now a vassal state, Jehovah never forgets when you've been bad. Even though Cyrus didn't believe in Jehovah, he was a monotheist, and the Bible actually calls him the second Messiah ("anointed one") of the Jews after Moses, now I remember, there was a killing in Kansas City at the World's End Saloon, you were one of the boarders. By the way, Noah's son Shem was allegedly also the same as righteous Melchizedek, who killed Nimrod in battle and sent the pieces of his corpse to the far reaches of Nimrod's empire to show them that Big J was still boss, after which Nimrod's wife Semiramis, mother of harlots got pregnant, claiming that dead Nimrod impregnated her from beyond the grave, which makes him a god in his own right, thanks for the memories. Nimrod also founded Assyria, which instead of being known for free sex, astrology and magic was known for cruelty, walking captured enemies around in cruel harnesses like dogs and flaying them alive, and other junk. Eventually Nimrod became the Sun god, and Semiramis the Moon god AKA Asteroth or Ashera the Queen of Heaven, later called Astarte or Ashtarte. Her son Tammuz was slain by a wild boar, and returns from the underworld each spring, I guess that the Devil created all this false religion as disinformation against the future arrival of You Know Who Starts With J, see the 2009 3-D flick Avatar and check back with me after you get your sight back.
The Jews had the precious Bible, but were into theocracy as well as judges and kings, and the hairy edge of mankind's political future lay in blondeland Greece, where the tradition of the Wild Wild West of independence and individual worth was in the balance as horrible Zoroastrian Persian emperor (-522 to -486) Darius ("maintains possessions well") I the Great (-549 to -486) and his hordes of foot-kissing slaves tried to take it over, only to see why the West is the Best at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.E.. When new horrible Zoroastrian Persian emperor (-485 to -465) Xerxes ("monarch") I the Great (-519 to -465) tried it again, he really got his clock cleaned at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E., where a hastily-assembled force of 7K Greek freedom fighters stopped the entire million-man Persian army long enough for Greece to regroup and kick their butts out forever, which is why we like marathons. After groaning under super law-and-order lawgiver #1 Draco ("dragon") the Lawgiver (-659 to -601), who decreed the death penalty for stealing cabbages in 621 B.C.E., and who the Greeks finally threw out like a bum after 25 years of suffering in 594 B.C.E. for Solon ("wise") the Wise (-638 to -558), who maybe gave you 20 years of hard labor for it but was still strict as hell, just kidding, maybe not, a new era began for mankind when Pericles ("far-famed") (-495 to -429) founded the Age of Democracy, where each individual man was considered important enough to take their vote, as opposed to every other country's system where the monarch is a god on Earth whose word is law. And these blonde hung dudes never heard of the Bible or circumcision, and liked to go around in naked exercise areas called gymnasiums and let the women admire their brains, because they were polytheist pagans and proud of it, their gods were supermen with super physiques and super sexual appetites. Too bad, the Romans conquered Greece in 86 B.C.E., and turned the Greek brain men into house slaves who taught the crude militaristic Romans the finer things when they weren't out conquering and enslaving new territories. It took until the U.S. came along in 1776 C.E. to get all the theory right in the Declaration of Independence, namely, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government derives its right to rule from the consent of the People with a capital P. And to be fair, it took until the late 20th century before women and minorities were included in the democratic republics of Europe and the U.S., that's progress, too bad that Muslim countries still labor under retro 7th cent. theocratic Islam and its Run Its the Quran, which not only codifies male supremacy and slavery as divine law, but orders the destruction of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the name of total submission to Allah, forever holding them back and making progress dangerous and iffy, run, the aliens are coming, but we'll get to that later.
The 5th century B.C.E. starting in 500 B.C.E. was the Golden Age of religion, when the major modern religions were all founded, even Judaism, when they returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian Captivity, and Ezra ("helper") the Scribe allegedly "found" the Books of Moses and read them aloud to the people to help them remember their old religion, then started ending mixed marriages with Babylonians, using all them detailed genealogies to decide who's pure, which might mean the Bible was first cooked up about that time, unless you accept the backdating story going to Adam and Eve through Solomon, David, Moses and Abraham, who might just all be fairy tales, they had a lot of time to make it up in Babylon, land of a zillion gods, a ziggurat on every block, and mother of astrology, what's your sign. Major whiz kid blue ribbon best in class religion founders were Gautama Buddha ("enlightened one") (-563 to -483) of Nepal and India, Zoroaster (Zarathustra) (-660 to -583) (Zoroaster is Greek for undiluted stars, Zarathustra is Persian for camel driver) of Persia (6th cent. B.C.E., but actually nobody knows for sure), and Confucius (-551 to -479) (Chinese for Master Kong) and Lao Tzu (-604 to -470) (Chinese for old master, as in lived to 130) of China. Not that the Greeks didn't have their own myth-maxed religion based on the Mount Olympus thingie that went way way back, and the Egyptians and Hindus had theirs, do not drink alcohol while taking Rig Veda or you'll get man boobs. But these new religions lasted to modern times, and the race was on, it's not a business matter, it's a family obligation, how come you still have the same body you had in 6th grade, I'm gay not dead. The Greeks were blonde brain men, the original White is Right of the West, and preferred their philosophers, including #1 Socrates (-469 to -399), who refused to write anything down, and his disciple Plato (-428 to -347) (Greek for broad, as in he was a wrestler with broad shoulders before settling down and living for his mind), who did it for him and broke a zillion quills. Socrates was the father of Western atheism, which is what they made him drink hemlock for, while Plato was the father of Western theism, because he claimed to prove God's existence with pure reason, including the Trinity, which came back to haunt Christianity later, spend the next 25 years reading his corpus and check back with me Timaeus. Plato's student Aristotle ("best of all") (-384 to -322) became the teacher of Alexander the Great, straightforward is the way TD Greektrade does business.
All them cerebral monotheistic religions and Greek philosophies give me a headache. If it weren't so uncerebral, I'd prefer to go Outback with the great Greco-Roman Gods, including Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Aphrodite (Venus), Ares (Mars), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaestus (Vulcan), Poseidon (Neptune), Athene (Minerva), Artemis (Diana), and cool Apollo, god of the Sun, music, archery, and prophecy. If only the gods were us, supermen and superwomen living up high somewhere with all our bad lusts and weaknesses, not afraid of nudity and able to have sex 24/7/365 sans fear of diseases, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Arthur C. Clarke), call it the Star Trek Dream. Speaking of prophecy, the biggest difference between religion and philosophy, an attempt to establish divine authority by claiming a divine message has been communicated to a prophet, that's the game every religion plays, believe my prophet when he/she prophesies by uttering prophecies or bad things will happen on top of the good things you will get if you go for it. The difference is in how they want you to believe, voluntarily with or without evidence, or by force, call it Action Pak, a double feature every day and night, 24 hours of the Matrix, hey you got a call, I bring word from the Oracle, you must come at once.
Too bad, after conquering Palestine and the Holy Land (including Jerusalem, after which the Greeks ran it until the Romans took over, luring a number of Jewish men into the gay Greek lifestyle), Egypt, Persia, et al., blonde-blue hung Macedonian Greek Alexander ("defender of man") the Great (-356 to -323) was allegedly planning conquer Arabia and give them a dose of them Greek gods when he suddenly took sick with malaria and died in Babylon at the tender age of 33, blowing the Western world's main chance, alas, bugs control history. Alexander's body was shipped encased in honey to the new city of Alexandria, Egypt, where his brainy general Ptolemy I Soter ("savior") (-367 to -282) set up shop as the new blonde Greek pharaoh, spawning a series of ever-degenerating inbred descendants ending with hot-to-trot Cleopatra ("father's glory") VII (-69 to -30), AKA Elizabeth Taylor, who was known for pussy-whipping the #1 (or #2 if you prefer Alexander) Western military hero of all time Julius ("child of Jove") Caesar ("hairy") (-100 to -44), AKA Rex Hairyson, er, Harrison, along with the magnificent Library of Alexandria, which might have actually been more of a legend than an actual building complex, but if so, a great one, giving the impression that the ancients had an Apollo Project going to promote learning and science, but only while they were pagan, with the Christians and later Muslims ruthlessly destroying it in order to foist the Dark Ages of Religion on us, hence vote for more federal funds for science and technology.
Meanwhile, although the Jews were united under a king since 1000 B.C.E., the wildass Arabs of the N were split into a bunch of feuding tribes, and there was no king of all of non-Yemen Arabia yet. Religiously, the Arabs were out in the boonies as polygamous polytheist pagans, worshiping 360 tribal gods, one for every day of the lunar year, centered in the holy tourist trap town of Mecca (Makkah), where at some unknown murky date around the time of Christ a big black meteorite fell from space, wowing them and causing them to worship it as the Big Black Cube, or, in Arabic, the Kaaba (Kaabah) (Ka'bah) (Qaaba).
Muhammad was born in Mecca in the Year of the Elephant (570 C.E.), where he grew up watching the locals fleece all them pagan polytheist tourists, who agreed to call an annual truce from their neverending Hatfield-McCoy feuds long enough to kiss the cube and drink the bitter water from the nearby (66 ft. to the east) Well of Zamzam (Ishmael) (Ishmail), where they renewed their strength along with their swarthy Ishmaelite complexions and madass Arab ways. Later on, the Muslims tried a coverup and claimed that Mecca was really founded way back around 2000 B.C.E. by none other than Father Abraham (Hebrew for father of a multitude of nations) of Ur in Babylonia, who allegedly set up the Kaaba with the help of his favorite son Isaac, er, Ishmael (Ishmail) (Hebrew for God listens), while teaching the local rubes monotheism, which was later turned back into polytheism by the bad Amalekites, although there is actually no archeological evidence for an ancient city of Mecca before Claudius Ptolemy (90-168) mentions Macoraba in the 2nd cent. C.E., sorry there, Omar Sharif.
The #1 Arab god was the Moon god Hubal, which was the #1 money-making racket of the Cool Cash, er, Quraysh (Koreish) Tribe, which ruled Mecca. If you noticed that Hubal sounds suspiciously like Allah, you're right, get it? But these Moon worshippers who suffered from too much sun didn't live in a vacuum either. They had a big world about them that had long given up the Moon, the Sun, and other celestial objects. Since the 1st cent. C.E., religion and politics in the Western world was all about, not an astronomical object, but a man, Jesus Christ (-2/-4 to 31/33?), a Jewish descendant of Abraham (Hebrew for father of a multitude or many nations) on the good side of the Force, via his son Isaac (Hebrew for laughter) by his wife Sarah (Hebrew for princess), whose son by wife Rebekah (Hebrew for to tie) was Jacob (Hebrew for supplanter or held by the heel), the dude who wrestled with an angel, was held by the heel and renamed Israel, then went on to have son Judah (actually Yehuda) (Hebrew for to praise, as in praise God), who founded the praiseworthy tribe of the Jews. The religion Jesus Christ founded via a horrible crucifixion preached love and peace, along with nonviolent resistance to the Roman govt., with it being okay to pay taxes but not to work for the govt. or military, with the soundbyte "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" (Matthew 22:21), promising believers eternal life in paradise with Christ if they keep their noses clean. The disturbing idea that a miracle man once walked the Earth like an Egyptian and healed the sick and lame and raised the dead, was executed like an accursed blasphemer and traitor then disappeared from his tomb despite a Roman guard, and wasn't a magician consorting with evil spirits but is really the one and only Christ, the only begotten son of God, the Creator of the Universe, and might even be God himself, and was resurrected from the dead and sits at the right hand of God, exposing the whole Earth as lying in the grip of the Devil but at the same time judged and awaiting destruction no matter what new trick he pulls was a shockeroo, easy to mock at first but eventually sinking in, it's us versus Da World, and causing conversions and lifetime loyalty, even without all them gratuitous angels. The message must have been tremendously powerful, because it was spread by peaceful methods in an empire where the mean pagan Romans had all the swords, but at least the Romans weren't trying to convert them back to paganism by the sword, so it was all 1-sided. Wrong, they did try, in several Christian persecutions, which always failed. After a person becomes Christianized and accepts the Gospel story and message, then undergoes baptism to signify rebirth as a new person, a literal voluntary slave of Christ, and begins to talk to him and get talked back to, he's a goner. Eventually Christians even started time over with Year 1, Anno Domini, scrapping the old system of years since the founding of Rome in 753 B.C.E. for a new system based on the Year of their Lord, escape the pagan cold. The fact that they appropriated the Jewish Hebrew-Aramaic Old Testament via the Greek Septuagint translation of 132 B.C.E. and added their own Greek New Testament allowed them to convert Jews and pagans alike, since Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire. At first the polytheist pagan Romans, known for tolerance of all other religions, didn't bug them too much, until they refused to do the simple act of sacrificing to the emperor as a god like everybody else, which caused them to be treated as enemies of the state, forcing them totally underground. Meanwhile the Jews mainly rejected the new cult despite their literature (Gospels, etc.) that claimed to prove that their own Bible predicted his coming along with every detail of his life for centuries, causing the stiff-necked Jewish leaders (who got Jesus crucified by the Romans, stinking them both up) to promptly ban those writings along with the Greek Septuagint version of the Bible they themselves created because it bolstered the prophecy claims, and when their own chief Christian prosecutor Saul of Tarsus switched sides and became St. Paul (5-65), they soon got to the point where they didn't talk anymore, which only made it easier for the Christians to make converts among the gentiles (non-Jews), spreading throughout the empire on its own great roads and using the protection of its own military to keep safe, and winning the propaganda war using the latest knowledge technology of the Codex, the modern-day book format, replacing the lame scroll. Not that I buy that the Gospel stories are historical, or even that there was a real Jesus, but since the Christian cult came from somewhere, peddling its own unique literature, and took over the Roman Empire, giving them every chance to cover their tracks, we'll go with it for a quick lead-up to Islam. A Christian is a "little Christ", who wants everybody to be like Christ, even though that is impossible, he was perfect and worked miracles, but he was pretty much the opposite of the pagan Romans, and threw it in their faces, so it was quite dangerous to be one, gotta hand them that, and they didn't preach holy war and use violence to spread, they did it by preaching the Gospel message and by personal example, spreading empire-wide despite all them persecutions. So if I were the Devil, after losing most of my demon-worshipping Roman pagans and shoring up most of them stiff-necked Jews against that pesky Christ, I'd be thinking I needed to create a meaner leaner empire that is more intent on persecuting them pesky Christians, and has a powerful new cult to pressure them into that is designer-made to make them immune to the original Gospel message, that's where I screwed up, gotta go back to the original problemo, guess what it's called, starts with I Submit.
So Christianity got off to a slow start, like the marijuana legalization movement in the U.S., they mainly did it at night with the windows and doors closed and shades drawn, but after the efforts of a long line of Christian martyrs and saints, who meekly suffered horrible deaths for their faith it slowly took over the hearts and minds of the mean cruel Romans, call it the Devil's greatest setback. Special notice should be given to Jesus' specially-selected "rock of the church" disciple St. Peter (-1 to 67) (AKA Simon Peter or Cephas), who allegedly became the first Christian bishop of Rome and was crucified upside down at his own request, followed by St. John the Evangelist (1-100), the last of Jesus' Twelve Apostles to die after allegedly being given the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) by an angel sent by Christ personally in the Holy Grotto of Patmos off the SW coast of Asia Minor (Turkey), foretelling the End of Days when Christ will return and destroy all of Satan's wicked minions in the Battle of Armageddon, and revealing in Rev. 13:17-18 that the Antichrist AKA the Beast will have the number 666 encoded in his name and will fool many by posing as a prince of peace. Too bad, the multitudes decided that it would be in a year ending in 66 or some multiple of 66 or 666 that either Christ would return to end the old world of Satan and begin his reign, or his archenemy the Antichrist would either be born or start his rise, bringing Christ to save the world, causing the phenomenon of Millennium Fever after too many of these false alarms caused the biggest hopes to be placed on the year 1000, after which they switched to 1000 plus permutations of 6, 66, and 666, even using month #6 June as one of the magic keys to the big date, even though it said name not date, and some ancient manuscripts have 616 not 666, which not coincidentally is all the Roman numerals in order MDCLXVI. Back to the founders. St. John's disciple St. Polycarp (69-155) of Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey was also a key figure, followed by St. Irenaeus (-202) of Gaul (France), North African Berber Tertullian (160-220) (who coined the term "Trinity"), Origen (182-253) of Alexandria, Egypt, Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), and later St. Ambrose of Milan (337-97), North African Berber St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), and St. Jerome (347-420) of Pannonia (Hungary).
Not that the Jews were still a national entity. First the Jewish Maccabees ("hammers") booted the Greek Seleucids (ruled by descendants of another of Alexander's generals, who controlled the Holy Land, C Turkey, Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkmenistan, and parts of Pakistan) out of Israel in 164 B.C.E., only to be conquered in 63 B.C.E. by the pagan Romans, who let them practice their animal-sacrificing McDonald's Golden Arches religion long enough to lose their republican form of govt. to dictator emperor #1 (-27 to 14) Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus ("revered") (-63 to -14) (who founded a state religion where all had to worship him as a god) and let Guess Who Starts With J come and go, then got sick and tired of their sanctimonious holier-than-thou bullshit in the Jewish Revolt of 66 C.E. and closed in on them, the Roman army under future emperor #10 (79-81) Titus ("defender") Flavius Vespasianus (39-81), son of current emperor #9 (69-79) Vespasian (Titus Flavius Vespasianus Sr.) (9-79) (the Flavorful Anus Dynasty, known for their bi ways with their baby makers) wiping out Jerusalem in 70 C.E. after starving them out, killing all but 97K of 1.2M and taking the survivors away as slaves along with as much loot as they could find, using it and them to build their gym dandy Roman Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater) in Rome where they had all their fundays watching sporting events with real blood not SFX, which is why their empire was #1 in the West, it had plenty of pro sports programming for the areligious booze-swigging masses. Too bad, some of the entertainment included watching pesky atheist traitor Christians being thrown to the lions. The fact that the Jewish Christians fled Jerusalem for the mountain fastness of Pella per Jesus' instructions when the Romans were about to finish them off made the Jews consider Christian Jews as traitors. After one last independence attempt by the spoilsport Jews during the Bar Kochba (Kokhba) ("son of a star") Revolt in 132-136 C.E., the Romans under emperor #14 (117-138) Hadrian (76-138) permanently kicked them out of Israel, starting the Jewish Diaspora (Dispersion), then renamed it Palestine after the Phoenicians or Philistines to rub it in, thus planting the seeds of every world war to come until either the Wandering Jews give it up, are destroyed, or rule da World, oi vey, what was that about Jews not getting mad but getting even?
Back to Arabia. There were Arab Christians from the 200s onward, but not a lot, I guess it was a great sacrifice to give up polygamy for Christ and treat women like people. There was even a part-Arab Roman emperor (244-9), Philip I the Arab (Marcus Julius Philippus) (204-49), who on Apr. 21, 248 lucked out and got to lead the celebrations of the 1000th birthday of Rome, founded in 753 B.C.E., which featured 1K gladiators fighting to the death, along with hundreds of exotic animals, which means he was a good ole mean cruel pagan sans beard and turban, call it multiculturalism. In 253 Roman emperor (253-60) Valerian I (193-260) made the fateful decision of splitting the Roman Empire into two halves, taking the East side and giving his son Gallienus (218-68) the chickenshit West, who ruled not from run-down Rome but from Treves. It was originally supposed to be a temporary thing so Valerian I could be free to deal with all them pesky German barbarian invaders, but ended up permanent after he fell out with his son then got his ass kicked bigtime by the Zoroastrian Persians in Edessa and used as a footstool by Persian emperor (241-72) Shapur I (215-72) before being executed and his skin stuffed with straw for display.
To make a long story short, Christianity became the official religion of Rome starting with Roman emperor (306-37) Constantine I the Great (272-337), who in 313 proclaimed the Edict of Toleration in Milan, then set up Constantine Town, AKA Constantinople (he called it New Rome, enticing Romans to relocate from the Old Rome by shipping and reassembling their villas) on the Bosporus Strait leading to the Black Sea, and consecrated it to Christ on May 11, 330 C.E., after which they definitely had their er, eyes on them pesky illegal pagan Arab aliens down south, but first had to deal with the immediate problem of them even more pesky Germans coming down from the north, who ended up ripping the Roman empire apart and killing the Western half entirely in 476 C.E., leaving only the eastern half based in Constantinople. Too bad, Constantine I the Great detested the Jews, whose religion he called a bestial sect ("sect nefaria"), and his so-called Edict of Toleration restricted Jewish rights including the right to proselytize, and prohibited them from living in Jerusalem. In 337 his son, rabid Arian Christian emperor (337-61) Constantius II (317-61) promulgated a law making the marriage of a Jewish man to a Christian woman punishable by death, and in 339 upped it to making conversion to Judaism itself a criminal offence subject to confiscation of all their property, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.
Too bad, the Christians weren't satisfied with merely being legalized, but wanted to become the sole established state church, with its bishops on the govt. dole, which allowed the Roman establishment to systematically corrupt the Church from the top down, starting with the 318-bishop First Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., which endorsed the age-old pagan doctrine of the Trinity despite clear lack of support in the Bible (dressed up in new clothes, with God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit as coequal persons in one Godhead, with the fact that the Egyptians had Isis-Osiris-Horus etc. only proving to them that the Devil knew about the real Trinity all along and tried to spread disinformation), declaring the Arians, followers of Alexandrian Egyptian Berber bishop Arius (250-336) (who thought Christ was a created being, hence could never be equal to God, which offended most Christians, who always regarded Christ as a god of some kind even if they couldn't understand the subtleties of how there could only be one God yet he could begat, forget it, catch the new season of How I Met Your Mother on CBS) to be heretics, after which the bishops increasingly called on the state to cancel the Edict of Toleration and use its might to crush Christian heresy (often those who were Jesus' real believers like in the early days) and paganism alike, especially so they could confiscate pagan temples and use the gold to build Christian churches, causing the pagans to fight back, and both them and the Christians to tear the empire apart with a long civil war that ended with the accession of emperor Theodosius ("God's gift") I the Great (347-95) in 379, who on Feb. 27, 380 made Nicene Creed "Catholic Christianity" the official religion of the Roman empire and declared all other religions illegal, that settles it, you pesky pagans and Jews iz on notice. Of course, by this point the remaining pagans all found it easy to convert to Catholicism, it's name doesn't mean universal for nothing, because Catholicism reached out to them by incorporating pagan holidays and gods under laundered names, not to mention pagan doctrines. This only exposed the stiff-necked Jews as incorrigible holdouts, causing the Romans to tighten the screws. Hence, Christianity didn't invent the idea of convert-or-die, it invented the need for church-state separation, which took until Dec. 15, 1791, when the U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified after a huge complex struggle to free Westerners from the grip of the Church while still allowing anybody to be a member of that or any other Christian denomination, even to be an unrepentant gag, Jew. During God's Gift I's reign, concern for the increasing number of Greek-speaking Christian churches caused Latin to be adopted as the official language for the Roman Catholic Mass, whose name comes from the words "Ite, missa est" with which the priest dismisses the congregation. To throw a er, bone to the new Christians who were still pagan underneath, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary became such a rage that Tertullian's old writings of 208 that dissed it got mashed, and pesky references in the Gospels to the "brethren" of Jesus (1 Cor. 9:5, Gal. 1:19, Mark 6:3, Mt. 13:55) were no longer interpreted to refer to later sons of Mary by Joseph. Instead bishop St. Epiphanius (310-403) of Salamis in Cyprus (author of the Panarion or Medicine Chest Against All Heresies) proposed the more PC theory that they are sons of Joseph by a former marriage, and Jerome later proposed the even safer theory that they are sons of Alpheus, the husband of Mary's sister, and hence only Jesus' cousins, and in 431 at the instigation of Alexandrian patriarch St. Cyril ("lordly") (376-444), the First Council of Ephesus declared heretical the doctrines of Nestorianism, by Syrian-born Constantinople archbishop (428-431) Nestorius (386-451) for refusal to call sinless-born Virgin Isis, er, Mary the Mother of God, only the Mother of Christ, causing him to be deposed and the Assyrian Church of the East to split and go its own way. If I were a Jew I'd be puking chunks as the supposedly monotheist Christians first promoted Christ then his mother to gods, and had the gall to call me nuts.
In the early 400s the Western Roman empire began to turn into a bunch of wusses as it officially became for PC Trinitarian Christians only. On Jan. 1, 404 after Christian Trinitarian Roman emperor (395-423) Honorius (384-423) (son of Theodosius I) and half-Vandal Christian Trinitarian Roman gen. Flavius Stilicho (359-408) celebrated a triumph in Rome for defeating the pesky German Arian heretic Visigoths under king (395-410) Alaric ("ruler of all") I (370-410) (the 4th in the last hundred years), and an arch was erected claiming the total destruction of the Gothic nation, which they claimed would never rise again, Honorius spent several mo. in Rome trying to make everybody feel good again by visiting the Christian clergy on the one hand and attending the Dec. games on the other, which featured not only chariot races but wild beast hunts and a military dance along with gladiator fights, go, pagan guys, go. Too bad, they were interrupted by Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, who gave a speech denouncing them, followed by Asian monk St. Telemachus (a myth?) rushing into the arena to tell them to make somebody stop the fight and being stoned to death by angry spectators, causing whimpy Honorius to pass laws prohibiting human sacrifices. Realist grumblers accurately predicted that the martial spirit of the Romans, their obliviousness to the sight of blood and their contempt of death would evaporate, making them easy prey for the bloody barbarians. Too bad, the big V the Romans were celebrating was the Apr. 6, 402 Battle of Pollentia in modern-day Pollenza near Asti on the left bank of the Tanaro River in the Alps pocket WNW of Genoa (25 mi. SE of Turin), which they won by surprise-attacking the Goths while celebrating Easter Sunday, getting around the sacrilege by having the Roman cavalry charge be led by pagan barbarian (Alanii) Gen. Saul, although it almost backfired when the pissed-off Goths thought God would help them win, and made them determined to get revenge. In 405 Stilicho ordered the destruction of the Sibylline Books when he didn't like their prophesies of doom, while Jerome finished the Vulgate, the first Latin trans. of the Bible, and Pope Innocent I issued the first Index Prohibitorum (list of prohibited books), and served notice on all remaining pagan libraries that everything they've got was on the list. Meanwhile the Christian infiltration of the govt. caused the institution of slavery to become more and more kaput as the clergy created an escape clause by prohibiting the enslavement of Christians, so of course every slave wanted to convert as soon as the bath water could be run. For awhile at least, the great dream had arrived, and Rome was evolving toward a Christian paradise on Earth, the New Jerusalem, right? Wrong. Actually, the numerous Arians and closet pagans began to think it wasn't worth fighting for anymore, refusing to pay taxes or join the Roman military, and just defended their home areas, causing the empire to come unglued. No surprise, the entire house was rocked when the Visigoths under Alaric I took advantage of the execution of Stilicho in 408 by Arcadius through jealousy, and returned and romped through Italy and sacked Rome on Aug. 24-27, 410 (first time since the Celtic Gauls in 387 B.C.E.), call it the original 9/11, being Christians albeit Arian heretics they spared the churches, spurring St. Augustine to publish his 22-vol. Latin bestseller The City of God, a new interpretation of St. John's Revelation that the heavenly New Jerusalem should be their goal rather than an earthly one, causing Christians themselves to become ambivalent about defending the empire from barbarian attacks as long as they had their reservations in heaven secured, and a lot of them to turn into monks and nuns and hole-up in monasteries and nunneries - this after a century spent in bitter civil wars to get everybody on the same team, which only made the impact greater, go ask Edward Gibbon about it. If only they had kept church and state separate and retained the Edict of Toleration so that pagans and heretics could continue to feel like they had something to fight for - alas, the Western empire's days were numbered because of their own narrow-minded intolerance. Meanwhile the Germanic Arian Vandals from modern-day Poland invaded Gaul over the Rhine River on Dec. 31, 406, and in 409 they ended up in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain), giving their name to the region of Vandalusia, er, Andalusia in S Spain, causing the Romans to invite the Visigoths to invade Spain in 418 to kick their butts, and in 429 after deciding to illegally immigrate to North Africa under king (428-77) Genseric (Gaiseric) (389-477) ("spear king"), killing St. Augustine in the African town of Hippo, then taking Carthage, they were welcomed as liberators from the slave-master Romans and taught to sail ships, turning them into seafaring pirates who loved to vandalize Roman cities. That's right, blondes used to be Barbary pirates. There must have been some kinky interracial sex too, ask Muammar al-Gaddafi. As a reward, the Romans let the Visigoths have land in S Gaul to set up their own kingdom, which ended up becoming their biggest mistake.
As the West was groaning under barbarian incursions, the East was humming along like busy buzzing bees. Byzantine emperor (408-50) Theodosius II "the Calligrapher" (401-50) become emperor of the East in 408, being crowned as a boy but then growing up and promulgating the Theodosian Law Code (Codex Theodosianus) in 438 that was used in both the East and West. He also built the Theodosian Walls around Constantinople, either double or triple depending on whom you talk to, but totally impregnable and never taken, even in 1453 (they broke through an unguarded gateway). Too bad, in 425 after his intolerant lifetime virgin sister Pulcheria ("beautiful") (399-453) (who acted as his regent from 408-16, and controlled him ever since) put him up to it for authorizing new synagogues to be built and adjudicating disputes between Jews and Christians, T2 ordered the execution of Jewish physician and Nasi (Hebrew for prince) (since 400) Gamaliel ("recompense of God") VI, who became the last Nasi of the Jewish Sanhedrin, abolishing his office in 429, and causing the House of Hillel (Hebrew for greatly praised) to become extinct, along with the Semicha, the tradition of judicial authority in an unbroken line from Moses. Yes, the original Nazis were Jews, but the Christians acted like Nazis towards them, and you know what that brings, no you don't, but it won't be Christian forgiveness :)
But I'm trying to scope the history of Islam, so I better get back to the subject. About the time of Constantine the Great, nearby Ethiopia (actually it was called Abyssinia back then), right across the narrow Red Sea from Arabia (the east coast of Ethiopia was called Punt, as in you could punt a football across it) converted to Christianity, and tried to come in from the sidelines with and without Byzantine help for centuries, which only pissed off them proud bedouins more, making them harder to persuade except by the sword, since they didn't have Contract Bridge yet, sorry there again, Omar Sharif. Too bad, in 451 the Council of Chalcedon (Fourth Ecumenical Council) of 500 bishops, called in the city of Chalcedon across from Constantinople by Byzantine emperor (450-7) Marcian (Flavius Marcianus) (396-457), and presided over by the patriarch of Constantinople caused a split between the Syriac Orthodox Church of Syria, Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria (which Ethopia was part of), and Armenian Apostolic Church on the one side, and the Latin Roman and Greek Byzantine churches on the other over the life-death matter of whether Christ, who was both God and man, had one composite incarnate nature "from two" natures, human and divine, known as the Monophysite ("single nature") doctrine, or was "in two" separate coexisting natures, now known as the Orthodox doctrine. The big-fish-in-a-small-pond emperor sided against the Monophysites, and the council affirmed the power-drive formula that Jesus had two natures, and was/is truly God and truly man simultaneously, but without mixture (alteration, absorption or confusion) of the two, in hypostatic union (which had been decided in the First Council of Ephesus in 431), and declared the 449 Second Council of Ephesus a "robber synod" and annulled its proceedings, causing the persecution of Monophysite churches in Egypt and Syria to begin, which ended up adding to the permanent split between the Eastern and Western empires, although for the time being the council granted the See of Constantinople the same privileges of honor as the See of Rome, with the primacy going to the Roman See. You might say the Big Bang Theory of how God made Christ in Mary's womb by making him both human and divine at the beginning won over the Darwinian Theory that Christ started out as a human egg in Mary's womb and then was instantly evolved by God into divine somehow, with Christ's human nature "dissolving like a drop of honey in the sea" in his divine nature, or that he had a human body but divine soul or mind, call it the Creation theory, er, forget it, at least Dan Brown knows that Christ was just a man and it was all a plot by Constantine, who must have backdated the resurrection from the dead and sitting at the right hand of God part. Of course the Jews were kibbutzing on the side that the putz never was resurrected and is in Hell, and no man can be God, and he's just a cursed blasphemer, yada yada yada, maybe it's time to finally get even with the entire Christian outfit with an Antichrist they can put together in their spare time in the back of their kosher meat shops. Behind this institutional split was actually the age-old Greek vs. Roman thingie, as in Greeks are brainier and more logical but Romans are more practical plus command an army and have made the Greeks into their house tutors, kind of like Spock vs. Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Too bad, spoilsport Marcian let it go to his head that the Romans think they're holier than the Byzantines and their Roman top bishop is higher than their Greek top bishop, and refused to help the Western Roman empire when it was being torn apart by the mounted hordes of mean 3.5 ft. midget Attila the Hun (406-53) in 451-2, and the Germanic Vandals of North Africa in 455, who sacked Rome, contributing to its fall to the Arian heretic Visigoths in 476, who already had split off Spain and Gaul, and now had three little kingies taking the place of one big emperor, leaving the pope surrounded by a sea of armed barbarian heretics, like in the Planet of the Apes.
After Rome fell in the fall, er, late summer on Sept. 4, 476 C.E. to Visigoth chieftain Odoacer (Odovacer) (435-93), checkmate, Byzantine emperor (474-91) Zeno (426-91), from the wild area of the Taurus Mts. in Turkey called Isauria, who refused to help his Western Roman brothers in order to make Odoacer his patrician (so he could claim rule of both sides) got double-crossed, and after Odoacer claimed to be king of Italy he talked Ostrogoth king Theodoric ("people's king") the Great (454-526) into invading Italy, killing him and taking over in 493, freaking the pope and his Latin crowd out with yet another Arian regime. He proved a fairly good ruler although he never took steps to megamerge the two pops. into a thriving nation, and when he died the remaining educated Latins got trampled in the succession struggle, and the Western Roman Empire was permanently out of sight and mind, after which Constantinople ruled the Roman Empire (which is what they called it, although we now call it the Byzantine Empire since the original Greek name of Constantinople was Byzantium), unsuccessfully trying to take the Western side back from the Goths, only to see new German tribes such as the Lombards (Longbeards) move into N Italy, leaving them with the S part, with a dead zone in the middle that was depopulated by all the wars, plagues and famines, ruled by the pope as the Papal States. The top Byzantine emperor (527-65) after that was Justinian I the Great (483-565), who was doing just great until the Plague of Justinian (bubonic plague) hit in 541-2, causing the empire to go into a permanent decline because it kept returning every generation until around 750. What did I say about bugs controlling history? Good time for a new world mental plague to go with it? Not a natural one, but one cooked up in a lab? I wonder who was waiting for their big chance to get even, starts with J? In 529-34 the Justinian Code was issued, making life hard for pagans and Jews, while continuing the systematic condemnation of slavery. Of course, when Islam arrived, it did a land office business reenslaving Christians. Meanwhile in Gaul, Clovis I (466-511) became king of the pagan Franks ("freemen") in 481, and converted to Roman Catholicism along with his subjects in 496, becoming the first German group that didn't go for Arianism, kicking the Visigoths out in 507 and turning Gaul into I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter France, which became the pope's main hot dog military arm for centuries, going to their heads and causing them to consider their language and culture to be superior to the other Germans, which they helped along by developing that frog talk now known as French, which is why so many kings wanted to be called Louis (loo-ee), that's frog talk for Clovis. Later, after their Visigothic German cousins in Spain got their ass kicked by the Muslims, they stood firm and threw them back over the Pyrenees, making them even more superior don't say hot dogs or wieners, how about raw oysters and baguettes with brie, culiminating in the 20th cent. with Charles de Gaulle, who lamented that he couldn't impose unity on a country with 265 different kinds of cheese.
Did I mention the Jews? You see, there were a lot of Jews in Arabia back then. Why? Because after all the centuries of Christian hate, discrimination and persecution, this was one of the best places to hide out from them. I know, I know, Roman Catholic Aussie Hollyweird "Mad Max", "Lethal Weapon", "The Passion of the Christ" actor-director Mel Gibson (1956-) pissed a lot of Jews off with his drunken assertion in 2006 that Jews caused all the wars, but in Muhammad's case it's undeniable, and here's why: they created this Frankenstein.
To back up a bit, devout Muslims who believe every word of the Quran is direct from God don't want you to know that Arabia had a history before it, but not only did they have some, they had their first Hitler, and he was a gag, Jew. In 522 the Jewish Himyarites of the did-I-say Jewish Kingdom of Saba in S Arabia (Yemen) (founded 110 B.C.E.) (who lived in a land swarming with Arab polytheist pagans, but at least were fairly safe from the horrible Jewish-persecuting Byzantine and Roman Christians) under king (518-25) Yusuf Dhu Nuwas (Nawas) (-525) (a converted Arab) began a campaign to convert Coptic Christians to Judaism by force to get even for their persecution of Jews, massacring the Christian pop. of the Himyarite capital Zafar ("victory") in the Yemeni highlands 80 mi. SSE of Sana'a, and burning their churches, destroying other Christian fortresses in the highlands, I love the smell of napalm in the morning, it smells like victory, then going after the Christian Axumite oasis of Najran in SW Arabia near the Yemeni frontier and massacring its 20K pop., then writing letters to the kings of Iraq and Persia encouraging them to do ditto, which Byzantine emperor (518-27) Justin I (450-527) found out about, causing him to help Coptic Christian king Kaleb (Caleb) (Ella Atbeha) (Hellestheaeus) (St. Elesban) of Axum on the other side of the Red Sea in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to come to their aid. In 523 after defeating the Christian invaders, Dhu Wah Diddy ordered them to give up that Christ crap and become Jews, and after they refused, he had them thrown alive into a burning ditch, something even the Quran can't cover up, referring to them as "The cursed people of the ditch" (Sura 85:4). The news pissed off Byzantine Not Just in Time I, who declared war on the kingdom of Saba and sent a fleet with 70K Christian Abyssinians to help the Axumites, who kicked their butts in 525, after which the Himyarites were assimilated into the N Arabian tribes, and Abyssinian leader Eriat became ruler of Yemen, after which the Persians ended Axumite rule in Yemen around 575 by helping the remaining Himyarites throw them out then taking over. So you see, the idea of convert-or-die started with the Jews, not the Muslims or Christians, pretty easy call for any official on the football field of Time, but it was an Arab League game, and you know what sore losers Arabs are. So, if Duey Huey Louie was a converted Arab Terminator who was stopped because his army was too small, why wouldn't these Arab ex-Jews and/or their original Jewish handlers set out to create a T2 that would have a much bigger army of Arabs and finish off all Christians and other non-Jews, er, Muslims in Byzantium, Iraq, Persia, even New York City, it's possible, even probable, no certain, Muhammad was the original Liquid Metal Man, with no face, no body, he's every Arab, with a Mission: Impossible to inscribe in their minds.
Christianity sucks, quitting Christianity sucks even less with Nicorette? Did I mention that Jews never got along with Romans before, during or after they went Christian, so no wonder they wanted to get away from them, and who can blame them if they set up a secret pardon the expression Apollo Project to create their worst nightmare, and only wanted to return to Christian Rome, East or West, behind an army of Christian-killers with bulletproof brains? The 325 Council of Nicaea separated the celebration of Easter from the Jewish Passover, with the soundbyte "For it is unbecoming beyond measure that on this holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews. Henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people... We ought not, therefore, to have anything in common with the Jews... We desire our dearest brethren to separate ourselves from the detestable company of the you know whats. How, then, could we follow these Jews, who are almost certainly blinded." In 343-81 the Synod of Laodicea approved Canon 38: "It is not lawful to receive unleavened bread from the Jews, nor to be partakers of their impiety." St. Hilary of Poitiers (300-68) ("Hammer of the Arians") referred to Jews as a perverse people whom God has cursed for evah and evah. St. Ephrem the Syrian (306-73) (author of over 400 hymns) referred to synagogues as brothels, sing it, brother. St. John Chrysostom (347-407) called the Jews "inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the Devil", adding "Debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of pigs and lusty goats. They know only one thing, to satisfy their gullets, get drunk, to kill and maim one another. They murder their offspring and burn them to the Devil... The Jewish disease must be guarded against. The Christian's duty is to hate the Jews." Taking his great advice, Byzantine emperor (379-95) Theodosius I the Great permitted the destruction of Jewish synagogues if it served a religious purpose - if? In 380 Bishop St. Ambrose of Milan ordered the burning of a synagogue, calling it "an act pleasing to God." In 415 Bishop St. Cyril expelled the Jews from Alexandria, while St. Augustine explained "The true image of the Hebrew is Judas Iscariot, who sells the Lord for silver. The Jew can never understand the Scriptures and forever will bear the guilt for the death of Jesus." When Platonic pagan brain babe Hypatia (370-415), head of the Library of Alexandria and best hope of the world at that time complained about what they were doing to Jews and pagans alike, a Christian mob of monks scraped off her skin with sharpened oyster shells and set her on fire until she shut up permanently, which incidentally later gave them ideas about what to do with so-called witches. In 418 St. Jerome (creator of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, no Hebrew or Greek allowed) wrote of a synagogue: "If you call it a brothel, a den of vice, the Devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever you will, you are still saying less than it deserves." Later, between 489 and 519 Christian mobs had a free hand, destroying the synagogues in Antioch, nearby Daphne, and Ravenna, Italy.
Of course, Jews have never been a monolithic bloc, but just in case, in 529 Justinian I not only closed the Neo-Platonic Academy at Athens, plunging the Christian world into the original Microsoft Windows Dark Ages, but passed a law ordering the synagogues of the other Jewish white meat Samaritans centered in Neapolis, Palestine destroyed, and took away their rights to bequeath property, causing them to revolt in the summer, only to be summarily crushed, after which their leader Julian's head was sent to the emperor, and the 20K remaining Samaritan rebels were sold into slavery.
So, to make a long story short, in 570 C.E., the year of Muhammad's birth, Mucca, er, Mecca was invaded by Abraha (Abreha) ('Abraha al-Ashram) (Abraha bin as-Saba'h) of Yemen (-554) (Eriat's successor, who assassinated him, this could be your lucky day), who built the 80m x 25m Al-Qulays (al-Qalis) Cathedral (Arabic for ecclesia or church) in Sana'a to rival the Kaaba, which he wanted to destroy in order to turn all that cash to his till, arriving with a train of elephants and an African Ethiopian Christian army to kick pagan ass for Christ one mo' time and come in the for the kill. Too bad, Abraha was repulsed from the walls after allegedly being pelted by showers of stones dropped by birds, probably really smallpox.
Shazam, two months later, look what the storks brought in. On the 12th day of Raby' I, the world was dis, er, graced, no, disgraced bigtime by the birth of Kutam (Khatam) (Kid Tommy?), later known as Muhammad (Mohammad) (Mohammed) (Mahomet) (570-632) (Arabic for Praiseworthy One, the names Ahmed, Ahmad, Hamdan, Hamid, Mahmud, and Mahmoud being variants), son of Abdallah (Abdullah) (who died almost 6 mo. before he was born), named by his grandfather Abdul Motalleb, the defender of Mecca (digger of the Well of Zamzam), whose father Amr ("ruler") Hashim ("pulverizer") ibn Abd al-Manaf (Hashem Ben Abd Manaf) (-497) (nicknamed Hashim because he gave pilgrims to Mecca free broth with pulverized bread in it) was founder of the Banu Hashim clan, and the first to equip camel trade caravans and make the town a trade center, with a special edict from the Ethiopian and Byzantine emperors exempting them from duties or taxes. To quote the #1 Western historian of that era, Edward Gibbon (1737-94), "[Muhammad,] the only son of Abdallah and Amina, was born at Mecca, four years after the death of Justinian, and two months after the defeat of the Abyssinians, whose victory would have introduced into the Caaba the religion of the Christians" - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-89, Ch. 50. Call me a conspiracy softie, but I smell a rat. Did I mention that Muhammad's mother Amina ("faithful") bint Wahb (Amina is Arabic for Mary?) was pregnant with the little devil for four years, no wonder his daddy Abdallah croaked before he was born, don't ask why one meaning of the Arabic phrase "Abd 'Allah" is "servant of Allah" when there was no Islam yet.
So, to recap, born into a prosperous merchant clan, Big Mad Homicide, er, Homey, er, Madhomet was of the tribe of Qureysh and the clan of Hashem, which claimed lineal descent from Abraham's son Ishmail by Abraham's wife Sarah's Egyptian slave girl Hagar ("forsaken"), mother of the Arabic race, not to be confused with the comic strip Hagar the Horrible. Speaking of horrible, Hagar was the first Arab woman to be circumcised, by Sarah, making her the model for all future clitoris-hating Arab muddahs and bridegrooms. Too bad, Jehovah already had them Ishmaelites down pat, as proved by his own words in Da Bible about Ishmael: "He will be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen" - Gen. 16:12. In other words, he would never make them his prophets, tough titties. So, if I were an Ishmaelite who wanted to start a new religion and supersede the Jewish godman Christ, the first item on my agenda would be to shuck the Jewish Bible along with Jehovah, plus the Christian Bible along with its claims that Christ was the final prophet, and create my own, like Joseph Smith or Elron Humbug, and promote myself as a godman too no matter how hard it would be to coverup my dirty laundry, after which I could get all the hot young poontang I wanted and call it a message from God that polygamy is holy even for monotheists, like Father Abraham did it all the time, right, pass the sheep butter. And this time I would learn from experience that huddling at night to do it when the rulers aren't watching is too slow a way to spread it, so why not go 180 degrees and make everybody do it in broad daylight five times a day, and kill anybody who tries to interfere, Allah is Great, whap, don't make them respect you make them fear you, take the Medieval Tweet market by storm. Voila: the Raghead Antichrist!
Like Damien ("to subdue") the Antichrist (who is expected to be born on 6/6/6, why not around 666 C.E.?), all of Mad Hatter's close relatives died around him. His father died 6 mo. before his birth, his mother died in his 7th year while he was visiting Medina with her, and his grandfather in his 9th year, so he was raised by his butt, er, uncles, and his orphan's inheritance was a house, five camels, a flock of sheep and an Ethiopian maidservant, managing my finances runs me down? Maybe his father was the Devil and his mother was a virgin, what's the matter with being you mama?
Details of his early life are sketchy. In 583 Kid Tommy travelled to Syria with his uncle (head of the Banu Hashim clan) Imran ("prosperity") Abu Talib ("seeker of knowledge") ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib (549-619), and met with the (Christian?) monk Bahira ("shining", "bright") in Basra, who allegedly predicted that he would grow up to be a great prophet, maybe after a little sodomy, who can prove it in court? In 586 Muhammad the Propeller-head Prophet participated in the Hatfield-McCoy tribal Fijar (Sacrilegious) (Immoral) War, but didn't participate in the fighting, only helping to pick up the arrows afterward. In 591 he became an active member of Hilful Fudul, a league for the relief of the distressed. In 594 the 24-y.-o. bachelor stud became the business mgr. of 40-y.-o. wealthy noble-born widow Lady Khadija bint Khuwaylid (553-619) ("early baby", related to the Greek word Asia, meaning East or sunrise), and began leading her trade caravan to Syria and back, then married her (his first wife) in 595, turning him into a player on the Arabian scene. A woman, you're using a woman? She's dry, but I got plenty of sheep butter. Meanwhile for reference, the same year Japanese Empress Suiko issued the Flourishing Three Treasures Edict, officially recognizing Buddhism.
Since his clan already had perfected some kind of WMDs in order to repulse the pesky Christians, it would naturally be the next item on the agenda to find a way to unite all the feuding tribes under one flag and set out to conquer the world for turban-and-beard-wearing male supremacist throwbacks. So, as the year 600 rolled around, Arabian pagan polytheist Mecca caravan driver Kutam was wealthy, connected, and poised for greatness, but first a little makeover.
I don't know if this is significant, oh yes I do, but in 602 Byzantine emperor (602-10) Phocas (Phokas) ("a seal") (the first Byzantine emperor to break the old Roman tradition of being clean-shaven by sporting a beard, the one on the Roman side who first broke the tradition being Hadrian, the one who defeated the Bar Kochba Revolt, hence it would bring back old memories and make Jews see red) attemped to convert the Jews to Christianity after they supported the Persians who were invading them, and in 609 Patriarch Anastasios ("resurrection") II of Antioch was lynched by Jews angry over his attempt to make them accept condemned blasphemer Christ and the !*?!* Trinity, I'm dead, pull the trigger. Also in 602, Pope (590-604) Gregory ("vigilant, watchful") I the Great (540-604) (first Christian monk to make pope) wrote to the populace to avoid "following the perfidy of the Jews" by observing the Sabbath on Saturday, although it was okay for the Anglo-Saxons to keep their pagan Easter (named after the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess Eostre or Ostara, from the Greek word for duh, East or sunrise) eggs as long as they were recast in PC Christian terms, with no mention of Ostara changing her pet bird into a rabbit, Osterhase, which lays brightly colored eggs to give to kids to symbolize fertility; instead, since eggs are forbidden for the 40 days of Lent preceding Easter, think of it as a diet breaker. Since Easter is the season for baptisms, and converts wear brand new white robes to symbolize their rebirths, it became popular to take a long walk in one's new clothes after Easter Mass, becoming the origin of Oprah Winfrey. This might be just a coincidence, but it's too cool not to mention, namely, the black fire-tongued Hindu goddess Kali ("black") was first mentioned about 600 C.E., the goddess of death and time, as in you're time's up, give me your goodies, becoming a favorite with the Thuggee cult of professional robber-murderers, see any Indiana Jones flick, maybe they got it from Islam, maybe Islam got it from them, the 600s sure were an era of death religions, send in the History Dicks. Her hubby is Shiva, who likes to lounge around on the ground covered in white cremation ashes while she stands on him, that's too kinky to be sex isn't it?
Call it another coincidence, in 610 Kutam was converted by the local Jews to belief in the One True God Jehovah, changing history bigtime. Too bad, since Jews had long before decided that they couldn't use that name Jehovah anymore, because it was too holy to pronounce (which is why nobody knows how to really pronounce it - maybe it's more like Yahoo or Yahawooa, figure it out and check back with me after you suddenly regain your youth plus eternal life), they just called him the One True God, which proved to be the mistake of the millennium as illiterate Kid Tommy got it mixed up and changed the name to Allah, meaning Hu, er, Who Da Big Alpha, as in Alpha without the Omega, and began to talk about it to his wife and friends, obviously hoping to become an Arabian prophet and convert them to monotheism too, sibling rivalry is good. There's nothing you can do that can't be done, there's nothing you can sing that can't sung. Actually, the word Allah, which some claim is a contraction for the Arabic words "al ilah", meaning "the God" goes way back before Muhammad, meaning the chief god of the Big 360 in the Kaaba, and all Muhammad did was tell his followers that Allah is the only true god, and that they must dispense with the rest, since he's got the trademark, copyright and patent rights secured so he can start his own monopoly like Bill Gates did with Microsoft and spread junky PCs to flood out the far better Apples and Macs, on July 16 the race is on. And don't miss the list of beautiful-sounding Arabic Allah attribute names, including the Harmer, the Compeller, the Imperious, the Humiliator, and the Bringer of Death, you get your cake and can eat cupcakes too.
Since he was full of ill, i.e., illiterate, and couldn't read Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek, or anything else, and was too lazy to learn with all those hot ladies around (actually up till then Arabic wasn't a written language, Gabriel invented that for them too, like Joseph Smith with his special glasses), Cute Tom needed a speed plan, and how lucky that on Apr. 6, 610 on the Lailat-ul Qadar (Night of Power) in the 9th month called Ramadan ("to be scorched") the first (last in 632) surreal sura of the grab-yours-while-supplies-last 114-sura, 6,346-verse Quran (Qur'an) (Koran) (Arabic for recitation), the final and perfect message from God to all humanity (really a fake Bible revealed to him by Satan to form an army against the true God, or the output of a secret literature factory in Arabia, probably Jew-powered, using Muhammad as their front and dummy corporation in order to mobilize the Arabs into an army to forever keep the Christians out, which got out of control?) allegedly descended whole into his soul (making him the "Seal of the Prophets", the last and final) in the dark no-sports-attire-allowed 13 ft. x 5 ft. 9 in. Hira Cave near the summit of the Mount of Light (Jabal al-Nur) near Mecca from an Arabic-speaking angel calling himself Gabriel (Jibril) (really a demon of Satan, appearing to him as the Million-Dollar Man-Angel of Light after he ate some psychedelic mushrooms, or maybe a clever Jew who could throw his voice?), who ordered him three times to "Recite!" (Iqraa in Arabic), to which he kept answering that he didn't know how to read, then gave him the direct words of Allah: Good morning, I was just thinking, maybe we got off to a bad start here, we're going to be working together, how about some tennis? Excuse me while I kiss the sky, but if this isn't a conspiracy and coverup in order to launch a New World Order, I don't know what is. And all signs point to the Jews, sorry. It was like with JFK, he had to go, he really had to go, and they couldn't let him leave Dallas alive, sure it's a lone gunman, chuckle. How's this for a Christian back-achya: "But even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we have preached to you, let him be accursed." (Galatians 1:8) Speaking of accursed, by the way, the Yemeni Quran, discovered in the Great Mosque of Sana'a in Yemen in 1972 shows the dirty laundry of the supposedly perfect Quran of textual evolution, blowing the cover story of the angel and the perfect recitation of a perfect unchangeable text, I guess Muhammad and the early Muslims were a little bit insana'a, plus liars and frauds, and all them zillions of zombies, slaves and corpses was for nothing, and all them extremist Muslims base their worldview on intellectual sheep mush.
Ah, but the Quran was verfied at the source by tons of qualified expert witnesses, like the Book of Moron. Not exactly. After his first experience with the angel, Muhammad allegedly went to his wife Lady Khadija's cousin Waraqa bin Naufal bin Asad bin 'Abdul 'Uzza, a Christian convert who could read the Christian scriptures in Arabic (since written Arabic didn't exist yet, it must have been Hebrew and/or Greek, probably the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament), who confirmed that it wasn't an evil Jinn like M thought, but Gabriel, the same angel that Allah sent to Moses, let me tell you about my life insurance company. I bet he didn't say Allah, but the short answer is no, it wasn't an angel, he came from the other side of the Force, you judge a tree by its fruit. Either way, this Allah was not very cosmopolitan, but very small, appearing in the Darth Vader Hira-Some-Evil Cave ("I'm your faaather, hold my hand") to an Arab goy and whispering in his ears. Of course Wacky Waraqa couldn't have been the real author of the Quran, since he had conveniently gone blind and soon died and went to Heaven, where he now wears white robes according to a vision by none other than Prophet M.
So let's recap, total honesty, unbeatable service, lifetime money-back guarantee. What do you think I have stamped on my forehead, the word dumbass? Gimme a break, the Jews invented it all, they're not the smartest people on Earth for nothing. Muhammad was their stage manager and dummy corporation, while they handed him the plays, like Shakespeare was to Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, that's the power of the ancient Internet, ease of identity fraud, 600 pissed-off Jews are looking for work. By definition, illiterate polytheist pagans who are forever fighting for their honor in endless feuds because they won't change don't won't and can't begin to come up with something new like this that depends on vast erudition of the Jewish literature. The illiterate minds of a whole subcontinent of wildass Arabs were their tabula rasas that they could mold to their desires, especially with deliberate disinformation about the Jewish Old Testament and Greek New Testament. Maybe to them Jews it was a public service to convert them out of their polytheism into monotheism, and they naturally made sure that they could never be converted to Christianity for good measure, after which some of them went too far and got ideas about turning them into an anti-Christian terrorist force, thinking they could go along with them and return to Europe in style, not realizing that you can take an Arab out of Arabia but you can't take Arabia out of an Arab. I don't know, ask them if you got a medium handy, I'm just a Historyscoper and figure things out with evidence and deductive reasoning.
Maybe you think I'm a lone nut who made the Jewish origin theory of Islam up. Actually, it's old news to historyscopers and you're just an Islam history ignoramus product of the post-Christian school system, and that's why you read this far, you want to lean some history, so I hope you'll stick with me to the end, even if you have to come back 50 times till you do. The Quran's version of monotheism is "a bastard Judaism of Ishmael, and the post-Christian and anti-Christian Judaism of the Talmud", according to History of the Christian Church, Vol. 4, Mediaeval Christianity, A.D. 590-1073 by Swiss historian Philip Schaff (1819-93), among many others. That's right, the Jewish Talmud (Hebrew for "teaching"), an endless pile of profound crap they genned up after being kicked out of Israel and losing their ability to practice their religion with a temple, priests, and sacrifices, causing the stateless tribe to be taken over by the ever-tricky rabbis (teachers). It was filled with snide remarks and lies about Jesus, which happened to find their way into the Quran, call it their Apollo Project, but they didn't have to worry about exposure for a thousand years since nobody but a lifelong Jew could read through it anyway, if he lived long enough. So to cover their tracks, the Jewish authors of the Quran, who probably invented written Arabic also, start it out by having it call the Jewish Bible a fraud corrupted by the Jews, claiming that Jehovah's covenant with Abraham and Isaac (father of the Jews) in Genesis Ch. 17 was really Allah's covenant with Abraham and Ishmael (father of the Arabs) (see Gen. Ch. 16), making Allah seem forever at war with the Jewish-Christian Bible god Jehovah, who is of course now the Devil who caused the Jews to corrupt the original texts and worship him instead, you are such a Boy Scout, you see everything in black and white, if only a paper shredder could talk. Even the hopeful message of the Bible in Genesis 22:15-18 that "By your descendants shall all the nations of the Earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice" is turned dark, the Quran's version being that "There has arisen between us and you, enmity and hatred forever, unless ye believe in Allah and him alone" (Quran 60:4), and that when Abraham told his daddy "I will pray for forgiveness for you", he was not being an excellent example, making Islam not the religion of love but the religion of endless seething hate, not a brother or sister or cousin but the eternal hater of Christianity, whose founder uttered the command "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" Luke 6:27-28. No wonder that history ignoramuses like Pres. Obama (in Nov. 2009) get away with uttering lame soundbytes like "The rituals of Hajj and Eid-ul-Adha both serve as reminders of the shared Abrahamic roots of three of the world's major religions".
Of course the dark angel that nobody but Muhammad saw knows because he's the messenger sent by the hold-on-Sheena true god Allah, who is not Jehovah but also is, depending on if the Jews accept him, which they won't, hehe, you're illiterate but you can get as far as alpha, right camel faces, you accept him and take our, er, his orders while we watch. Allah is making guess-who-you Muhammad the crowning finale to the line of divine Old Testament teachers and prophets from Abraham to Jesus (never mind him being a Jew, we threw him out), and is uncorrupting his own Bible through him, especially the one used by those pesky Christians who claim that Jesus is God, and that's blasphemy, just what the Jews themselves convicted him of, it was due process of law, hehe, and we have been given a bum rap by Christians ever since, that's why we're hiding out down here in this sandlot, and now you dumbass Arabs can get even for us as cannon fodder for our new 7th century Vietnam. And Grandmaster G will implant the rest of the gold edition of the corrected Bible directly in Murray the K's heart bar by bar so the Jews can play both sides against the middle with plausible deniability, I have no recollection, Senator, shades of gray, not black and white, yes, black and white, kill them all and let God sort them out later while we charge high interest on armaments loans. I know you're no genius, Ohammedmay, so just come back once a week, take your mushroom, and we'll give you another musical lyric to memorize and sing for your friends, ain't it beautiful, unholy rock music by the original 7th century Simon and Garfunkel posing as the Rolling Stones, together we'll go far, to the top of the charts forever.
So, after getting his act down pat with private rehearsals in Da Cave, Praiseworthy One (name change provided by his grandfather as described above) began a 23-year Tour of Duty as Allah's Marine in the sand jungles of dope-kingdom Colombiarabia, with his first convert being (no surprise) his wife Lady Khadijah, followed by his son-in-law (shoulda been but wasn't his successor) Ali ("the greatest") (600-661), freed African slave and adopted son Zayd (Zaid) ("abundance", "growth") ibn Harithah (578-629) (he's black, so he can't be a contender, although he became the only one of Muhammad's Sahaba or companions mentioned by name in the Quran), and admirer-friend (later father-in-law and successor, who scores big points by giving his infant daughter to Big M for fun in bed, what an example he will set for Muslim fathers) Abu Bakr (Bekr) (572-634), the original Three Stooges.
Thus was born the sick evil crazy lying mental junk cult of Islam, from the Arabic word "aslama", meaning submission, and the Hebrew word "shalom", meaning peace (the true Arabic word for peace is "soth", so they later created the word salaam as a coverup). Obviously the coined word Islam is meant to mean both submission and peace, with the subliminal message of "Submit or Die", with either death of mental independence or physical death being understood as the ultimate peace. The cardinal doctrine is the did-I-mention total submission to Allah (who sounds suspiciously like the old Jewish god Baal AKA Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, the kind that like to swarm on shit and stink up your shined boots), either by conversion or murder (because after everybody is either submitting to Allah or dead, there will be peace, right, the ultimate peace), which spreads by force and fear rather than persuasion (but not really, because it's a combo religion-state so only the state part spreads by force, you aren't forced to convert just treated like dung until you do), and takes over the brain like a mental virus without Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo to come to the rescue, maintained by daily public brainwash sessions relying on the hypnotic Arabic language, you said it would be a surgical strike, that's what you said, I wasn't counting on this kind of collateral damage, yes I was. The day-to-day mind waste began of adults and little children being brainwashed daily into memorizing every word of the hypnotic sing-along Queeran, programming them to become 007s with a license to kill for the Arab M from his Big Daddy Allah, do they sound like his words, he can't be clear when clarity is just what he has to avoid, but the gloves come off.
But it's a religion, fully equal to Judaism and Christianity, and entitled to equal respect when it's not powerful enough to just kill you and shut you up? It's got principles, sure, the Five Pillars of Islam, Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp, and Groucho, er, Salat or Salah (public ritual prayer) (mass hypnotism), Zakat (almsgiving), Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca, wearing the ihram, to commemorate God's sparing of Abraham's son Ishmael), Sawm (fasting during Ramadan), and Shahada (shades of hell?), recitation of the prostrate-supporting Kalimah ("the phrase") jingle "La ilaha ila Allah, Muhammada rasul Allah", translation "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his final prophet", pass the ginkgo biloba. The Arabic term for a religious duty is fard. To be a good farding Muslim, pray five times a day in the Qiblah (Kiblah) direction towards Mecca and the Cubelah (don't ask what they do on a ship, plane or rocket ship), bowing your head to the floor (usually covered with a prayer mat) and baring your neck to show that you know who owns it, along with the head at the end of it, and, if Allah doesn't lop off your head so you can stand back up, it's time to go out and kill kill kill till Allah gets his fill, which he never does, you're Allah, dumbo, do it for Muhammad. After you die, guess in what direction your head must be buried, you got it, you're iron filings the Cube is the magnet. Not that you would even have a head on your shoulders if you refused to pray five times every day for life, since the penalty for refusing is guess what, death by beheading, done by a happy Muslim executioner, roll it all together and make it stick. Each of the daily prayers has its own name and extensive rules and regulations, and the Dhuhr (pronounced zuhr) midday prayer is replaced on Fridays with the Jumu'ah prayer, in case you wondered. All Muslims must celebrate Ramadan with a month of sunrise-to-sunset (fajr-to-isa) fasting followed by Eid ul-Fitr, a pain-relief-without-messy-creams-or-jells celebration on the final day. Why do Muslims like to behead those who resist believing in the Quran and submitting to Sharia? Answer: a severed head is about the same size as a Quran? I guess Muhammad thought that to make his horrible intolerant compulsive mental slavery fit only for illiterate polytheist polygamous clit-slicing slave-owning Arabs look equal to real non-compulsive religions like Judaism and Christianity he had to pile on coercive commands, like giving out alms to poor Muslims as a cover story, fasting once a year for heart health, and visiting Mecca at least once to kiss the Cube of Satan and drink the mineral water of Hell, the bitterness giving you a clue if you ain't stupid, you and I want the same thing, only till now you've done all the work, the little fish, but I can help you get the big fish. Speaking of work, one of the most insidious doctrines promulgated by Islam is Inshalla (Arabic "In sa Allah"), meaning "It is Allah's will", which Muslims forever use as an excuse for poverty or from having to have a Western-style worth ethic. By the way, hate happens in Islam, so one time when they get over their laziness for awhile is on the Hajj in the stoning ritual, where they furiously throw stones at stone walls representing the Devil and his infidels and blow off steam before they return for the struggle.
What exactly about Islam causes Westerners to sense that it's pure evil? It's not necessarily the part about the dark cave, since that's obviously a lame attempt to ape St. John's grotto and change the ending. Simple, it's staring you in the face like an ass crack. In Islam, all believers are Allah's slaves, and he commands all who don't do what he says to be killed by his believers, so to become a Muslim is to accept the duty of holy murder, holy cow, it's like getting paid to shop. In Christianity, for contrast, believers are children of God, with free will to disobey him, and yes, he promises that he will judge them after Armageddon, but otherwise tells them not to kill each other, even using the L Word. Okay, technically Christians are slaves of Christ, which is why they call him Lord, but Christ doesn't command you to kill for him, rather suffer for him and imitate him, and doesn't order you beheaded for apostasy like Allah does. So who would you rather have live next door? Don't think too hard in this nuclear age or you might be tempted to try the Tom Tancredo (1945-) solution to Islam's world crimes of dropping a giant dirty nuke on Mecca, obliterating the Kaaba and turning the whole city into a giant deadly radiactive pit, after which any remaining true believers who won't admit that Allah is a fraud will have to visit it like he ordered and face fatal radioactive poisoning, or else face execution by other Muslims for disobeying his orders, pardon me while I break out my jar of Vaseline and put some on my face and ass :)
What am I calling it, an evil satanic cult masquerading as a religion? Duh, right, like you should go to prison if you do everything it tells you to beyond the Five Pillars. At least it's got some good points, if you're an old skool male chauvinist pig. One, it's easy to indoctrinate little children into it and keep them in it for life, even the females. Two, since males have a divine right to engage in polygamy, pedophilia, wife beating (Quran 4:34), and female circumcision for their child brides, I smell popcorn, plus other male chauvinist goodies and perks too numerous to list, it's easy to grow into and hard to grow out of, plus after you actually murder somebody for Allah and Muhammad, you know you've crossed the line and there's no way back, that is unless you accept that Christ died for your sins and was the final prophet, not an intermediate prophet who didn't die for your sins, was not the son of God, did not rise from the dead, and isn't sitting on the right hand of God waiting to judge you, and already judged Muhammad, who isn't up there with him, gotcha, is that all you have to say. Luckily in a land without much water, there is no requirement for baptism for members, just a daily touch-up before the five-times-a-day ritual prayer, no you can't call in sick, watch that ass crack in front of your face, see if you like the taste of Hidden Valley Ranch. But calling it a religion on the same par as Judaism and Christianity is sick, since there's no way to gain eternal life through a mere change in heart, indeed no promise of paradise except via martyrdom while obeying did-I-mention Sura 9:5 ("the Verse of the Sword"), which teaches believers to go out and kill infidels (kafirs), to quote verbatim, "Fight and slay the infidels wherever you find them", while screaming the voodoo words "Allahu akbar!", meaning Allah is not just some great god but the greatest god, the Acme, Big Daddy Rock, sometimes you have to make compromises, man, no you don't, man?
Too bad, illiterate Muhammad, the youngest person in history to play Major League Baseball never wrote it down, but supposedly dictated portions to his personal scribe Zayd ibn Thabit (-644) (say it until it's a habit?) under the direction of his father-in-law Abu Bakr, leaving the rest to be remembered by his followers, and not all written down until 12 years after his death.
Here's what you need to know to hail a cab in Cairo. First, no matter how intellectually bright you are, it's pretty much impossible to understand how dangerous the "real" Quran is unless you listen to some true believer "sing it" in Arabic while you get into the daily slave prostrations and lower your brains to the floor in every way for about a year. Even then, to really become a true Muslim headbanger you need to memorize it and sing it yourself acapella, like any American kid trying to copy the Beatles and Rolling Stones in his bedroom, lucky that Ham Handed Muhammad didn't have an electric guitar or we'd never best him. Lucky for Muslim parents, the whole Quran is around 80K words, but when repetitions are counted, there are really only about 2K words, it's sheet music, even kids can memorize it if they can swing an AK-47. All are encouraged to become a Huffaz, a person who has memorized the whole thing and recites it endlessly, no need to have a life, so no wonder there's 10 million of them running around now in poor Muslim lands, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, praise Allah. If you're rich and powerful and can't spare the time, try getting a special copy printed with your own blood like Saddam Hussein of Iraq did in 1997, vampires are all the rage this season, of course. Speaking of So Damn Insane, to put it plainly, it has virtually zero intellectual content like the Jewish-Christian Bible, is not filled with history, sage philosophical soundbytes, and genealogies and sermons on religion, that would take too much time, just naked buckle-up buttercup get-your-mind-right-and-go-kill-field programming, call it dumbed down for Arabs. Later you can just replay the hamster track endlessly while your victims' corpses rot and fool yourself into thinking you saved yourself by going on Hajj. The most used word is Allah, the second is "ill" or knowledge of Allah, funny what "ill" means in God's real language English. After the first short opening sura (the fatiha), the 114 suras (surahs) or chapters are organized from longest (#2) (called Baqara meaning cow or calf) to shortest (#108) (called Kausar meaning abundance or pond), each being divided into ayas (verses) (6,236 total), the longest Sura 2 Al-Baqara ("calf") containing 286, and the shortest Sura 108 Al-Kausar ("abundance" or "pond") containing three, something about Muhammad having the greatest number of followers and being the sweet pond on the day of resurrection, and how the unbelievers are bereft of all goodness, oh he himself has said it, and it's greatly to his credit, that he is an Arab man, he i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Arab man. Sura 1 Al-Fatiha ("the opening") starts out "Bismillahi r-rahmani r-rahim", or "In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the ever merciful", setting the stage for the hypnotic brainwashing repetition, since this verse starts out every one of the other surahs except John Lennon's #9 ("repentance"), the one that kill says da infidels if they resist. Sura 114 An-Nas (Al-Nas) ("mankind") h goes "In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. Say I seek refuge with the lord of mankind, the king of mankind, the god of mankind, of the Jinn and mankind from the evil of the sneaky whisperer who whispers in the hearts of man." What is a Jinn? You guessed it, Aladdin, a genie, don't sweat, it's a glandular thing with them Arabs, can we see your belly button. Shaitan (Satan) allegedly started as a genie named Iblis. Obviously, Muhammad knows all about the evil whisperer and the demons of Hell, since he's their main man, call it a Freudian slip, I'm not going to apologize for thinking, I bet that sweet pond is really the Lake of Fire, that's the Devil's method, turn black white and white black and get your hands on the green, there's trouble in Paradise. (The Arabic word for Paradise is Janna, coincidence?) Islam is thus the catholic universal religion for total history ignoramuses, who can be brainwashed into thinking they know everything when they know nothing, and need to unlearn what they learned, but can't, call 1-866-666-FIXED and lock in your rate, we can live in a bubble. The first sura allegedly revealed to Big M was #96 (that's 69 upside down in Arabic numerals), Sura 96 Al-Alaq ("the clot"), which claims that God made man from a blood clot (them Allahu Akbars love the sight of clotted blood), that there are two types of men, those who bow to God's will, and those pesky "lying and sinful" unbelievers who don't, for whom the "guards of Hell" are waiting, and that the unbeliever shouldn't try to deny to the believers the right to worship Allah, nor must the believers "yield" to threats from unbelievers, whap, there goes another head, that's the only mind you have, don't waste it. Note that in the cow surah, verse 190 says "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not exceed the limits, for Allah doesn't love those who do", whatever limits are supposed to mean, but verse #191 clears it up a bit, saying "And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places they drove you out if, for persecution is worse than slaughter", which I guess means killing is within the limits, but merely persecuting without killing is. It's like the iPhone, there's apps for just about anything. It's the clean-burning mind fuel of hate turned into code for your internal operating system, complete with virus protection against love and tolerance, just say it over and over and you'll get the need for speed, kill kill kill, ahhh, that's a relief. Are Muslims worshipping God and getting closer to him so they can be with him in Paradise, or worshipping Satan and getting closer to him so they can be with him in Hell, while their victims go to Heaven to be with guess who trice? Maybe the atheists are right and there's neither a God nor a Devil, but if there were, God wouldn't want to put his name to this crap, but it's just what the Devil would come up with and attempt to frame God with writing so he can win the war for human souls, someone who can bring opposing sides together, that person is not in the house. Isn't that my job, I'm a critic? So here goes: "And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light", 2 Corinthians 11:14. One of them divine revelations is telling the truth and one is lying, you decide, atheists can attack the Law of the Excluded Middle. By the way, the Muslims stole their flowery descriptions of the delights of paradise from the writings of the Zoroastrians and Hindus, any damage, swabbie, a direct hit sir.
What does this wonderful new Bible teach its true believers about the old Bible and its false believers? Let's start with Sura 5 Al-Maidah ("the table spread"), which respectfully calls the Jews and Christians "People of the Book" (5:19), and says that Jews are friends with Christians, but then says that Muslims are to shun them both since, one, "Infidels are those who say that Jesus, the son of Mary is God" (5:17), and of course Allah is the one and only God and has no son, trust me and be cool, oh Hell no, and two, "The Jews and Christians say 'We are God's beloved children'", but "Why then does God punish you for you sins?" (5:18), that'll trip them up, the chicken is in the pot, over, cook it, roger that. Obviously, the Jews who created Islam wanted themselves to be treated special, so that's why this loophole is there, which they grudgingly had to allow Christians into, but they made sure that Muslims were unitarians like them who believe that there is not only one God but that he can't have a son, and that anybody claiming to be is a blasphemer who should be executed pronto, like they already got the Romans to do to Jesus, only now it's an assembly line operation. Of course, "idolaters [including Christians and Jews] are nothing but unclean, so they shall not approach the Sacred Mosque [in Mecca]" (Sura 9:28), and if they are caught, guess what, whap, even if you're Jesus himself. Muslims don't even call him Jesus, they call him Issa, and accept his virgin birth and miracles, but deny he was crucified, died and was resurrected, claiming he was raised alive to Heaven, and will return on Judgment Day to help the Muslims not Christians, because you see, Jesus was a Muslim all along, not the Son of God or God, but a mortal fallible man like Prophet M, whose mission was to play second fiddle at best, after all, he was a Jew whom the real Jews told him got too big for his shit britches. Funny how if Muhammad was illiterate he seems to have read the Gospel of Luke 1:35, containing the story of his favorite angel Gabriel and favorite fantasy babe Mary, but even so, he goes pornographic by changing the words "come upon" and "overshadow" in Sura 66 At-Tahrim ("prohibition") Verse 12 to "breathed in her vagina" (the Arabic word for vagina or private parts being farj - figures). Maybe he was describing holy cunny, that's how Jesus got made, right, just like he did it every night with his Sweet Six sugar diapers wife under the theory that old men who can't cut the mustard can still lick the jar, but we'll cover that later. Speaking of holy cunny, check out the Quran Holy Cunny Song, Sura 66 sung by a true believer, it was #1 on the Sick Pop Charts for 1000 years at least, if they get their way it will be on the American Pop Charts for the next 1000 years, over my dead body. Speaking of stealing from the Jewish Bible, Sura 12 Yusuf retells the Old Testament story of Joseph of Potiphar's wife fame, twisting it to prove that he really worshipped Guess Who Al Ends with La, but really proving that their original aim was to rewrite the entire Old Testament but being Arabs they got lazy and settled.
Here's another nice bit of divine guidance for true Musclemen. Sura 9 At-Tawba ("the repentance") calls for unbelievers to be killed (9:5), and don't be careful. Oh, I already mentioned that. Okay, it's only if they refuse domination and paying the jizya tax, to be explained later. Verse 6 says that Christians who call Christ the son of God are deluded away from the Truth, and Allah's curse be on them, so much for the 1.5-2.1 billion Christians living today, sorry, no psychiatric discharges for monks. In fact over 90% of the suras make reference to how Allah hates non-Muslims and is going to torment them for eternity in Hell, while nowhere does it even permit Muslims to love them. Contrast this with the Christian God: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is Love" (1 John 4:8). Who would you rather not live next door to? Speaking of the oxymoron of Muslim love, do you remember reading from time to time about Muslim honor killings, for example by a parent when a child converts to Christianity, marries without permission, has unmarried sex, or even wears immodest clothes, only to see Muslim spokesmen claim it's not supported by the Quran? Wrong, see Sura 18 Al-Kahf ("the cave"), verses 60-82, which tell the story of the journey of the Green Man Khidr with Moses, during which Khidr murders a young man for honor and then explains the holy wisdom of it, namely, that he might grow up to be an unbeliever so why wait.
Speaking of love and Islam in the same breath, Muslim disinformation artists love to tell you that the scary word "jihad" means each Muslim's internal struggle. Sure, it takes an internal struggle to ditch God for Satan and steel oneself to the horrible war and oozing blood you yourself will cause. But there's also the greater jihad, which means just what we thought all along, the expansion of Muslim-ruled territory by holy war, Capt. Jack Sparrow, last pirate.
The scariest thing about the Quran is its Doctrine of Abrogation, meaning that Prophet Muhammad can declare his own pronouncements null and void in later pronouncements, with the Medinan Verses following and superseding the Meccan Verses, or vice-versa, depending on what sect you talk to. And you got it, the Quran isn't arranged chronologically, the verses were shuffled and rearranged with shortest first for easy memorization and nobody ever publishes a chronological edition, they would be beheaded for blasphemy probably, so it takes a lifetime of study to figure out what supersedes what. Meanwhile, even a boy can shoot a gun at an infidel. Hence it's virtually impossible to fight it on its own terms, get it? It's like Strip Poker, in which the last move is chopping off your head.
That understood, I guess all the following quotes from the Quran are void whenever a Muslim disinformation artist goes to work on Western govts. to soften them up for mass Muslim immigration, after which when they move in they become valid again. Govt. know-it-alls can skip this paragraph, everybody else should read it 10 times at least. "The (only) religion (acceptable) before God is Islam." (3:19) "If anyone desires a religion other than Islam, never will it be accepted of him." (3:85) "You are the noblest community ever raised up for mankind." (3:110) "The unbelievers among the people of the book and the pagans shall burn forever in the fires of Hell. They are the vilest of all creatures." (98.6) "Surely the vilest of animals in Allah's sight are those who disbelieve." (8.55) "The unbelievers are your inveterate enemy." (4:101) "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews." (5:82) "Mohammed is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another." (48:29). "Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends." (5:51) "Make war on them until idolatry shall cease and Allah's religion shall reign supreme." (8:40) "Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme." (2:193) "The true believers fight for the cause of Allah, but the infidels fight for the Devil." (4:76) "We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers." (3:151) "I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels, strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers." (8:12) "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter." (5:33)
Here's some elevating Muhammad quotes, defining his religion of peace and love. Muhammad said to the Jews: "If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His apostle, me, and I want to expel you from this land." "You [Muslims] will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will [betray them] saying, 'O 'Abdullah (slave of Allah]! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', and whoever says that, his life and property will be saved by me." (4:196) "Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him." (9:57) "No Muslim should be killed for killing an infidel [kafir]." (9:50) Notice that it's never like 30 days in jail and a 999 dinar fine, it's always kill him kill him kill him, get it?
Obviously, this zero intellectual content brainwash Quran code is great for getting them killers off their asses and out there after some pushups, but a working tribute-collecting church-state union on Muslim-ruled territory has to have a set of rules and regulations, the Sharia (Shari'a) (Shariah) ("way, path"), AKA the Muslim Din (Deen) ("way of life"), an elaborate code of laws based on alleged sayings and doings of Big M that took several centuries to formulate between killing sprees, give the gift of death, including the Hand, er, Hadd Offenses, the punishment for which entails stoning, lashes, or severing of a hand. Thus, to be a real Muslim you can't just get by with your Quran, you also have to study the Hadiths and the Sira Rasul Allah, the Muslim biographies of Prophet M, which contradict each other. Let's not smear them, though. Muslims venerate Moses and Jesus as prophets, but only Muhammad is the final and authoritative prophet, so when there is a contradiction keep your head by killing Jews and Christians to gain Paradise, these two corpses here, they're brothers. Sura 5:91 tells believers to abstain from wine and gambling, but it's in the form of a "will you not" not a "thou shalt not", hence most Muslims abstain and some imbibe, including modern-day Iran. It's also curious how the Muslim Halal ("lawful") food laws look suspiciously like the Jewish Kosher (Kashrut) ("fit") food laws, talk to your Jewish doctor about alcohol use, liver disease, and a tendency to fall while standing.
But I'm just an Islamophobe, so I better shut up? That's a great new scare word, it makes smart people sound dangerous for expressing their thoughts, keep going to the U.N. and trying to make it a world crime, except when a Muslim verbally condemns infidels to Hell, that's part of their religion. Sorry, it's all about them not us. Islam is not just another religion that people practice in private inside their temples or churches or synagogues so we can practice live and let live with them. They not only make bad neighbors, they're your worst imaginable nightmare. Everybody who doesn't want to submit, die, or pay a punishment tax for life under their bootheels with a thousand deaths threatened for every attempt to think for yourself or insult their infinitely multiplied honor should be afraid of them coming to town. Even when they don't have the power to take over the govt. and set up horrible Sharia yet, they want to deface the entire city in all ways imaginable to make it unlivable for everybody else, call it the ultimate schmucky insolent arrogant intolerance, I'm reaching for one word to cover it and can't find it, oh yes I can, total submission. Their idea of a church is a mosque, which requires a minaret, or hog-calling tower, where the muezzin loudly calls out to the prostrated ass-crack sniffers the silly la-ilaha I'm ill with Allah Sing Along with Bitch "pillar of Islam" brainwash exercise five times every single day as long as they can get away with it. The very idea presupposes that they own the govt. I know that some churches have bells which they tastefully ring only once a week, some more often, but they don't make everybody stop and get down on the ground like an air raid siren five times a day, do they, call it a loud clock. Where did this horrible arrogant degrading idea come from? Didn't I say the Jews? How? Easy. They used to be big in Egypt, you-guessed-it Alexandria, Egypt, where for ages the pagan nitwits there would prostrate themselves to their One God the Sun and his only son on Earth the pharaoh, and the Christians drove them out to Arabia, so call it Jewish poetic justice to make all Muslims into Egyptians who come out in front of the pyramids en masse to bow to the Great Pharaoh in the Sky and think it's the Creator of the Universe, their Jehovah, chuckle, how retro, what maroons, I bet if they flip Allah the bird he will strike them down with lightning. What a good joke there, you Jew guys, an endless Three Stooges short, not. Good move keeping the Moon worship too, that makes it universal and keeps them busy at nights. But the forced daily prayers teach equality of man since everybody from the king down has to do it, and the king has to smell crack like the most mean peasant? Sure, that puts the religious leaders over the secular leaders, making Western-style church-state separation not only unthinkable but deadly to try, ask any ayatollah about what they do to secular shahs. In our modern Western world the minarets must go, they really must go. They should be outlawed under building height codes, and noise ordinances enforced. Make them wear earphone radios at least, sheesh. Too bad, they will likely want to kill you for trying to stop them, that's what the brainwashing is about, to turn them into Allah's marines ready to kick ass 24/7/365, anybody's ass, right in front of your faces, including infidel government officials.
In short, Muhammad founded a zombie religion based on mass daily public hypnosis requiring abject prostration, followed by killing of hated enemies as the sure road to paradise for the happy shahids (martyrs), in direct contradiction to the Christian church, which up to now gave sainthood to those persecuted and killed by their enemies while they don't resist, and Jesus, who was known for his famous soundbyte "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), also, "Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven... And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men.... But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:1-6), which I guess means that he's calling all Muslims hypocrites, so get out that scimitar and lop some heads for Allah.
How about the Jewish Hebrew Bible?; "Don't put your trust in princes or mortal men, who cannot save... Happy is the one who has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in Jehovah his God" (Psalms 146:3-5). I guess the Bible wasn't quite the deterrent Jehovah thought it would be.
But let's give the other side a chance. One, it was sure good for Arabia, turning it from an overpopulated backwater desert shithole to a world empire that expanded into the Fertile Crescent by oozing blood and war, Islam the War Religion, conquer their minds as well as their bods. Two, at least the robotification of the masses could be seen to be a path to law and order and peace if if if everybody, and after all, there is one God, that much is sure, never mind that big black idol we'll get to that later, talk to my travel agent, and after Moses and Christ have clearly blown it, it boils down to whether you Arab brothers accept your prophet who's of your house of Ishmael or are content with their prophets who are of the house of pesky Isaac, Jacob and David? Hey, after 2K years of Moses and 600 years of Jesus Christ, so what if you can see the darker side of me, somebody help me through this nightmare, I can't control myself, isn't the world still in a big mess? Try this new Islam stuff, the greatest thing since buttered bread, and try blessing father Abraham 17 times a day to qualify for your government-backed reverse mortgage? Here's how we'll establish eternal law and order, we'll make everybody a cop or sheriff (sharif) who takes an active role 24/7, where church and state are one?
One big difference between the Christian Bible and the Quran is the latter's promise to give martyrs 70 virgins in Paradise, right? Or was that 72? Didn't I hear that before somewhere in Vikingland? Sorry, it's not in there, it was added later by commentator Ibn Kathir and caught on, whap there goes another zillion heads. Actually, the Quran does promise "houris" or virgins, but doesn't name a number, maybe it's infinite, like rolls of toilet paper, after all, once you've jizzed in a virgin, she's not a virgin anymore is she? Did I mention the 28 boys? "And round about them will be boys of everlasting youth. If you see them, you'd think them scattered pearls." (Quran 76:19). Despite the death penalty being mandated for homosexuality, Muslims enjoy it so much that they have figured out ways to call it something else, particularly when it comes to man-boy love. As the famous Muslim poet Abu Nawas put it: "O the joy of sodomy!/ So now be sodomites, you Arabs./ Turn not away from it,/ Therein is wondrous pleasure./ Take some coy lad with kiss-curls/ twisting on his temple/ and ride him as he stands like some gazelle/ standing to her mate." Too bad, recent work by philologist Christoph Luxenburg indicates that the word houri actually means sheep eyes, er, grapes, especially white ones, get it? Not that a pack of lies can be repackaged and not still be lies. As for women, they also go to Paradise, so what do they get, infinite stud muffins and Welch's grape juice? Sorry, Islam treats women as cattle, so the most they can expect after their earthly hubby ditches them for fresh houris is probably one good old fart who doesn't get it on too often with them because he's so busy with his coy lads.
To be fair, the Quran also says "Whoever takes the life of an innocent person, unless it be for murder or for spreading disorder on Earth, it would be as if he killed all mankind. And whoever saves an innocent life, it would be as if he saved all mankind" (5:32). Also "He who kills a believer intentionally, his reward is Hell, he shall remain there forever" (4.93). I guess that al-Qaida and other world terrorists who are taking the law into their own hands without trying to move in and take the territory, and kill innocent Muslims along with innocent infidels without giving them a chance to convert or pay the jizya like they did in 9/11 are headed to Hell, while those killing to spread the territory of their world domination and move in and set up shop are in, too bad that the Quran just says they're going to Hell not that other Muslims must kill them for us, quite the opposite, they will go to Hell if they try, this is a new type of mousetrap from Ortho, pass the Charmin Ultra Strong. Guess what the Quran means by innocent people? Muslims only, natch. And by those who spread disorder? You guessed it, anybody resisting the Sharia law, which starts out by kissing the Quran that condemns anybody who isn't a Muslim to Hell, yes, the Quran is perfect when it comes to the evil parts. Did I mention the next verse, 5:33? "The punishment of those who war against Allah and His Messenger Madass and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter." That's religious evolution for ya, just 600 years to go from a savior cruficifed for the sins of the world who says pick up your cross and follow me, to an anti-savior who orders his true believers to cruficify the world, and says pick up your sword and follow me. The sword or the cross: Johnny Got His Gun times a zillion wars, all caused by this mental A-bomb.
Oh yes, the subjection of women, perhaps the third worst feature of Islam after their oozing blood and war habit and justification of slavery, which I leave you to look up on your own when you get the time, my brains are brawn, I quote Schaff cited above, "Mohammed, by ameliorating the condition of slaves, and enjoining kind treatment upon the masters, did not pave the way for its abolition, but rather riveted its fetters". Sura 23:6 permits Muslim men to have sex with their wives and with female slaves, "those who are rightfully theirs", there's plenty of fish in the sea for Muslim Me. No surprise, in Islam any Muslim slave is superior to a free non-Muslim. When it came to equal rights for women, always-right Prophet Muhamad declared woman an awra, or shameful orifice, saying that her body was composed of 10 shameful orifices that should remain covered until the grave covered her entirely. Not that women weren't treated as cattle forever in the past in Arabia, but now he tied it to his monotheist absolute truth forever for the future. No, the burqa (full body covering), hijab (head covering, literally curtain), khimar (head scarf), and niqab (face veil) are not actually commanded in the Quran, but it's not commanded to not do it, leaving men in charge either way, although Sura 31 (An-Nur) says "Let them draw their head-coverings over their necks and chest", which doesn't leave a lot of room for maneuver. But that's because Islam, like Judaism, is based on obligations rather than faith, the do's and don'ts affecting every moment of your life, unlike Christianity. To set the example, Big M ordered women he captured in battle and whom he forced to be his wives to cover up and wear da veil that's like a license plate saying previously owned, whereas those captive women he and his army used as sex slaves were not required, making the lack of a veil become the sign that a woman is a lady or a ho. Thus was born the inherent equality of all people, not, rather the inherent inequality between Muslim and non-Muslim, male and female, and free and slave, all said with a face and body blanket, usually black, making a beautiful woman into a walking coffin that isn't allowed to do anything without her male owner's permission. Yah, that's something to fight and conquer the world for. Of course men have shameful orifices too, but less of them, so that proves that God made them superior and put them in charge. Even today Sharia permits wife-beating (Quran 4:34), flogging for a woman for fornication or even going out with her head uncovered, and beheading for adultery, and has really done a number on all women by rigging rape laws so that the woman victim ends up getting put on trial not the male perps, check your local news from Muslimland. Don't even ask what Sharia does with gays and lesbians, it starts with whap. Did I mention Egypt? You got it, Islam makes women into walking mummies while their male mental slaves bow to the Great Pharaoh in the Sky and thank him for everything including their penises. How's this for guidance on sexual equality? A son's inheritance should be twice that of a daughter (Quran 4:11), and the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man (Quran 2:282), the religion where romance isn't a must.
Did I mention that later on Muslims even attempted to frame the Bible on predicting Muhammad's coming, while forgetting they claim it's corrupt and not to be trusted, between wiping the Christian and Jewish blood off their swords? To show low they go, they take one word out of Song of Solomon 5:16 and try to twist it into the name Muhammad, don't take my word for it, watch a great YouTube from a modern-day learned Muslim ignoramus. Did I mention that to be a Muslim one must love Muhammad more than oneself (Quran 33.6), else one's iman (inner conviction) isn't complete? After all he had a good sense of humor, get the one about grabbing Zahir from behind in a market and asking if anyone will buy this slave, why ain't I laughing? The Bible did predict his coming, as the Antichrist, pardon me while I puke.
Back to the Muhammad story. In 613 Momma's-good-looks wild-imagination-college-education Ultimate Prophet Muhammad began his public preaching on the streets of pagan Mecca, hoping to have an easy time shocking and aweing the polytheists into monotheism once he explained how Hubal, er, Allah had made the Arabs the Chosen People, his unbelievable talent is only matched by the size of his heart. Too bad, it didn't take too well, he'd have to hone his act and get some new props.
In 619 while holed-up in the mountains around Mecca with his followers, going-on-50 Prophet Muhammad went through his Year of Sorrow as his beloved uncle Abu Talib (b. 549) (his chief protector in Mecca) died, followed by his rich wife Lady Khadija (his first convert to Islam), leaving him four children, all female (daughters of her first hubby?), Zainab, Ruqaiya, Umm Kulthum, and Fatimah, after sons Qasim (d. 605) and Abd-Allah (d. 615) died in infancy or childhood. He then married 55-y.-o. true believer widow Sawda bint Zama ibn Qayyis ibn Abd Shams in Shawwal. Meanwhile the lonely prophet, "as many men do in their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in women" (H.G. Wells), AKA midlife crisis, and proceeded to increase his harem to a total of 11 wives, who were later given the Muslim title "Mother of the Believers", because of the Quran verse "The Prophet is closer to the Believers than their own selves, and his wives than their mothers", meaning that Muslims can't marry his widows since it would be like marrying their own muddahs. The luckless babes included Aisha (Ayesha) (614-78) (Arabic for woman - what twisted humor), daughter of enthusiastic supporter Abu Bakr, whom he married at age 6, she had no say, then ignobly waited to consummate at age 9 before her first menstrual cycle, showing that it's Allah's will to be a holy pedophile as long as her hairless clitorisless vagina can handle your grown man's prick, that's Muslim girl power. Hey don't blame this on Arabs, this caused a furor even in his day. For the three years when he couldn't penetrate her, he satisfied his holy lust with Mufa' Khathat, thighing and climaxing on her clothes, then making her wash them, imagine his place in Heaven alongside Jizzus and Mary now. The real reason he had to wait three years is that it took that long for his caravan robbing biz to make enough to pay her dowry? Speaking of Mary, another of his wives was you-guessed-it Mary, an Egyptian Coptic Christian concubine who bore him a boy, Ibrahim, who later died, his subsequent showing of favoritism to Mary causing a mutiny in his harem. Another of his wives was Safiyya bint Huyayy (610-70) (wife #11), the wife of a Jew that he had captured and executed that same evening after picking her out of a lineup of captive women, see outtakes of "Schindler's List". By the way, the horrible example Muhammad set with Aisha is sometimes excused by Muslim disinformation artists by pointing to Jewish King David, who in his old age asked for young virgin Abishag to lie beside him at night to keep him warm, but the Bible is very careful to state that he had no intimate relations with her and never tried to put a ring on a finger and start shagging her or anything else, not that her age was even mentioned, she must have been in her teens at least, sorry (1 Kings 1:1-3).
In 620, his cult being persecuted by the unapologetic pagans of Mecca, loser Muhammad left the mountains and sought refuge in the neighboring town of Tayf, but was driven out with stones, and returned, licking his wounds. Just then the inhabitants of Yathrib (pop. 15K) to the north, an oasis town inhabited by Yemenites (many of them Jewish, guess which tribe), having embraced his One True God teaching (probably because of Jewish proselyting), and hearing of him on their pilgrimages to Mecca, sent him an invitation to come and rule them and become their next Brigham Young, not knowing he'd become the Arab Hitler, the Dark Cave is going to be a great tourist trap, let's buy the stock now. But he was a shrewd dude, and began a nearly 2-year parley with them, sending his reps in advance to make sure it wasn't a trap, after which in 621 Muhammad, safe in throbbing Yathrib and well-fucked with all his hot new wives, allegedly achieved full spiritual enlightenment, with the big year 666 right ahead, the tribe has spoken.
When I say full spiritual enlightement, I mean the grand tour, the Isra and Mi'raj night journey and ascension to heaven from either Mecca or Jerusalem on the winged miracle mule Buraq ("lightning") in the 12th year of his mission (621), where of course he met his fellow prophets, including Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and Allah himself, the Killer Klowns from Outer Space, and not only wasn't struck dumb in the presence of Allah, but talked him down from fifty to five prayers a day like a good Arab wheeler-dealer, then refreshed, came back on his Mission from God to kick the whole planet's butt and kill everybody that won't get down on their faces facing the Big Black Cube five, count 'em five times every day and bare their necks so that there will be total Body Slam. When he returned, his friend Abu Bakr immediately accepted his story, even without a group photo or even an autograph (no wonder Muslims can't stomach a Muhammad cartoon, it would show him up), causing him to receive the name The Dumbass, er, Us-Siddiq (The Truthful). Coincidentally, the Christian bedrock principle of Original Sin, that all people are born in sin and are unworthy of approaching God until their sins are forgiven through Christ was neatly chucked, and now every sin-soaked pedophile killer raghead can approach Allah if they pray five times a day with clean ass cracks and then take orders from him to be his kill tools and make the blood of cross-kissers flow for Jesus himself, chuckle, you gotta be an Arab to be this dumb. I guess the Jews perverted the Christian Bible too where it says Jesus is the only name among men by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12). Oh I get it, Jews don't read that stuff, neither do Arabs. Oh, but some Jews do. In Islam, a person starts out with a clean Sin Slate, then Allah keeps a tally of sins and good works until he dies, and passes him if his good works such as killing infidels outweigh his sins such as lying, cheating, stealing, raping, etc., that's why so many take the killing-infidels route to make sure their sins are in, in fact, you pretty much have to kill some infidels, get it, keep it within yourself, your teammates played a hell of a game today.
Which brings us to the year 622. Having entered Mecca for the yearly shindig, the elders plotted to murder the pesky egotistical bum, breaking the law of sanctuary, and every family in the city except Muhammad's approved his murder in advance. Too bad, on July 16 they rushed into his room, only to find his adopted son Ali sleeping in his bed, and Muhammad flown the coop, after which he began his Hejira (Hegira) ("flight"), fleeing Mecca, then feinting first S, then N, arriving on Sept. 20 in Yathrib, which was renamed Medinat al Nabi (Medina) ("city of the prophet") (not Muhammad-dina?), his own Salt Lake City, where he arbitrated a blood feud between the Aw and Khazraj tribes, and signed the Constitution of Medina with all the tribes there, including polytheist and Jewish ones, creating the first Muslim Ummah ("nation"), (Islamic theocratic community), consisting of the muhajirun (Meccans who followed Big M to Little M) and the ansar (Medinan converts), requiring them all to help each other militarily while referring all disputes to himself. Both Mecca and Medina are on the W side of Arabia in the Hejaz (al-Hejaz) ("the barrier"), a strip bordering the Red Sea extending from Haql on the Gulf of Aqaba in the N to fig-producing Jizan in the S, I guess them Arabs love their jizz.
Muslims date history from this July 16, 622 event (Muharram 1, 1 A.H.) because it's the first time that Islam existed as a religious-social-political system with a military leader directing the killing of innocent people with their knickers in a twist, and not just a personal faith. Notice that I said political-religious-social system. There is no room for separation of church and state, sorry, it's about total world domination, the World Mental AIDS Plague is loosed. The Muslim calendar consists of a 354-day guess-what-lunar year with 12 months of 29-30 days, which is never corrected so that religious days fall eventually in all seasons, and there's no escape, mwuhahaha.
At first Muhammad thought that the three Jewish tribes in Medina (Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayza) would see the light and embrace his new religion, incorporating the fast of Yom Kippur into Islamic ritual and designating Jerusalem as the Muslim prayer direction, as after all they taught him monotheism in the first place, and they told him how that pesky bastard Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be their Messiah but was given due process of law and executed for blasphemy and treason, and how his body was stolen by his followers from a you-guessed-it dark cave so they could claim he rose from the dead to make dupe converts, and how it's been 600 years and he didn't return like he promised, so the real Messiah must be due, and it's him, give me your Jewish girl infants and I'll do 'em proud. Too bad, they proved stiff-necked like they did with Jesus, and told him he was Looney Tunes and insulted Da Prophet to his face, which pissed him off and caused him to decide to whack them to prove he's better than both them and Jesus Freaks, although they would both know it proves he's worse, and he began raiding the caravans of Mecca, always unsuccessfully, preferring to set out on Thursdays, and liking to start out in the opposite direction of his intended target to fool spies. After all, his Allah told him that anybody who doesn't believe in him will be tortured forever in Hell, but Allah doesn't do any killing himself, he's an impotent Ass Clown in a cave, no, you my puppets must do my killing for me, and I'll be waiting in Hell to, er, that makes Allah into Stephen King's Pennywise the Ass Clown, AKA the Devil, don't tell anybody, suckas. Them Jews is hated by everybody, so killing them off will be wildly popular, and as for them whiny Christians, who guilt-tripped the pagan Romans and turned them sick inside with empathy, sorrow, conscience, etc., the Devil's new religion will turn it all against them as Muhammad's Terminators will actually get their mental dope fix by lopping their praying heads off and shouting Ass Clown is the Greatest, send me to Hell, stick me up the Devil's ass. Call it a test of their faith, but if Christians have to turn to the Devil to defeat us Muslims, they lose by winning, can't they read St. John's Revelation where their Christ predicts that we will take over the whole world (Rev. Ch. 13), and that only his personal arrival with an army of angels can stop us? (Rev. Ch. 19) What was that Christ said long before Kutam was shitting yellow? "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). Yes, let's call his bluff, why not, I got 666 reasons that says Jesus is a fraud, and if so we got ourselves a world, even if it won't be fit to live in because we'll all be slaves of the Devil, I will be long gone from Earth and ruling with him at his left side in Sucker Paradise Hell. That's why the Devil sent the Big Black Cube down about the time of Christ, as his countermove? Check back with me after Armageddon if you can.
Speaking of revelations and Armageddon, the test of a true revelation from God must be that it can predict the future, right? Welcome to Chez Nous, may I take off your chapeau, monsieur? The Cave Sura (18 Al-Kahf) is the one that claims that Allah revealed the Quran in the Dark Cave in order to remove the errors that had crept into his own scriptures that were being thumped in Muhammad's day by pesky Byzantine Christians and Jews, and warns those who ascribe a son to God that by doing so they are incurring Allah's wrath and will go straight to Hell. Besides, true Christians will hate Islam, but their end will not be like their beginning, because the Cave Sura also contains Islam's End of Days predictions, just as accurate as the rest of the Quran. You see, in the Big Inning these pesky Bible-thumping Christians were weak and suffered bitter persecution from pagan Romans, but Allah had mercy on them and delivered them from their trials and tribulations and put them on the road to progress and prosperity, but after they grew rich and prosperous they descended to idolatrous practices, and instead of turning to Allah they turned to the world and became entirely lost, so screw them and don't pay taxes. Thus true believer Muslims are warned to learn by example and not end up rich and prosperous like them busy bee Byzantines and money-grubbing Jews, which is a safe bet if they do all them prayers and waste all that time and energy memorizing the Quran then trying to figure out what supersedes what. The Cave Sura proceeds to mention the great dispensation given to Moses in his vision, and how it was incomplete, but now Allah's new dispensation of Salami Salami Baloney Islam will bring to perfection and completion Moses' incomplete teaching and emerge triumphant from the ashes (make a note) of decadent Christendom, sounds suspicously like a pissed-off Jew talking in a sock puppet doesn't it? Of course the infallible Allah describes the conditions which will follow the final total triumph of Islam, namely, a time when Muslims would also turn their backs on religion and become engrossed in the pursuit of material wealth and power like the Saudi royal family, and that to punish them of their sins Allah would once again grant success and prosperity to Christian nations which for a time had been restrained from advancing into their regions, after which a great destruction will be brought upon the world, the nations will split into two hostile camps wedded to opposite ideologies, with sin and inequity being the hallmark of the non-Allah camp, after which Allah will create circumstances that finally check the seemingly irresistible flood threatening to engulf the entire world. In passing, Mankind Back to the Stone Age Cave Sura hints that the same people will play an important part in arresting and stopping this flood who had once before broken the political power of evil Gog and Magog, which Jews believe to be the descendants of Noah's son Japthet, and Bible-thumping Christians believe to be the modern nations that will back Antichrist in the End of Days and try to destroy them, so obviously the final conflict will be an all-out Armageddon between Christians and Muslims where blood flows in oceans while the Jews sit on the sidelines and cheer, or play both sides against each other, or maybe get caught in a sandwich, the Bloody Meat Trinity. The Christians believe that the Antichrist will also attack the Jews, and when they're about to be destroyed they suddenly loosen their stiff necks and finally accept Christ, who saves them all, I don't care if you're a butler or chiropractor, I love you. Incidentally, the Quran's own prophesy of two irreconcilable world camps doesn't seem to encourage mass Muslim immigration to the West, now does it, maybe they'll read this and all go back despite the gift certificate offers to stay from Western history ignoramuses. Either way, let's hope the Age of Religion ends before any of the three God-believing holy-book-thumping camps get a chance to fulfill their own lovely prophesies and ruin the world. It's horrible End of Days prophesies that keep all these holy book religions going, isn't it?
In 623 Muhammad's raiders were finally successful in attacking a small caravan of Mecca, and killing a man, I wouldn't be surprised if it were a Jew. As this was in the sacred month of Rahab, it broke the ancient customary truce of the Arab Amphictyony and caused a big scandal, that'll show them that I don't break the rules I make the rules.
In Jan. 8, 624 Muhammad and all 313 of his crazed warriors defeated an army of 700 Meccans led by Abu Jahl guarding a Kurashite caravan outside Mecca at the badass Battle of Badr (Arabic for full moon), killing 50-60, including Kurashite chief Abu Sufjan ibn Harb, and wounding an equal number. Happy Muhammad returned in triumph to Medina, converting many munafiqun (doubting Medinans), and was then inspired by Allah to order the assassination of a number of Jews who had been heckling his new monotheistic revelations, banishing the Jewish tribe of Banu Qaynuqa. Badr became a popular Muslim name for girls.
On Mar. 19, 625 (Sat.) 3.2K Meccans led by Abu Sufyan kicked the butts of Prophet Muhammad and his 1K-man army at the Battle of Mt. Uhud in NW Arabia near Medina, knocking the unportrayable prophet down and nearly killing him, darn it, I'd like to have that vid, and causing his followers to turn tail and flee. Too bad, the Mecca Lekka Hi Mecca Lekka Lo, Mecca Lekka Chonny Ho didn't follow up and enter Medina, so Muhammad survived to fight another day, retiring to rally his followers and lick his wounds, and writing some suras for his best-selling Quran: "The suras of the Koran which are attributed to this period, excel nearly all the others in their majesty and sublime confidence" (Sir Mark Sykes). After calling on his people to fight for Muhammad per the Constitution of Medina and being told it was the Sabbath and to piss off, wealthy Jewish Medina rabbi Mukhayriq of the Tha'labah (don't say Taliban) tribe fought with Muhammad and was martyred, leaving his entire wealth to Muhammad, who called him "the best of the Jews" (which wasn't saying much, coming from him), and used it to establish the first Muslim Waqf (charity) for the poor in Medina. Feeling good again, he accused the most wealthy of the two remaining Jewish tribes, the Banu Nadir, of treason and expelled them from Medina so he could take them out of the protection of the constitution and loot them later - the punch line is always how greedy and dishonest them pesky Jews are, maybe that's the origin of the Godfather's motto to always keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
In 627 the Meccans decided to finish Muhammad and his 3K men off with an army of 10K, starting the Battle of the Trench (Ditch) (Confederates) on Mar. 31. Too bad, after they arrived at Medina they found that it had a new trench and wall, the product of a Persian convert. The trench must have been a technological breakthrough to these camel drivers who worshipped water like natives of Arrakis, and they hunkered down puzzling what to do so long that they finally dispersed in Apr. without finishing the job. Just kidding about the trench, it wasn't filled with water, that's just the version in the Muhammad cartoons. Contrast this self-proclaimed anointed one of the one-and-only Creator of the Universe having to hide behind a ditch, with his main competitor Jesus Christ, who once said he could snap his fingers and get a legion of angels to defend him from the entire Roman army, I like that cartoon better, good job, Mel. Oh yes, Muhammad never claimed to be anointed like Jesus, Moses and the other prophets of God, guess he slipped up somewhere and went off half-cocked.
Free of the Meccans at last, in 627 Muhammad raided and defeated the last Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza, who had a well-circumcised castle near Medina, and had 700 (900) Jews beheaded (not that head), and their women and children enslaved. Helped by the fact that they were among the bidders for these choice slaves, the head, er, leading men in Mecca began to come over to Muhammad's side, and he now was indisputed ruler of a unified Medina, seeking to extend his power, I don't want anybody working with me who's scared, okay? Let's recap Muhammad's non-love for the Jewish tribes of Medina, and how he quickly ditched them: 624: Battle of Badr: exile of Banu Qaynuga. 625: Battle of Ohud: exile of Banu Nadir. 627: Battle of the Ditch: massacre of Banu Qurayza - three strikes and you're out.
In Mar. 628 after Muhammad led 1.4K followers to Mecca to perform a pilgrimage, he was stopped 10 mi. away near the Hudaybiyyah spring by troops of the Quraish tribe that run it, led by Suhail ibn Amr. After sizing each other up for a fight, Allah allegedly sent the "sakina" (spirit of peace) into their hearts, and they signed the 10-year Treaty of Hudaybiyyah (who da big boss?), allowing Muslims to enter the city and perform the circuit for 3 days, beginning not this year but next, as long as they enter unarmed except for sheathed swords. Muhammad then turned back to Medina, trying to explain the defeat as a V by telling them that Allah has promised them the spoils of the Jewish town of Khaybar (Khaibar), which they sacked 6 weeks later, beheading all the Jews that survived, Muhammad personally talking with a black haggard donkey who called himself Yazid Ibn Shihab, whom he renamed Yafoor, adopting him for his ride after making sure he didn't desire females. No, I didn't make this up, but I wish I had.
Too bad, the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was indeed a giant V for Islam, which they call Sulh-e-Hudaybiyyah, because it allowed Muslims to be allowed to exist so they could switch to Da'wah ("invitation"), the outward appearance of peace and friendliness in order to preach and make mass conversions and increase the size of their army for the next jihad, and in Muhammad's case it worked so well he practically had enough eager Quran-singing warriors to win without a fight. As Imam al-Zuhari put it, Soul-train-Hudaboss was the greatest V in the history of Islam. Actually, in Islam the world is divided up into Dars or Houses, including the Dar al-Islam (House of Peace) for believers, Dar al-Dawah (House of Invitation) as just mentioned, Dar a-Harb (House of War) where Sharia isn't in force yet so war is their fate, Dar al-Kufr (House of Unbelief) ("Unbelief is one community" - Muhammad), Dar al-'Ahd (House of Treaty) (an Islamic nation's Christian tributary states), Darl al-Hudna (House of Calm) (infidel nations that paid a tribute for a temporary truce), and Dar al-Amn (House of Safety), a new term invented by Muslims living in the West to describe how stupid their infidel host nations are, yuk yuk, bring the kafir house to your house.
Muhammad then ordered his faithful jackasses to turn towards Mecca when they pray rather than Jerusalem as they have done till now (i.e., it's the new qibla), and declared Mecca their permanent pilgrimage center, like it had been for the polytheist pagans. He also allegedly sent the envoy Al-Ala'a al-Hadrami (-635), who converted the Arab states of Bahrain ("two seas" - freshwater springs surrounded by salty seas) and Qatar, same old establishment, different owner. Speaking of houses, bathrooms and gutters, Islam even has a set of rules for using the water closet or toilet, including praying to Allah first, taking rings off your fingers, never urinating while standing even if you're a male, who must never hold his thing with his right hand, D, Gossip Girl, final answer. When shitting, a Muslim must never be positioned to face Mecca, nor to turn his back to it, but always shit sideways to Mecca. Males can use bath water left over by women, but not vice-versa, that's like having sex with them maybe, after all, water exposed to the sun can cause leprosy, sorry no mention about what to do when you get prostate cancer :)
About this time the courts of Byzantine Emperor Heraclius I (575-641) in Constantinople (Greek Orthodox Catholic), Persian Shah Kavadh II (590-628) in Ctesiphon (Zoroastrian), and Tang Emperor Tai Zong (Tai Tsung) (599-649) in Canton (Buddhist) were visited by Arab envoys of the new kid on the block, "the prophet of God, Muhammad", residing in the squalid trading town of Medina in deodorant-challenged Arabia, who sent them letters telling them to acknowledge the one true Alpha (with him as Omega?) and submit, or else. As the story goes, Heraclius, busy with restoring order in Persia shrugged it off, while Kavadh, hearing of how Muhammad had dechristianized and Muslimized Yemen, tore it up, threw it in the envoy's face and ordered Muhammad to fuck off, causing the latter to cry to Allah to rend his kingdom from him. Only emperor Tai Zong treated his envoys with respect, and allowed them to build a mosque for Arab traders in Canton. As a side note, the Muslim envoys of Messina arrived in Canton via a ship coming from Yanbu, the port of Medina in Arabia, showing the existence of east-west trade in those times.
Not that Tsai-Tung was about to adopt Islam. In 635 he also received Christian Nestorian monk Alopen (Olopen) (Olopan) (Olopuen) (Chin. pronunciation of "Rabban") with respect, heard their yim yam out, and ordered the Christian scriptures translated into Chinese for further study, permitting Alopen to found the first Nestorian Christian mission in China, which never took and was dissolved by the 13th cent., golly, that sure looks delicious, let's eat.
In 629 Muhammad led his followers back to Mecca, and the pagans vacated the city for three days to allow them to circle around and kiss the Black Cube That Fell From Outer Space pagan-style, the original Cuba Gooding Show Me the Money. He then sent 3K of his men to the Byzantine city of Busra to conquer and convert the pagan Ghassanid Arabs there for killing his emissary, and ended up fighting the Battle of Mu'tah E of the Jordan River in modern-day Jordan, getting his ass kicked by a superior Byzantine force he wasn't expecting and retreating, calling it a push to save face since his black freed slave and adopted son Zayd was killed.
Also in 629, after defeating the Persians, Byzantine emperor Heraclius I marched into Jerusalem, and the Jews suddenly flip-flopped and claimed to be on his side, but he was probably figuring out the Arab thing by now in his subconscious, as proved by a dream that the Byzantine Empire will be destroyed through a circumcised people, and ordered them massacred by fanatical monks (later covered-up by claiming the monks did it on their own just as he was about to conclude a peace with them?), causing tens of thousands of Jews to flee to Egypt, at least they got good libraries and beachfront property is available, it's the original Miami, driving them into the arms of the Christian Copts, who were sore at them for aiding the Persians also, and massacred some of them, but not all, since there were 40K left in Alexandria alone. That was the last straw, I'm sure, and them Jewish puppetmasters finally showed their Arab Manchurian Candidate the Red Queen card and let the dogs of war loose on all Christians everywhere forever.
In Jan. 630 (10 Ramadan, 8 A.H.), after suddenly deciding to break his peace treaty with them, Puppet Prophet Muhammad surprised and captured Mecca, entered the city with 10K men in triumph, killed 28 opponents, removed the statue of the god Hubal from the Kaaba, destroyed all tribal idols, and announced the Law of Islam (Shari'ah) (Sharia), after which the entire pop. was converted to Islam by the sword, and kafirs (kuffars) (non-believers, who cover-up the truth of Islam like farmers do seeds) were forbidden to enter the city forever, the dogs are probably a case for the Supreme Court. The Muslims call it the Fatah-e-Mubeen or Glorious Victory. Black Abyssinian ex-slave Bilal summoned Muslims for the first time from the roof of the Kaaba, I wonder how this would look from space? From now on all Muslims must face the kiblah (direction of the Kaaba) when praying, and all mosques have a mihrab or niche carved in the wall pointing the way. The Kaaba was laundered by Muhammad's holy Crapola, er, Koran, and was now supposed to have been given to the patriarch Abraham by the angel Gabriel, and was originally white but turned black from the sins of mankind (therefore white is right with Allah and Muhammad - small wonder that Joseph Smith copied them in his Book of Moron, making black skin a punishment for sinning, which neatly takes care of most Muslims, who happened to be swarthy even before the big conversion, grin).
Three weeks later, 10K Muslim Medinans and 2K new PC Meccans defeated a confederation of the pissed-off pagan bedouin tribe of Hawazin-Thaqif from the nearby city of Ta'if in SW Arabia at the Battle of Hunayn, and captured big booty, and Muhammad was official Cock of the Big Black Rock, beginning to receive tribal delegations (wufud) from throughout Arabia, and making them pay the alms tax (sadaqa) to him at Medina, listen to the way it rolls off your tongue, it sounds like a perfume. Too bad, his Medinan brand of Islam, cooked up while he was weak and tolerating the existence of non-believers soon changed to the lean mean Meccan brand, which tolerates no non-believers and pumps up the testosterone in the holy warriors to spread the territory outward from Da Cube.
Later Muhammed led an army of 30K to the northern city of Tabuk on the Syrian border to take on a Byzantine Christian army, which never showed up, after which he returned and scolded the "hypocrites" who stayed behind and/or didn't finance the jihad ("all-out struggle for Allah") (holy war for Islam, a Muslim engaged in it being called a mujahid, plural mujahideen), and issued his bloody Sura 9:5, along with Sura 9:123: "Oh you who believe, fight the unbelievers around you, and let them see how harsh you can be; know that Allah is with them", with Sura 9:111 promising those who "slay and are slain" paradise, and Sura 4:136-7 condemning future Western immigrant Muslims et al. as "those who take disbelievers as allies", and going on to insure that Islam repeatedly teaches Muslims never to make friends with unbelievers. One goes in, millions come out, searching for the next victim, until there's nothing left to kill, you have to love its simplicity, it's one-billionth our size and it's killing us.
The main base secured, and the Christians he feared since his birth in the Year of the Elephant proved to be wusses, starting in 631 Muhammad's followers began spreading out in a mad rush to bring the rest of Arabia into submission to the new cult on the block in order to increase the size of their army. Too bad, in Mar. 632 62-y.-o. Muhammad, now the Master of Arabia after a 23-year jihad, and no longer needed by his puppetmasters, no management skills, led the Hajjatul Wada (Farewell Pilgrimage) from Medina to Mecca, then on the 9th day of Dhul al Hijjah (the 12th and last mo. of the Islamic calendar, when Muslims do the Hajj) delivered his Last Sermon to the People in the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca to 124K, forbidding all plunder and blood feuds among believers, and commanding all believers, even slaves to treat each other as brothers, obviously a ripoff of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians 3:28, the epistle Jews love to hate the most, what a coincidence. He preached merchant honor, commanding that 90% of a Muslim's life be devoted to work in order to put food on the table. His speech includes the soundbytes "All humanity came from Adam and Eve, thus an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, or vice-versa; neither does a white have any superiority over a black or vice-versa", er, the last part is a Muslim disinformation that made its rounds on the Internet. Also, "No prophet or messenger will come after me and no new true faith will be born", sorry Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. One of his last instructions was to expel all Christians and Jews from the Arabian peninsula, I love my Quran Coffeemaker. He then returned to Medina, sickened of a fever, and died on June 8, 632 in the lap of his favorite wife Ayesha (A'isha) after a peaceful life of love consisting of 78 battles, only one of which was defensive, leaving only some mats, blankets, jugs and other personal items, a white mule and a little piece of land he had already willed away. His burial place was kept secret, good idea, imagine how many would like to get even, at least they didn't make up a story about him being the son of God and rising from the grave, although in retrospect that might have been a fatal booboo, check back with me later. Later the story was changed and Muhammad was buried in his own house, which is also a mosque, no need to lose all that tourist revenue. Muhammad's Tomb and the land on which he is allegedly buried became the most holy site in Islam, even more holy than Mecca and Medina. Some think he died as a result of being served poisoned meat by a Jewish woman getting revenge for what he did to Khaybar. By the way, some think he suffered from acromegaly in his later years, as proved by his huge preserved footprint, which explains his impotence and paranoia about his wives that made him order them to cover themselves to keep potent men at bay, causing billions of Muslim women to later suffer, plus launching the phobia about portraying his likeness since he was a grotesque giant with disorted features that make him look like a circus freak, and that won't help with conversion efforts. Good timing in retrospect as this upside-down Christ died 600 years after the real one, but with infinitely more sin mileage, covered in his own I'm-holy-fuck-you-or-you're-dead fake holy Satanic b.s., becoming the Ghost Hitler Who Rules Through a Music Score Disguised as a Book, launching a mental AIDS into the human species that is finally exterminated in the year ?, I wish, it's a challenge of knowledge delivery systems that only Science and Technology can solve. What did Jeezy already predict about him, call him psychic? "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of death and everything unclean" (Matthew 23:27). Speaking of whited sepulchers, Big M also allegedly left a Letter to St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt circa 628, promising them freedom of religion and from paying the jizya, the right to repair their churches, exemption from military service, freedom from forced marriages of Christian women to Muslim men, etc., which is often used in modern Muslim disinformation articles, but is actually an ex-post facto forgery, contradicting the Quran and Muhammad's real actions in numerous places, as if that matters, since real Christians in Muslim lands such as Egypt have always had to live like mangy dogs, clear to this day. Of course it's real, as proved by the hundreds of other Christian churches in Arabia, Ethiopia, and Egypt with the same letters from Big M, not. Obviously the monks forged the thing precisely because they knew that without it they would be destroyed, enslaved, or killed, and that the Allah Akbar cretins would be dumb enough to fall for it, which they did, get it? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Did I mention that there's real doubt that Prophet Muhammad really lived, not only his historicity, but the historical authenticity of the basic Muslim documents? Like Moses and Jesus, he might have been, no probably was, definitely was a dummy corporation for a New World Order that covered its tracks so nobody could prove anything in court, check intuition plus, free your skin. Too bad that in our modern world we historyscopers have to deal with what we've got and can't look back into Time with a Cosmoscope like the Big Banger Scientists.
He was survived by daughter Fatima Zahra (d. 633) and nine, count 'em nine wives but no sons, and since he didn't make a provision for political succession, a power struggle ensued, and his father-in-law Abu Bakr (572-634) was elected by a shura (committee) as the first successor (caliph) (kalifa) to the Prophet (not the next prophet, as Big M is the final prophet), because, like the first four Rashidun or Rightly Guided (Righteous) Caliphs (632-61), he was married to a daughter of the Prophet or had given his daughter to him in marriage, and was one of the Prophet's Sahaba (close companions), and his daughter was Big M's favorite wife.
At Abu Bakr's accession many Arab tribes revolted, starting with the Banu Hanifa, who lived in the garden spot of C Arabia now known as Riyadh ("gardens"), causing him to begin the Ridda (Apostasy) Wars to rid da Arabian peninsula of apostasy, bloodily reconsolidating Arabia by 633. Then, obeying those letters that the Prophet had sent to "all the monarchs of the world" in 628, caliph Abu Bakr declared did-I-mention jihad (Arabic for "all-out struggle for Allah") (holy war to spread Muslim rule over more territory, a person engaged in it being called a mujahid, plural mujahideen) on the Roman (Byzantine) and Persian empires, sending little fanatical armies of 3K-4K Arabs at them. They do like to send little fanatical armies at ya, don't they? By the way, the Arabs have another word, qitaal to mean fighting with weapons, which is a subset of jihad if done right.
The first general, Usamah (Osama) ("lion") bin Zayd (612-) (son of the dude who died at the Battle of Mu'tah Fuck'ah, whom Muhammad appointed to CIC of his armies a few days before his death, pissing the other generals off - Osama bin Laden wishes he could equal his success) then led an expedition to pesky Byzantine-controlled Syria with the goal of reaching Constantinople, while the 2nd general, Khalid ("immortal") ibn al-Walid ("newborn child") (592-642) (who was on the Meccan side in the 625 attack on Muhammad, then converted to Islam in 629, and goes on to never know defeat in 100 battles) led a 2nd expedition to pesky Persia, which had recently had the stuffing knocked out of it by the Byzantines and was on its knees, beginning with the frontier town of Hira (capital of Persia's richest province of Iraq, and under the control of an Arab tributary prince), which fell in the last week of May 633. Too bad, before they finished off Persia, the Byzantines had been seriously weakened by the Persians, making both of them easy game for the new Allah Akbars. To add fuel to the fire, as soon as they met up, the Christians began calling the new Mahometans (Muslims) idolaters and pagans, pissing them off no end. The real question: would Muhammad have ordered the execution of Christ if he told him he was the Son of God? You bechya.
Each time they offered three choices to the infidels they met: convert, pay tribute forever, or become worm food. Hey, before you knock it, think about it awhile This religion beats mixed-up incomprehensible, schismed, priest-ridden Christinsanity, it has no sacrifies or priesthood like Judaism, and Christianity's heaven is too hard to attain, while with Shalom for Lamers anybody can understand the perils of Hell, the rewards of Paradise with a guaranteed 72 virgins, and the brotherhood of true blood-stained believers here on Earth, boys will be boys, right? And Muhammad is no impossible god-man who has never sinned, but more of a Jewish-type King David or Moses, who is just as Semitic as they are, but the Jews came from the bad side of Abraham's house, and we Arabs are the good side, never mind how we ended up in this desert hellhole, it's our turn to take the Promised Land. And anyway, the Jewish Temple is kaput and Jews can't get forgiveness of sins by sacrifices of sheep anymore, so what's wrong with this new source of sheep to slaughter, infidel sheep, that'll save our souls, chuckle, think of all the women slaves we'll get. Go on, buy this new Islam stuff, it's leading edge, because you don't ever have to think for yourself again, we tell you just how and when to pray, how to act, and forget all the other monotheist religions that don't want you to hurt a fly, let's turn back the calendar, murder, rape and torture are OK with your monomaniac god Allah now, so sign right here and join the quick line by dying in a jihad and bypassing Allah's judgment seat on your way to the Big P and (did we mention?) your bonus of 72 sexy Vs from divinematch dot com.
In 633, talk about bad timing, while the Saracens were winning battle after battle out in the East, the Fourth Council (Synod) of Toledo in Spain, called by Visigoth king Sisenand and presided over by Archbishop St. Isidore ("gift of Isis" - don't ask) of Seville (560-636) met in the church of St. Leocadia, and removed all taxes on the clergy and proclaimed the right of nobles and bishops to confirm elections to the Visigothic crown. It also prohibited the pesky Jews from keeping slaves, and put all tithes in the care of the bishop. So much for church-state separation. After thinking it through to the max for centuries, X marks the spot, the Filioque Clause was inserted into the 381 Trinitarian (anti-Arian) Creed of the First Council of Constantinople after the words "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father", adding "and [from] the Son" to emphasize that Jesus the Son is of equal divinity with God the Father and has equal spirit-generating mojo. Too bad, the Eastern Orthodox Church couldn't spit, er, swallow it, since it couldn't get over how/why a father isn't superior to his own jism, er, son, and declared it heretical in 867, then jismed, er, schismed completely with the Roman Church in Crab Nebula Year 1054, I'll come back to that later.
On July 30, 634 the 20K-man army of the Arab Muslim Saracens (Arab. "shirqiyyeen" = easterners) defeated the 80K-man army of the Byzantines at the Battle of Ajnadayn in S Palestine, and took Bostra and Baalbek, building a mosque inside the ancient Temple of Jupiter, which had been converted into a fortress, hehehe, I am strong like the ox, I crush you like crumb. They then swept up the coast of Palestine as far as Caesarea, forcing Jews to convert to Islam by the sword, which really did the remaining Samaritans in, so that by 2007 there were only 712 left. On Aug. 23, 634 Abu Bakr (b. 573) died, and was succeeded by Muhammad's adviser and brother-in-law Omar (Umar) ("long life") ibn Al-Khattab (582-644) as caliph #2 (until 644), going on to conquer Syria, Persia, and Egypt, defeat Byzantine emperor Heraclius I, and institute the Islamic taxation system, which requires "People of the Book" (Ahl al-kitab) (pesky Jews and Christians, who go for that perverted version of the Quran they call the Little Library of Books or Bible) to pay a special poll tax, which they call the jizya ("punishment") (as required by Surah 9:29), as in pay it or I'll jizz in ya face and kill ya, and (after too many feigned conversions to avoid the ban on non-Muslim ownership of land) a special land tax called the kharaj in order to practice their faith and not be killed for failing to submit (it is usually grudgingly accepted with a slap in the face?), ending up financing the Muslim state when they captured Syria and Egypt, which had large Christian pops., meaning no taxes Syria and Egypt, which had large Christian pops., meaning no taxes for the lucky Muslim faithful (gain the world and lose your soul jokes here?). "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and his Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." (Quran 9:29)
Omar also created garrison settlements (amsar) to keep Arab troops separate from newly conquered peoples, founding the new cities of Kufa (639) and Basra (636) in Iraq, and Fustat (later Cairo) (642) in Egypt. He knew which side his bread was buttered on, and made Islam attractive for soldiers by establishing the diwan, a list of soldiers entitled to govt. stipends ('ata), with the earlier converts getting higher pay.
On Sept. 20, 634 after reaching Damascus, being forced to withdraw to Yarmuk, defeating the Byzantines, then reattacking with the help of the Monophysites in Syria (who were tired of Roman Catholic persecution), the Muslims under Khalid ibn Walid captured Damascus, capital of Syria, and forced the Pact of Omar on the Christian dhimmis (people of the dhimma or protection pact), which prohibited them from building new churches or repairing existing ones, practicing their religion publicly or converting anyone to it, displaying the cross or ringing church bells, riding saddles or bearing arms, selling alcoholic beverages, displaying wine or pork openly, etc., and forced them to show respect to Muslims, give them their seats if asked, plus free room and board for three days, etc., even forcing them to look different than Muslims so there will be no question who's superior to who by wearing the zunnar (zonnar) (wide cloth belt), keeping to the side of the street and never using the Muslim greeting "as-Salamu alaykum", all this protection from being murdered in return for paying the jizya (protection money). I wonder why Western govts. welcome Muslim immigrants today if they read this, the Nazis sure did. Ascetic Damascus-born Egyptian-trained monk Sophronius (560-638) fled and became Christian patriarch of Jerusalem (until 638), giving a Christmas sermon noting that the I-love-you-too-much Muslims already control Bethlehem, and calling them "unwitting representatives of God's inevitable chastisement of weak and wavering Christians".
Notice that I didn't say you have to convert or die, and if I did, I ain't sorry. True, when it came to their pagan polytheist Arab brothers, that was da choice, it's a matter of ending them family feuds with a final solution and all that jazz. But with "People of the Book", no, you only have to submit to their theocratic rule or die, after which you can pay tribute forever or convert and help expand their territory by your own killing forever, as if you're not under eternal pressure and are treated as politically sidelined second class merde with little or no personal rights until you do, but not really, because they prefer to make both death and taxes inescapable so they can ride you like a talking donkey did I say forever. Back then, if you were a Christian and they hadn't conquered your territory yet, you'd spread the story that that's what they'd make you do, convert to being an idolatrous infidel that has to kiss a big Black Dick, er, Cube and deny that Christ is God so you doom yourself to Hell, or die and receive a martyr's reward of Heaven, call it put up or shut up, maybe God is allowing Islam as your ultimate test. Only after it was too late would you find out your other options, on your knees, a lifetime of slavery then face God and tell him you were a coward. Even today, time doesn't change that formula. If a Muslim army could conquer Europe, they would dissolve all their governments, parliaments, national assemblies, European Union, etc., and set up their own military occupation government where you are forced to listen to them endless hypnotic prayers from the minarets 365 days a year, 5 times a day, forever. If a Muslim army could conquer the U.S., down would come the Stars and Stripes, and out would go the Constitution and Bill of Rights, right into the fire, along with most Western infidel culture, which would be classified as blasphemous and sacrilegious. Women would have to cover up like the cattle they are, and live under their horrible sharia laws and spread it for their hubbies at age 9. Not that a few or a large group of Muslims couldn't immigrate and pretend to accept the infidel government, but you and I both know they're just biding their time for the main army to arrive, and then they'll be ready to join them, Allah be praised, gag. Back to the timeline.
The year 636 wasn't the year 666, but to the superstitious it was 2 out of 3 at least. On July 23, 636 the Muslim Arabs under Gen. Khalid captured Gaza, the principal Jewish community in Byzantine Judea from the Byzantines, then laid siege to Jerusalem for two years, taking it in 639. Meanwhile on Aug. 15-20 25K-40K Muslim Arabs under Gen. Khalid defeated 80K-100K Christian Byzantines under Heraclius I at the epic Battle Yarmuk (Yarmouk) on the banks of the Yarmuk River (tributary of the Jordan River) near Hira, with 50K Byzantines vs. 4K Muslims killed, and captured Damascus, which became the capital of the caliphs until 750 (which they went on to fortify and adorn), while going on to annex the rest of the Levant, making Syria (part of the Roman empire since 64 B.C.E.), er, Muslim. Don't blame the Christians entirely though. Part of the reason for their defeat was that the Byzantines were used to hiring Christian Ghassanid Arab auxiliaries for their cavalry, most of whom double-crossed them and switched sides, leaving them up Shit Creek without a paddle, I had a really strong feeling about this one, shit.
It's all Muslim good news now. In 637 Persian resistance to the Muslims stiffened, and Persian Gen. Rustam gave them a damned good fight at the Battle of Kadessia (Qadisiyya) in Iraq, sitting on a golden throne on a raised platform at the rear of his ranks of levied soldiers. Too bad, after three days of a push, the Arabs suddenly received reinforcements, and the Persians attempted a quick win with a charge of their 33 war elephants, but one was wounded painfully and went beserk, charging and panicking the other elephants, who ended up breaking the Persian line, and this time the Arabs pressed home and slew infidels all night long, killing Rustam and winning one for Big Alpha.
Meanwhile in 637 more Muslims under Caliph Omar and Gen. Khalid conquered Jesus' old digs of Jerusalem, which they call Elya Al-Quds, whose patriarch Sophronius preferred to accept the Umari Treaty than fight, in which the Holy Sepulchre and the True Cross were protected, and all Christian churches and relics left in Christian hands in return for paying the jizya tribute; Jews were forbidden to ride horses, build new synagogues, hold judicial or civil posts or build new synagogues. The city required Caliph Omar to come and receive his new possession in person, which he did in 638. The Muslims also captured the Nestorian stronghold of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 637.
In 638 as promised, Caliph Omar came from Medina to Jerusalem (600 mi.) on an ass like Jesus, er, a camel, Arab style, carrying a bag of barley, a bag of dates, a water skin, and a wooden platter. He brought only one attendant, and when his own emirs greeted him in fine silks he threw a tantrum, as well as handfuls of dirt at them, finally meeting with Patriarch Sophronius, with whom he toured the Holy Places, making jokes about his followers being too expensive, and refusing an invitation to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, saying he doesn't want to endanger its status as a Christian temple. Since Christian mucky-mucks had claimed that the Bible predicted that a humble but just and powerful man will come to Jerusalem riding on an ass and will actually prove to be a protector an ally to the Christians of Jerusalem, Sophronius (b. 580) died happy on Mar. 11.
Meanwhile in 638 Persian Shah Yazdgird III appealed to the Chinese for help against the Mad Muslims, but went unanswered as the Muslims occupied and plundered the Sassanian imperial capital of Ctesiphon and conquered Iraq as far N as Mosul, making Iraq safe for Saddam Hussein. Once-boss Ctesiphon then began to decay before the prosperity of the nearby Arab capital Baghdad ("god's gift", "fair garden"), after which the Persians yielded the Euphrates region, including Antioch and Beroea, the latter being renamed Haleb (Alep). One good thing for Russians, Omar sanctioned chess for Muslims, and the conquest of Persia caused the game to change from chatrang to shatranj.
In 639 the Arabs under Gen. Amr ibn al-As (al-Aas) (583-664) overran Mesopotamia and invaded Egypt, while yet more Arabs attacked Armenia, and conquered it by 653, there goes Noah's Ark.
Meanwhile Caliph Omar launched the practice of dating time with the Hejira (Hegira) (622 C.E.), which became 1 A.H. (anno hegirae), fulfilling Christian fears that the Antichrist would start time over with year 1 and force everyone to worship the image of the Beast, cover the runway with whipped cream.
The Muslim string of hits never ends. In 640 the romping Saracens conquered Caesarea after a 7-mo. seige after a Jew named Joseph led them in through a tunnel under the city, attaboy Mel. Meanwhile more Arabs under gen. Amr ibn al-As sieged and took the fortress of Babylon-in-Egypt on the E bank of the Nile in Egypt, and moved toward Heliopolis, destroying the Byzantine army at the Battle of Heliopolis on Nov. 4, 641, then sieged the Egyptian capital of Alexandria, seat of the Byzantine govt., and captured it with the support of Christian Monophysite Copts, who had been treated like merde by the Orthodox Byzantines and maybe hated them worse than the Jews, giving Arab Muslims control of Egypt, which they ruled from their new capital of Fustat (later Cairo) N of Babylon-in-Egypt. On Nov. 8, 641 the Treaty of Alexandria, which sealed the Arab conquest of Egypt expressly stipulated that the city's 40K Jews were to be allowed to remain, after which the last Byzantine troops evacuated the city on Sept. 17, 642. Too bad, the Arabs burned the 300K papyrus scrolls of the Library of Alexandria to heat the public baths, the supply running out in one year, ending the great School of Alexandria that brought us all that math and science, so despite what the Christians did to pagan Alexandrian librarian Hypatia in 415, it was the Muslims who finally destroyed the accumulated knowledge of the ancients, how 'bout them apples, Adam?
The Muslim conquest of Egypt caused Adulis (key to the trade route to India) to be closed to old Arabian enemy Abyssinia (Ethiopia), which was cut off from the rest of Christendom for the next eight cents. Can these Jews, er, Muslims do no wrong? Stay tuned to the next episode of Don't Get Mad starring Moses Geteven.
On Feb. 11, 641 Emperor Heraclius I (b. 575) died after losing Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Egypt to the Muslims, and his sons Constantine III (Heraclius Novus Constantinus) (b. 612) and his younger half-brother (son of Martina) Heraclonas succeeded him, but Constantine III died on May 25 of TB (murdered?), and in Sept. after Martina was suspected of poisoning him, Heraclius' 11-y.-o. grandson Constans (Constantius) II Pogonatus (Pogonatos) (the Bearded) (630-68) was made co-emperor under pressure, but soon the Senate deposed Heraclonas, slit his nose to make him unworthy of being emperor (a saving face thing in reverse), and exiled him, along with Martina and her other sons, and Constans II became sole Byzantine emperor, becoming the one with the longest beard, making him the Abe Lincoln of the Bee-Beards, and he tried to be worthy of it by organizing against the Muslim Arab threat, redoing the provincial administration by establishing themes (themata) and strategoi (military governors) with wide authority over civil officials to mobilize against invading raghead killer zombies, his new organization working well enough to stay in place for centuries, Orajel says to my toothache pain, you're done.
Then the Christians got a lucky break. On Nov. 7, 644 Caliph Omar (b. 581) was stabbed to death in a mosque in Medina by a Persian slave with a personal (not poltical) grudge against him (didn't use enough olive oil?) right after appointing a committee to determine his successor (sure it wasn't political?). He was succeeded by Othman (Uthman) (Osman) ibn Affan (574-656) as caliph #3 (until 656), who went on to attempt to centralize the administration of the new Muslim territories from Medina, continued the conquest of the Iranian plateau, and ordered the creation of a definitive official ed. of the Quran, the first digitally remastered DVD set of the Osmonds.
Meanwhile in 646 a Byzantine fleet recaptured Alexandia from the Muslims, but did nothing to replace the priceless scrolls of antiquity burned there, I guess I better quit harping on it, but that didn't stop the Muslims from beginning an invasion of N Africa in 647-8, and assembling a fleet and taking Cyprus in 648, they plague is waterborne now. In 649 they raided Carthage from Libya and killed Christian Exarch Gregory, then defeated a Byzantine fleet off the coast of Egypt. Meanwhile around 650 they completed their conquest of the Persian empire, pancreas, liver, kidneys, all liquified despite the CDC Stage 3 Alert, sure it moves fast, but I still think there's hope for us.
In 650 the Muslims raided Cappadocia, taking and plundering Kayseri (Caesarea), raping Christian women in churches, executing the leaders and taking the pop. into slavery, causing the Christians to return to their underground cities, consisting of 200 complexes, with some rooms big enough to hold 10K.
One bright spot if you're black. In 651 Arab armies attacked Nubia, and after a push a nonaggression treaty (bakt) was concluded, agreeing on Aswan as the southern limit of Arab expansion, giving Nubia five cents. of peace, switch to Nubian Liberty Mutual and save 25% on your policy.
More good news for future Osama bin Ladens. In 652 the Arabs captured Khurasan and introduced Islam to guess-what Afghanistan, conquering Kabul in 664-70, causing Alexander the Great to roll over in his grave in Alexandria, as if they didn't run that too.
In 654 the Arabs conquered and plundered the Mediterranean island of Rhodes, setting it up as a new naval base and launching point, selling the remains of the Colossus of Rhodes (-226 B.C.E.) to a Jew from Edessa (Homs), Syria, who allegedly transported the bronze on 900 camels, although this is probably moose hockey invented by Christians to fulfill the prophesy of the destruction of the great statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2:31-35, more Mel Gibson jokes here.
Just when you thought this couldn't get any worse, in 655 the Byzantines, personally led by Emperor Constans II took on the Arab Egyptian fleet in the naval Battle of the Masts off the coast of Finike in Lycia, and were so roundly whipped that Constans sought refuge in Syracuse. Muslim naval superiority was established in the Mediterranean, which became a Muslim lake until 1571, causing West Europe to become isolated and revert to a purely agricultural civilization with minimal trade and communications, causing Feudalism (OHG fehu ot = "cattle possession") to be developed and go into full bloom in the 9th through 15th cents. (the term itself wasn't used until the 17th cent.), shades of Odysseus.
Just when they were getting successful, shit really did happen in Islam, and it started to go kablooey and turn against itself, which is no surprise since it's a Satanic murder cult based on the clean-burning mind fuel of hate, the ultimate drug of Satan. In 656, ten years before they were supposed to bring Armageddon to the Christians, the first fitna (Arabic for all-out schism in the Muslim world) saw Islam split into the Shits and Shinolas, er, Shiites and Sunnis, originally over the succession to the papacy, er, caliphate, making them hate each other more than the Christians, slowing down their takeover of the world as they fought each other instead, and holding back Armageddon for at least another Millennium, take the Brain Bus 10-question pre-test. On July 17, 656 after the Mushaf of Othman, the official text of the Quran (which was previously preserved on scraps of wood and camel bones, by the way, and shoo them flies away before reading them, please) was established on the orders of 80-y.-o. Caliph Othman (b. 574), he was stoned in the streets of Medina by a mob of rebel Muslim forces from Egypt (who were pissed off by low pay and prestige despite being early converts, and by Othman's appointment of members of his own Umayya clan to top administrative posts), driven to his house, and assassinated while reading it, causing the Arab world to go into turmoil for five years, giving the Byzantines a rest. At first Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law (son of his adopted father Abu Talib, and husband of his daughter Fatima), and adopted son (closest male relative) Ali ibn Abi Talib (599-661) (father of Muhammad's grandsons Hasan and Husayn) was elected caliph #4 (until 661), cmdr. of the faithful, and last of the Four Righteous Caliphs, with capital in Kufa, Iraq, stressing the equality of all Muslims and the role of the caliph as imam (spiritual leader), and disapproving of the degenerate game of chess for Muslims. He was supposedly Muhammad's choice all along, and the preceding caliphs supposedly perverted the True Faith, yadda yadda yadda, according to the Shiites. Muawiya (b. 602), the Mecca-born former secy. of Prophet Muhammad and gen. of Abu-Bakr vied unsuccessfully for the caliphate then settled for becoming gov. of Egypt and Syria until 661.
Too bad, when Ali failed to punish Othman's murderers, another split happened, the anti-Ali party being called the Joe Foreman, er, Kharijites (Kharijis) ("deserters"), while the pro-Ali party split into the Shiites (Shi'ites) (Arab. "Shi'ah" = "followers [of Ali]"), who reject the first three caliphs, don't accept the Sunna (non-Quranic sayings and doings of Muhammad, taken as gospel) as authoritative, and claim Ali as the first true imam ("leader", "guide"), and the some-sunni-day Sunnis, who accept all four, and love the Sunna as well as the Quran (sounds like they beat the Catholics and Protestants?), and on Dec. 4, 656 the First Muslim Civil War (Fitna) (ends 661) began with the Battle of the Camel outside Basra, Iraq, where the forces of Fourth and Final Rightly Guided Caliph Ali defeated the triad of Muhammad's widow A'isha (Ayesha) (who led a camel charge), and his former male companions al-Zubayr and Talha (after they split with him for failing to punish Othman's murderers), supported by the Quraysh of Medina (who feel threatened by Ali's embracing of the Ansar or Medinan converts). Al-Zubayr and Talha were killed, and A'isha was captured, and retired from politics.
But even more split happened in Muslimland. The Shiites later split between those who believe that caliphs must be descended through Ali's wife (Muhammad's daughter) Fatima, and those who accept any descendant, and then further split among those who believe that Ali is an incarnation of God, and even further among those who believe that he will be reincarnated as the Mahdi, ("divinely-guided one"), the Muslim Messiah who will stay on Earth for 7-19 years before the Second Coming of Issa (Jesus), who will kill the blind-in-the-right-eye Dajjal (al-Masaih ad-Dajjal = "false Messiah") and defeat his army of the deceived on the Yawm al-Qiyamah (Day of the Resurrection) (Surah 75) and establish the Muslim Millennium, or that he will be the mysterious son of the 11th imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi (869-?), who disappeared after his daddy died in 874. You got it, to Muslims the coming Messiah will be one of them, who will work with returned non-divine Jesus to kill the Antichrist, while to Christians the returned divine Jesus will work with them or for them to kill the Devil-controlled Antichrist, who just might be Muslim himself, and works with Muslims against Christians while portraying Jesus as the false Messiah to confuse them, what a way for the Age of Religion to go. To Sunnis, the Mahdi has yet to emerge in history, while to a Shiite he's already been here and will be baaack after reappearing from the Jamkaran Well at the Jamkaran Mosque of Qum, where tens of thousands now show up every Tues. evening to pray and drop him a note. The 2000 Noreaga and Achernar flick The Arrivals attempts to prove that the Dajjal is the leader of the Illuminati and Zionists because the Illuminati symbol is the all-seeing eye, which makes him 1-eyed like Sauron the Lidless Eye in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", this is the result of 1400 years of research into a dark cave.
Over the next several centuries the two groups split Muslimland, with the Sunnis (90%) encircling the Shiites centered in Iran and Iraq between the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea. They also diverged in their practices, and here's a summary if you can keep from upchucking: Sunnis pray with their arms folded below the rib cage, Shiites with their arms straight down at the sides; Sunni mosques tend to have domes and minarets and prohibit all images, Shiite mosques tend to have portraits of Ali and/or Hussein; Sunni clerics usually wear white headgear, Shiite clerics are more elaborately attired and also have black or green headgear; Sunni homes like to display quotes from the Quran, and fly white flags after returning from Mecca; Shiite homes like to display images of Ali and fly colorful flags from their roofs during every important religious occasion; in modern times Shiites hang Aleks (strips of green cloth) from their rearview mirrors; Shiites like to wear a Turbah (disc made of clay, stone or wood from the battlefield in Karbala where Hussein was slain) under their forehead during prayers to prevent it from touching an artificial material, but Sunnis consider it idol worship and confiscate them when they go to Mecca; Sunnis like to name themselves after Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman, while Shiites like to name themselves after Ali, Hussein and Fatima Zahra; Sunni tribal names include Bakri, Dulaimi, and Samarrai; Shiite tribal names include Moussawi, Rubaie and Sa'aedi; the Jaburi, Khafaji and Shammari tribes have members of both sects.
In modern times the Shiite pop. is centered in Iran, with a fork jutting into the Basra area of Iraq, while the Sunnis have them totally surrounded and outnumbered, but are plagued by a number of sellouts to Satanic Western secularism (and probably a number of Zionist moles, chuckle).
On July 26-29, 657 Caliph Ali met with wild card Muawiya, who was seeking to avenge the murder of his Umayyad relative Othman at the Battle of Siffin on the upper Euphrates River. After the battle began, Muawiya's Syrian troops demanded arbitration, brandishing pages of the Quran, causing the battle to be deferred until a committee could meet, why do you stop, you know the rules, because we do?
Screw committees, this is Monomaniac Mind Control Islam. In July, 658 the Battle of Nahrawan saw Caliph Ali decimate the small group of Khariji secessionists who believed that Allah, not a committee should arbitrate a caliphate dispute, and that therefore Ali and his followers are not true Muslims, after which they continued on as the smallest division of Islam, practicing extreme equality, without regard to blood descent, and established enclaves along the Persian Gulf, Oman and North Africa.
In 659 Constans II concluded a truce with Arab cmdr. of Syria Muawiya, who told the caliphate committee what's what, openly asserting his claim to the caliphate from distant Damascus.
There are only two episodes of Breaking Bad left? Don't count on it. On Jan. 27, 661 (19th day of Ramadan) caliph Ali ibn Abu Talib (b. 599), husband of Prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatima Zahra was assassinated (poisoned), and his eldest son Hasan ("handsome") (625-69), brother of Husayn (Hussein) ("handsomer") (626-80) was encouraged to vie for the caliphate, but after noting that Muawiya has the biggest Muslim army, he declined, and Husayn waited in the wings until 669, while Muawiya became caliph #5 Muawiya (Muawiyah) (Mu'awia) (Mu'awiya) (Moawiya) ("proclaiming the unity of God") ibn Abi Sufyan (602-680), founding the Umayyad (Omayyad) Dynasty, based in Damascus (ends 750, although the Umayyad style of architecture survives in Spain until 1000). After he reneged on his treaty with Ali that promises not to name his son as successor, the Shiites started calling him a usurper and mulk (king) (an un-Islamic departure from precedent), and reviled him. Nonplussed, he beautified Damascus to rival Constantinople, while allowing the provinces to be administered by Byzantine and Sassanid bureaucrats in pre-Islamic government divisions (diwans), who conducted official business in infidel Greek and Pahlavi.
Don't count the Christians out yet, and keep your boots shined. In 663 Emperor Constans II transferred his court from Constantinople to Italy in a chess move of blocking Arab conquest of Italy and Sicily, with dreams of restoring Rome to its old imperial glory dancing in his head, starting by stripping it of all remaining valuables, becoming the last visit by a Byzantine emperor, please, folks, the President's ETA from the Middle East Summit is at 0:600, I want an army of experts ready to sign hundreds of thousands of affadavits.
The Big Year 666 approached, and yet the Muslims seemed to be slowing down, it was a counterclimax, the only apocalyptic thing of note being the Great Plague in Britain and Ireland from 664-8. In 666 the the Muslims led by Ibn Hudayj raided Sicily, who cares, you can have it, fuggedaboutit, and in 667 they first crossed the Oxus River into C Asia, you can have that too, just leave the vital parts of the old Jesus-loving Roman empire alone. Meanwhile the Arab onslaught on Christendom was so out of the blue and ill-understood that the Christian view of Muhammad was a total blank, with most not even knowing that the invaders had a new prophet or what his name was, believing only that the attacks were by pagans and were a punishment of God for their own sins, I'm still trying to picture how Christians who can't speak or read Arabic are supposed to decide to convert or know the options before losing their heads, Abdul, don't keep the customer waiting, whap. Only one anonymous Byzantine document written in Palestine between 634-40 called Doctrina Iacobi Nuper Baptizati (Latin for "The Teaching of the Recently-Baptized Jacob") contained the soundbyte about Muhammad, who is not mentioned by name: "He is deceiving. For do prophets come with sword and chariot?... You will discover nothing true from the said prophet except human bloodshed." It was not until Arab Christian monk-priest St. John of Damascus (676-754) began writing on Islam that Christendom finally got clued in, with the new term "false prophet" coined and used ever since, and later biographies tried to date his death in 666 to cinch their view that he was the feared Antichrist, while others changed his name to Mahmound, meaning Devil Incarnate, it was a war of disinformation on both sides.
On Mar. 26, 668 after the coast was clear, and being recommended by Abbot Hadrian of St. Peter's in Canterbury, England for his personal experience with the bearded turbaned Antichrists, bearded bald-headed Greek Orthodox monk Theodore of Tarsus (601-90), who fled Tarsus to Constantinople in 637 when the Muslims took it, and was living in Rome at the Eastern Orthodox monastery of St. Anastasias, and had by now mastered Latin as well as Greek lit., introducing the litany of the saints to the West, can you afford not to be in good hands with Allsaint, was consecrated as archbishop #8 of Canterbury by the vital 666-riding Pope (657-72) Pope St. Vitalian (Vitalianus) (-672), and headed on down, no turban in sight, arriving on May 27, 669, and hitting it off by spreading delectable scare stories about them terrible Arab Antichrists, five heads and ten eyes, that was just the donkey.
Meanwhile on Sept. 15, 668 after he proved too expensive to maintain in his accustomed style, Byzantine Emperor Constans II was murdered during a mutiny in Syracuse, Sicily while bathing by a cubicularius, and the Armenian patrician Mezezius (-669) was proclaimed emperor by the rebels. Too bad, the troops and local pop. wouldn't buy it, and he lasted only a few mo., while Constans II's son Constantine IV claimed the throne. As if the Busy Bees didn't have enough problems, Caliph Muawiya I sent an army under his son Yazid I against them, and it reached as far as Chalcedon, taking Amorion. Talk about a weird historical feeling, to be emperor of 666 Ghost Rome and be called Zeus from Mount Ararat.
In 669 Constans II Pogonatus' son Constantine IV (652-685) finally went with a force to Sicily to kill Mezezius and put down the revolt, or some troops from Italy and Africa did it for him and sent him Mezezius' head, my copy of the Byzantine Mirror is smudged, after which Constantine IV became sole Byzantine emperor (until 685), and returned the court to Constantinople, where he was forced by his troops to accept his brothers Heraclius and Tiberius as co-emperors for an insurance policy (until 680). Meanwhile after the Byzantines recovered Amorion, the Muslims attacked Carthage and Sicily. They can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with, and they never ever, ever, give up, they're the original Terminators.
In 669 Muhammad's grandson Hasan (b. 625) died in retirement in Medina, and his younger brother so damn insane, er, Husayn (Hussein) (626-80) finally got his turn to revolt, claiming the title of caliph (2nd/3rd imam of the Shi'ites), alleging corruption of Muawiya, and leading a revolt in Iraq based in Caliph Ali's old capital of Kufa (ends 680).
In 670 the Muslims captured Cyzicus in Mysia on the W coast of Asia Minor, allowing them to set up a naval base to launch attacks against the infidel Byzantines, while also setting up a naval base in Kairouan (Qayrawan) in Tunisia in N Africa (northernmost bulge of the continent), making Islam a major naval power, able to launch raids on Europe and W across N Africa.
In 671 Ziyad ibn Abihi, Umayyad gov. of Kufa sent 50K troops to Merv in Persia in a plan to resettle Arabs in the area, causing the male soldiers to begin marrying indigenous Zoroastrian Persian women, which ended up backfiring in the 8th cent. when their descendants sparked the Abbasid rev. that overthrew the Umayyads in 750.
An all-new epsiode of Mad Men is about to begin. In 672 the Muslim troops of Caliph Muawiya I captured Smyrna and other coastal cities in Asian Minor, along with the island of Rhodes, then, under Gen. Abd Errahman, son of Khaled (who later died and was replaced by Gen. Sophian and his son Yezid) they sieged rich Constantinople, believing that the first army to siege the city of the Caesars will have their sins forgiven, or at least plenty of consolation prizes, and in Apr. 673 they began a land-sea attack on Constantinople, giving up in Sept. but blockading the city and beginning an annual attack for the next five years, until 678. Meanwhile in 673 brother Arabs began yearly raids until 704 across the Oxus River in an attempt to capture Bukhara and Soghdiana, and you think the U.S.-Mexico border is a problem.
But the West had secret veapons. In Apr. 674 the Muslims passed unimpeded through the Hellespont and landed troops near Hebdomon Palace 7 mi. from the big city, but were repulsed, with Greek Fire (a flame-thrower that puts people and ships on fire, invented in 673 by Syrian engineer refugee Callinicus) being used against them by the busy buzzing Byzantines for the first time, causing the soldiers of Blallah to back off and plunder the coasts of the Propontis until Sept., then retreat to the isle of Cyzicus for the winter. Being stupid zombies, they repeated this cycle until 678, giving up with the loss of 30K troops, leaving behind the grave of martyr Abu Ayub (whom the Christians confused with Job?), which was miraculously relocated via a holy vision after the fall of the city in 1453, becoming the site of the 4-star Mosque of Abu Ayub - see Edward Gibbon, Ch. 52.
In 678 the Byzantines used Greek Fire to destroy the Arab fleet at the naval Battle of Syllaeum in Pamphylia, and defeated them on land in Lycia, keep your head down, there's a lot of gunfire.
On May 6, 680 Caliph Muawiya I (b. 602) died after planning to capture Constantinople the long way around by sending a western invasion force to Spain under Musa ibn Nusayr (640-716) (son of a Jewish convert to Islam, who had his own motives?), which is cancelled. He was succeeded as Umayyad caliph in Damascus by his son Yazid I (642-83), causing the Muslim siege of Constantinople to end, and turning the caliphate into a oh-hell-no hereditary dynasty. On Oct. 2, 680 after trying to reach his main base of Kufa and being intercepted by a 1K-man vanguard of Yazid I's army, rival caliph Husayn bin Ali (b. 626) was done in at the town of Karbala (Kerbala) in Iraq 60 mi. SW of Baghdad near the Euphrates River, and on Oct. 3 a 3K-man army of Yazid I led by clergyman (not military man) Umar (Omar) ibn Sa'ad (gov. of Ray) arrived, beefing up to 20K by Oct. 6 and 30K by Oct. 10, cutting off the water supply to the town on Oct. 7, causing Husayn's half-brother Abbas ("lion") ibn Ali (b. 647) (eldest son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and 2nd wife Fatima bint Hizam al-Kilabiyya), known as the greatest warrior in Arabia to bravely sally out alone to get water for the women and children, and get killed after losing both arms and carrying the water bag in his teeth. On Oct. 10 (Muharram 10) Husayn and his 72 loyal companions (close relatives of Prophet Muhammad), including his other half-brother Usman (Uthman) ibn Ali sallied out and took them all on at the Battle of Karbala (Kerbala), and were all massacred after putting up a heroic fight, after which Husayn's head was placed on a lance and sent as a gift to Yazid I, beginning the Second Muslim Civil War (Fitna) (ends 692). The bodies of Husayn and Abbas were buried by the local Bani Asad tribe at the Masshad Al-Husayn Tomb, which became a Shiite religious pilgrimage site. The Sunni-Shiite split was hardened forever as the Shiites began commemorating Husayn's martyrdom in the yearly ritual of Ashoura (Ashura) (Aashurah) ("tenth"), held on the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharram, where the faithful march in processions beating their chests, drawing their own blood (cutting themselves) and mourning their failure to help Husayn battle Yazid, the loss consigning Shiites to minority status in the Islamic world. Some Shiites don't draw blood because harming one's own body is un-Islamic, body not mind.
The Muslim menace temporarily in check, the Christians went back to their superfine distinctions about the Godhead with the Sixth Ecumenical Synod (Third Council of Constantinople) in Constantinople on Nov. 7 680, which decided the pressing issue of the popular new Syrian-Armenian doctrine of Monothelitism (a new variant of Monophysitism that claims that Christ doesn't have one nature, divine, and two wills, divine and human, but one will, divine, and two natures, divine and human), which was rejected as heretical on Sept. 16, 681 after 18 meetings in favor of the 2N2W Orthodox doctrine after Syrian-born deacon St. Andreas (669-740) gave great speeches winning them over. Nobody wanted to discover Newton's Law of Force or the Periodic Table, of course, their souls came first and God told them he'd give them a Ph.D. exam in theology before he'd let them enter the gates of Heaven, I guess I missed that part of the Bible. Too bad, this decision caused Monophysite-friendly Syria and Egypt and its patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem to bug out of the Byzantine church forever, and it started to lose its dominance over the West, with Pope (678-81) St. Agatho (577-681), becoming the first Roman pope to interpret Luke 22:31 in support of papal claims to the primacy of the succession of the alleged first bishop St. Peter (Jesus' disciple way back when, who they claimed was the first Christian bishop of Rome, even though he may actually have never set foot there, who cares it's about power now and in the future), putting all Italian, er, Roman archbishops forever ahead of any Greek, er, archbishops of Constantinople no matter what they do about them Muslims.
I might have shocked you by blaming Islam on the Jews, but there it is. The Arab world of Kutam was filled with illiterate pagan bedouins, and it was them Jews that made him what he was, teaching him about monotheism and the Bible, opening up a whole new fairy tale world to his mind, and manufacturing his holy literature out of some secret Jewish literature factory, unless you want to accept the official Muslim coverstory. It's easy to understand that they needed him as a front to survive in a world that was shrinking daily, and were already dealing with him all the time via their caravans, who knows all the sordid details. As proof that they had no time to lose, on Jan. 9, 681 the Twelfth Council of Toledo, convened by Spanish king Ervig and run by fanatically anti-Semitic Bishop Julian of Toledo (642-90) (himself probably of Jewish descent, making him more anti-Semitic to avoid suspicion?) issued 28 laws condemning the Jews, forbidding them from observing the Sabbath et al., showing how fair they were by changing the death sentence for Jewish converts to Christianity relapsing to 100 lashes plus lifetime persecution, while enacting many devilish details such as mutilation of a father and de-nosing of a mother for circumcizing their son, although new Jewish converts to Christianity were allowed to skip pork, after which all local Jews were forced to hear the decrees read in the Church of the Holy Virgin, hurry up 711.
In 683 Muslim Umayyad forces reached Tangier and the Atlantic Ocean. Sidi Okba (Uqba) ibn Nafi, Arab conqueror of North Africa was killed 10 mi. from the Sahara oasis town of Biskra, Algeria, his tomb containining the earliest known Arabic inscription in North Africa. The same year, after Abdullah ibn Zubayr (624-92) (son of Caliph Abu Bakr's daughter Asma, and nephew of Muhammad's wife Aisha) and Abdullah ibn Umar (614-93) (son of Caliph Omar) began a revolt in the Hejaz, winning the Battle of al-Harrah NE of Media, then capturing Medina and sieging Mecca (damaging the Kaaba), Yazid I (b. 645) died suddenly, and his son Muawiyah (Moawiyah) (Mu'awiya) II (661-84) became the 3rd Muslim Umayyad caliph (until 684), but al-Zubayr's son Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr (624-92) (whose father Zubayr ibn al-Awwam was the nephew of Muhammad's wife Aisha, and whose mother Asma bint Abu Bakr wass the daughter of Caliph Abu Bakr) rised against him, demanding that the caliph be selected from the Quraysh tribe of the Umayyad clan, in other words, himself, and began the Second Muslim (Islamic) Civil War (Fitna) in Arabia and Iraqi, which ended in 692. Meanwhile the Qays tribal confederation in N Syria and Iraq backed al-Zubayr, while the rival confederation of Kalb in S Syria and Palestine backed the Umayyads, causing a separate feud, and in July, 684 the Battle of Marj Rahit (Marj-al-Rahit) saw the Kalbs defeat the Qaysis, but not really ending the feud, which continued to fester, eating at the Ummayad base.
In 684 Muawiyah II died, and Abd al-Malik (Abdal Melik) (Abdel Malik) ibn Marwan (646-705) became the 5th Muslim Umayyad caliph, making Arabic the official admin. language in 696, and instituting the barid (1 barid = 4 farsakh = 12 mi.) pony express-style postal and spy system. Al-Malik also designed a unique standard Ummayad coinage independent of the Byzantines and Sassanids, consisting of gold dinars and silver dirhams, all devoid of pictures, and containing Arabic inscriptions, after which cartoons of Muhammad were definitely out. Meanwhile al-Mukhtar began the Mawali Mahdi Uprising on behalf of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, a son of Caliph Ali by a concubine, which gained the support of the mawali, non-Arab converts to Islam who were treated like manure and forced to pay the jizya. In 686 Mukhtar Thaqafi proclaimed al-Hanafiyya as the first Mahdi ("divinely guided one"), the messiah who comes at the End of Days and institutes a reign of justice, obviously copied from Christ. The uprising was crushed by 687. A major conference of the Arab tribes elected Marwan I ibn al-Hakam (623-85) ruler of the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad clan, representing a break, since the first three Umayyad rulers were from the Sufyanid branch. Meanwhile the Ibadi sect claims the 5th caliph as Abdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi, later becoming the majority (75%) belief in modern Oman, splitting with both the Sunnis and Shiites, and practicing dissociation but not hostility towards unbelievers and sinners, o man.
So, the holy Muslim scoresheet shows Quraysh (whose nuts start it all), who fathers Qusayy, who fathers Abd Manaf, who fathers Abd Shams and Hashim; Abd Shams fathers Umayya ibn Abd Shams, founder of the Umayyad dynasty; Hashim fathers Abbas (Abd al-Muttalib) (566-652), who fathers al-Abbas (ancestor of Abu al-Abbas, founder of the Abbasid dynasty), Abdallah, and Abu Talib; Abdallah fathers Muhammad the Prophet, who fathers Fatima Zahra, who marries Ali, son of Abu Talib; Ali and Fatima father Hasan and Husayn, founders of the Shiite imams and the Fatimid caliphs, what's new from the most controversial reality show in history, you'll find out in seconds.
More good news for Jews and Christians. In the 680s female neckazon Dahia al-Kahina (-603) became war leader of the Berber tribes in the Aures Mts., converting to Judaism or Christianity and taking on the Umayyad armies of Hasan near Meskiania (modern-day Oum el-Bouaghi, Algeria) and defeating him so soundly that he fled Ifrqiya and holed up in Cyrenaica for 4-5 years before returning and defeating her. She died fighting them or committed suicide at age 100+ (127?) in 703, after which her tribe might have become the main source of Spanish Jews, it's a mad mad mad mad world ain't it?
In 691 more bad news for Jews and Christians as the Muslims really went too far and finished the octagonal Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem under Umayyad Caliph Abd El Malik ibn Mirwan (Abdal Malik), positioned on top of the ancient Jewish Temple of Jehovah to show who's cock of the rock, planting the seeds of a future Armageddon no matter what else they conquer, check back with me later when Christ returns and smashes it, if he does, no earthly power seems to be able to, welcome to the final of dancing with the stars.
In 693 the Arabs took Carthage, and defeated Justinian II in Sebastopolis, Cilicia. But at least they haven't taken Spain yet, right? Give them another 20 years and let's see who makes the better deal. In 693 a revolt against Spanish Visigoth Christian king Egica, led by Bishop Sisebert of Toledo seized Toledo in the name of some bum named Duke Sunifred, who minted his own coins and intended to be crowned king, until Egica kicked their butts and convened the Sixteenth Council of Toledo, which defrocked Sisebert and prohibited him and his descendants from holding office. Archbishop Felix of Seville was translated to take his job in Toledo, and archbishop Faustinus of Braga was translated to Seville, while Egica had his boy son Wittiza (b. 684) crowned co-king just in case (until 702).
On Nov. 9, 694, la dee dah, Egica accused the pesky Jews of collaborating with the Moroccan Muslims (weren't they, Mel?), and ordered them enslaved and their property confiscated. Since Jews don't get mad they get even, the imminent takeover of Spain by Muslims was assured. Meanwhile in 696 Venice, the "bride of the sea" gained its independence from the weakened Byzantine empire, and Paoluccio Anafesto (-717) became its first doge (duke) (until 717), ultimately leading to the Italian Renaissance, ask me how when I'm more mellow.
In 697 Carthage fell to the Saracens, who destroyed it, despite Byzantine emperor Leontius sending a relief force, which arrived too late and instead raided the SE coast of Spain until it was driven off by Visigothic Count Theudimer (Theodemir) (-743), who ruled seven cities in SE Spain, including Orihuela, Valentila (Valencia?), Alicante, Mula, Bigastro, Eyya (Ojos), and Lorica.In 698 a plague broke out in Constantinople, spreading west and reaching Spain by 701, forcing Egica and his son Wittiza out of their capital of Toledo, the ravishing tweed jacket with a silk scarf and cascade of pearls, Party City, nobody has more Halloween for less. Meanwhile in 698 Emperor Leontius send a fleet under John the Patrician to recapture Carthage from the Saracens, but after initial success they were defeated and retreated to Crete, and through fear of the emperor's anger they proclaimed German army officer Apsimarus as the new emperor, then sieged Constantinople, got lucky when imperial officers opened the gates, and defeated and captured Leontinus, then slit his nose to make him ineligible for recrowning. Apsimarus took the name Tiberius III Apsimar (d. 705) and appointed his brother Heraclius as strategos, who gave up on Africa but went after the Umayyads to the east, I was just outside, then came in, I feel like some kind of conquistador when I don't have my foot in my mouth.
So ended the 7th century, with Islam having come out of nowhere to take over a big chunk of the civilized world, destroying Zoroastrianism in Persia, contracting the Christian Byzantines, taking over the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa, and preparing to take Spain soon. Meanwhile, having learned what humiliation is, and doing the Christian thing and blaming it on their own sins, sometime in the latter half of the 7th century Maundy Thursday (day before Good Friday), the day on which the pope, Catholic sovereigns, prelates, priests and nobles are supposed to wash the feet of 12 or more beggars to commemorate Christ's washing of his disciples' feet became an official Roman Catholic feast day to commemorate the Last Supper, pass the finger bowl, please, along with a joint and a goblet, my secret weapon, Listerine Agent Cool Blue.
Late in the year 702 mean king Egica (b. 610) died in his sleep, and his son (by Ervig's son Cixilo) Wittiza (Witiza) (Witiges) (686-710) (already anointed when he reached 14 on Nov. 15/24, 700, and made ruler over the Suevi based in Tuy, Gallicia) became king of Visigothic Spain (until 710), going on to start out good and reverse some of daddy's exile and confiscation of nobles, causing the people to love him, then go bad and "indulge in a plurality of wives and concubines, encouraging his subjects to do the same", while recalling from exile and surrounding himself with Jewish advisers, who (obviously in league with fellow Jews of Norith Africa, to make the coming invasion a cakewalk?) successfully counsel him to break down the defenses of cities, demolish castles and turn spears into harrows in order to stop potential traitors, causing the clergy to hate him.In 707 the Muslims under North African viceroy Abd Al-Aziz ben Musa ibn Nusayr (Nusair) (640-716) conquered Tangiers and subdued the Moroccan Berbers, which were standing in their way before taking Spain.
In 709-15 the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was built on the site of the Jewish Temple of Solomon 100m S of the Dome of the Rock, where Muhammad allegedly made his big Night Flight to Heaven on the back of the winged ass Barack O, er, Barak. Christians believe Christ preached a sermon there, and Jews believe that Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac there, so this is a nice place to start the Final War, I hope not.
In 710 after "tumultuously invading the kingdom with the encouragement of the senate" with an army from Italy, exiled Roderic (Ruderic) (Roderick) (Roderik) (Ruderigus) (-711) defeated and captured Wittiza "the Wicked", then blinded and imprisoned him in Cordoba, and was crowned the last king of Visigothic Spain by 711 after usurping the throne from Wittiza's two sons Evan and Siseburto (who escaped to Tangier). He then split the kingdom with (Wittiza's 3rd son?) Achila (Aquila) (Agila) (Akhila) II (-714), with the SW (Lusitania and W Carthaginiensis including Toledo and Egitania, AKA Idanha-a-Velha) going to Roderic and the NE (Tarraconensis and Narbonensis) to Achila II (nobody gets Galicia and Baetica?), giving the Muslims their big opening. Meanwhile Wittiza's family fled to Ceuta on the N shore of the Maghreb, allying with Jews and Arian Christians who hated the Roman Catholic bishops of the Visigoth monarchy, see our sensational success stories and find out how to become a Roman Catholic hater too.
We come to the big watershed year 711, as in 7/11 Stores, open 24/7 to offer convenient access to the soft underbelly of Christian Europe. On Apr. 29, 711 (Sat.) after Visigothic Count Ilyan (Julian) betrayed his post at Ceuta into the hands of the Muslims and flopped to their side to get even with Visigothic king Roderic for dishonoring (knocking up?) his daughter Lady Florinda, and sent four boats for them, a recon army of 1.7K Muslim Moors (mainly Berbers and slaves, plus a few Arabs) under lame Berber Muslim Umayyad Gen. Tariq (Tarik) ibn Ziyad (Zeyad) ibn Abdillah (-720) (AKA Tariq the One-Eyed) (of the Berber Nefzaoua tribe?) (a native of Hamdan, Persia?) (who was a slave of North African gov. Musa ibn Nusayr before being freed) (known for a prominent forehead and a black hairy mole on his left shoulder?) crossed the Strait of Gibraltar (Jabal al-Tariq) (Gabel al-Tariq) (mountain of Tariq) from Mauretania in the Muslim month of Shaban and Muslim year 92 (24th of Rejeb, June 19?), and invaded Spain (which they call al-Andalus), sending the boats back and forth several times until their entire army of 7K was over, then burning them so it was do or die for Big A. No surprise, Tariq obtained help from the Jewish community of Elvira (Ilbira) in a suburb of Granada, which was sick and tired of being sicked on and tarred, who came blame them, you're in the right place, only progressive Muslim dot com gives you the option of naming your price.
After Visigoth king Roderic spotted them and swore an oath to throw them back into the sea and began approaching, Tariq gave his Famous Do-or-Die Speech, featuring the immortal soundbyte "Remember that if you suffer a few moments in patience, you will afterward enjoy supreme delight", after which the pumped-up Allah Akbars charged the Spanish army, causing them to flee. They then marched to Cartagena and Cordoba before being driven back and regrouping and receiving reinforcements.
On July 19, 711 (Sun.) (two days before the end of Ramadan) King Roderic, who had holed up in his castle in Cordoba and sent men to gather an army of 100K blonde Goths (mostly serfs?) attacked the puny 10K-to-18K man Muslim army (including Arabs and Syrians, but mostly kinky-haired blacks?) at the Battle of the Guadalete (Rio Barbute) on the Jerez (Xeres) de la Frontera in SW Spain NE of Cadiz (later home of the fortified wine sherry), and was defeated after eight days after Wittiza's sons Evan and Siseburto made a deal and flopped over to the Muslim side in exchange for keeping their "royal portion" of 3K farms, and Tariq personally killed Roderic, who was mounted on a litter between two mules with a jewel-encrusted silk awning (either that or he drowned in the river, as his body was never found, just his white horse), after which his relatives Sisbert and Osbert fled, causing the confused Visigoth army to flee in all directions, most N to Ecija near Seville. Cadiz remained in Muslim hands until 1264. The Muslims then took Toledo, and executed the nobles of the city for assisting in the flight of Egica's son Oppa (Oppas), who had been declared king, and fled to Seville, where he became a bishop probably. Aafter the dead rich Goth princes were stripped of their bling, which was distributed among the 9K remaining Muslims, the news caused Muslims in North Africa to flock on over for the fun and games, after which they began to outnumber the quaking Goths. Meanwhile Achila succeeded as the positively last king of the Spanish Visigoths until 714, although he probably was already a rival co-king to Roderic, holding on in Zaragoza, Tarragona and Gerona, plus the province of Narbonne (Narbonensis), the last safe base on the far side of the Truth Booth (Pyrenees), which (too bad?) has a large Jewish pop.
The same year, 711, Arab Umayyad Muslims under Khorasan gov. Qutaiba ibn Muslim began the conquest of Transoxiania and the Sind, crossing the Oxus River, subduing Khwarezm and capturing Bukhara (140 mi. W of Samarkand), while 17-y.-o. Arab Syrian gen. Muhammad ibn Kasim al-Thaqafi (695-715) invaded Sind (in modern-day Pakistan) on the lower Indus River delta, setting up a kingdom that rules until 1026, and causing the Sindh province to be called Bab-e-Islam (Gateway to Islam).
It wasn't all bad I guess. The Muslims invading Spain brought rice, saffron and sugar cane cultivation with them, we both know how bad our sweet tooths are. As the Muslims took over Christian Spain, the Mozarabs, Iberian Christians who spoke Arabic and adopted Arab culture were born. Like Jews, Christians were "tolerated" (dhimmi), could keep their heads if they paid the heavy yearly jizya tax (usually accepted with a slap and spit in the face), and accepted a second-rate position in society, never being allowed to be in a position in control of Muslims, and constantly pressured to convert. Eventually they were not allowed to ring church bells or construct new churches, and were cut-off from the Christian world. As they were systematically legislated down to the level of slaves, some violated the don't-ask-don't-tell policy by publicly proclaiming their beliefs or even worse, blaspheming Big M in order to become Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, including Eulogius in 859, Pelagius in 925 (a boy ordered to submit to Islam and spread for the horny caliph?), and Argentea in 931. But I'm jumping ahead.
In 712 Gen. Tariq's master Musa bin Nusayr landed in Spain, and the Moors went on to conquer Cordoba, Malaga, Granada, and the Visigoth capital of Toledo, being greeted as liberators by the oppressed masses, especially the Jews, while executing many of the hated nobles; the Church of St. Acisclus successfully sheltered the remaining Christian refugees, who were allowed to live with the usual restrictions. They also mopped up Medina Sidonia, Seville, Merida and Saragossa, renaming the area Andalusia (Andaluz) (Arab. "land of the Vandals"). The southern tip of Portugal was called Al-Gharb (Algarve) (Arab. "the west"), which was not reconquered until 1251. They also conquered Ebora in central Portugal (until 1166).
By 718 all of Spain except Asturias in the NW was conquered, and became a Muslim state with Tariq as gov., who built a fortified castle along the NW slope of Gibraltar, which the Muslims held until 1309. Under the command of his master Musa ben Nusayr (a Berber recognized by Jews as of the tribe of Simeon) the Jews were freed, and a period of prosperity for them began in Spain, along with Christians, who were treated generously and protected from excesses by the new government at first, making it one happy haven in a dark Christian Europe, you can still eat all your favorite foods. Too bad, just as they were getting ready to cross the Pyrenees and take the rest of Europe, the jealous caliph summoned Musa and Tariq to Damascus, where Tariq died, proving that even if the whole invasion was a Jewish conspiracy to wrest control of Europe from the papacy, their control wasn't perfect, since the Muslim caliph messed it up for them.
Meanwhile in 712 the Arabs under Qutaiba ibn Moslim conquered Samarkand, and turned it into the cultural center of Islam, learning the art of making paper, beats pussy willows. Meanwhile in 711-2 the first Muslim mosque was built in still-multireligious Bukhara in Uzbekistan, which went on to become the 2nd holiest city in Islam after Mecca.
On Apr. 5, 713 after holding out for two years before being defeated, Visigothic count Theudimer (Theodemir) of SE Spain signed a treaty with Muslim emir Abd al-Aziz ibn Musa, submitting to Muslim rule ("the patronage of God"), with the right to keep worshiping at their Catholic churches, while having to pay a per capita tribute of one dinar in cash, four jugs of wheat, barley, grape juice and vinegar, two jugs of honey and oil, and half this for slaves. All enemies of the Muslim conquerors are to be handed over and not sheltered. The Muslims begin calling the region Tudmir. Meanwhile the Muslims began the conquest of the Ebro River Valley, and took Zaragoza (ancient Caesaraugusta), while more Arabs under Qutaiba ibn Muslim sieged Kashgar in W China NE of Tibet (until 715), and yet more Arabs under Muhammad ibn Kasim reached the port of Daybul on the Indus River.
In 714 the Moors captured the Spanish (earlier Roman) town of Arriaca (Caraca) in C Spain on the Henares River 35 mi. ENE of Madrid (until 1081), changing its name to Guadalajara (Arab. Wad-al-hajarah = "valley of the stones"). Meanwhile Visigoth king Achila II died in battle, and Ardo (Ardonus) (Ardabastus) (d. 720) became the definitely last Visigothic king of he-said-she-said Christian Spain (until 720), which had shrunk to the NE corner plus Narbonensis province on the far side of the Pyrenees, and soon, only Narbonensis. No surprise, Visigoth nobleman Count Cassius converted to Islam under the name Banu Qasi, and after swearing personal allegiance to caliph Al-Walid I in Damascus he was allowed to keep his county in the Upper Ebro River Valley (Logorno and Southern Navarra) as an autonomous hereditary principality due S of Pamplona and the Bay of Biscay.
In 715 after the Chinese emperor refused to help, Kashgar was sacked by the Arabs, becoming their first Chinese V. An alliance was formed between Tibet and the Arab world. Also that year, Al-Walid I died, and his younger brother Suleiman (Suleyman) ("peace") I bin Abd al-Malik (674-717) (son of Abd al-Malik) became Umayyad caliph (until 717). After getting confused as to whether the Hajj is supposed to be to Mecca's Kaaba or Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, he went to Mecca first, didn't like it, then decided on Jerusalem, like his father, watch the rest of the tape.
In 716 the Muslims conquered Lisbon (built on seven hills like Rome) and Oporto in NW Portugal (until 997), giving them control of the entire Spanish peninsula, after which they crossed the Pyrenees and invaded Narbonensis, the last Gothic province.
On Mar. 25, 717 after a period of anarchy, Leo III the Isaurian (680-741) became the Byzantine emperor, founding the iconoclastic Isaurian (Syrian) Dynasty (ends 867), and regenerating the busy bee hive, and just in time too, because the 2nd Arabic seige of Constantinople began in Aug. Luckily, on Oct. 3, 717 Suleyman I (b. 674) died, and Omar (Umar) II (d. 720) became Umayyad caliph, ending military expansion and granting tax exemption to all believers in the Islamic faith, including the non-Arab mawali, although future rulers revoked it. Meanwhile he imposed humiliating restrictions on non-Muslims, causing mass conversions and homogenizing the Umayyad pop. into Muslim and Arabic-speaking. All this, and Prophet Muhammad hadn't been dead a hundred years yet.
It looked bad for Europe in 732 (centennial of Big M's death) as the madass Muslim illegal alien terrorists crossed the Pyrenees and tried to take sunny France, which would give them a royal road to Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe. Yes, if they had succeeded we'd all be speaking Arabic now, praying five times a day facing Mecca, and slicing clitori of young girls by the millions while still living in the Dark Ages with no Star Trek in sight. It was naked God vs. God, the hairy razor's edge of history. Guess what? There are heroes. Just when things looked darkest, a hero arose, Charles Martel the Hammer (688-741), whose Merovingian knights braved the superior numbers of Muslim cavalry and their technological breakthrough of the stirrup, stood their ground like a wall, and kicked the Muslims' butts bigtime at the Battle of Tours and Poitiers between Tours and Poitiers on Oct. 10, 732, throwing the Saracens back over the Pyrenees with enough punch that they never returned to the attack. Western Christian civilization tracing back a thousand years to Alexander the Great was saved, hopefully forever, check back with me after they reconstitute me from my DNA a thousand years from now. The battle lines now hardened for centuries, until the Christian side slowly pushed the Muslims back inch by inch, step by step to North Africa, taking their chained poontang with them, whatsa matter Mel, where's the big budget movie?
Did I mention the Muslim habit of splits? In 740 Medina-born Shiite imam Zayd ibn Ali (b. 695) (brother of Muhammad al-Baqir, 5th imam of the Twelvers) died after the unsuccessful Zaydi Revolt against the Umayyads in Kufa in which he claimed the caliphate as the grandson of Ali's son Husayn. His followers carried on as the Fivers (Zaydi Shiites), the 5th School of Sunni Islamic Law (fiqh), incl. the Hanafis, Hanbalis, Malikis, Shafi'is, sun-dried Muslim shit comes in five flavors. The Fivers are actually a semi-Sunni sect of Shiites who refuse to condemn the three caliphs preceding Ali but reserve the right to military support against unjust rule of any descendant of Ali and Fatima, setting up states in Tabaristan in N Persia in 864, followed by Yemen in 893, becoming 40%-45% of the pop. of Yemen (mainly in the mountainous north) in modern times, with another 1M in W Arabia.
Not that all Muslims are badasses. The worldiness of the Umayyad Caliphate caused the growth of a mystical ascetic movement in Islam called Sufism, started by Medina-born Persian Hasan al-Basri (642-737), who moved to Basra and wore wool (suf) to show rejection of luxurious Umayyad clothing, giving the movement its name. Sufis spend their whole lives trying to search for Allah inside themselves while trying to avoid thinking of jacking, er, poontang, the Big Dark Cave of M not being good enough for them. Maybe some find Allah in their sewers and sinks, like Pennywise the Ass Clown, go ass them. Too bad, they are stuck in the Inshallah "it's God's will" mindset, causing them to justify oppression in modern-day countries such as Pakistan.
In 744 Marwan II (688-750) became the last Umayyad caliph, once riding through godforsaken Harran in SE Turkey (ancient home of the Mesopotamian Moon god Sin, making it the original Sin City?) (known for its beehive adobe houses, which are used to this day) and ordering its pop. to convert, allegedly giving them the choice of Judaism or Christianity as well, although this might only be a propaganda ploy to fool suckas into believing that the tiger has changed his stripes, check back with me after I get out my Ouija Board. Maybe they knew that Islam started as a Moon god religion and felt more at home, plus it's not nice going through life having zilcho political rights and power and having to pay the jizz-on-ya tax.
Did I mention the year 750 enough times yet? The Christians in Frankland who were reeling from the pesky Saracens coming over the Pyreenes got a lucky break in guess what year, 750, when the Sunni Abbasids (Abbassids) of Khorasan (Khurasan) in NE Persia (Iran), who claimed descent from Muhammad's paternal uncle Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, and whose Umayya clan was separate from Muhammad's Quraish clan (which they hated so bad that they even temporarily became Shiites to jockey for position against the Shinolas), and who gained critical mass by sending Persian (non-Arab) preacher Abu Muslim (728-55) out in advance to criticize Arab corruption and ethnocentrism and invite non-Arab Muslims like him to join, overthrew the Umayyads everywhere but in Al-Andalus (Spain), with Abu al-Abbas as-Saffah (the Blood-Shedder or Slaughterer) (721-754) (did I mention that Islam is the religion of war and oozing blood?) becoming caliph #1 (750-4), sweet like a lollipop, don't stop. In 762 Caliph #2 (754-75) Abu Jafar al-Mansur (712-75) moved the blood-soaked capital from Damascus to Baghdad (Arab. "gift of God") (Madinat al-Salam) 18 mi. N of the old Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon, designed on a circular plan, with canals dug to both the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which attracted traders from as far away as China, India and N Europe, who used innovative Arabic numerals in their accounting records, the pop. reaching 300K within a century. Meanwhile the Umayyads in Spain were left to hold back the Iberian Christians, who slowly began to go on the offensive with but one goal, push them badass idolators back into da sea. The Abbasids went on to have 37 caliphs, absorbing much of the pomp and ceremony of the Persian monarchy into their courts and going on to cultivate the arts and sciences and give Islam a fairly good name compared to the other dynasties, with an empire no longer consciously devoted to promoting Arabs per se, only the faith of Muhammad, call now to request your free quote. The Abbasids came up with the Sunni concept of the Rightly Guided Caliphs to refer to the first four caliphs, from the soundbyte "Hold firmly to my example (sunnah) and that of the Rightly Guided Caliphs", whose quadruple reign was called the Rashidun Caliphate (632-61).
Charles Martel's son was 3.5-ft. tall midget Pepin (Pipin) III the Short (714-68), who in 759 drove the last Saracens out of France (Gaul), capturing Narbonne and integrating Aquitaine into the kingdom of the Franks. His son was 7-ft. (really 6'4"?) tall giant Charles the Big or Large, AKA Charlemagne (742-814), the ultimate product of white blonde Euro genetics, a dude whose physique would make Ahnuld look sick, and whose intellect and courage far surpassed anything seen since Caesar, man, what a hero, them Muslims hated to see him coming. His top twelve warriors (peers) were called the Paladins, not really, that was romantic fiction made up later that mixed up the old Roman Emperor and his Palatine Hill with King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, but either way the basic psychic difference between Christian Westerners and everybody else in the core belief that a few heroes who are in the right can defeat vast hordes of dead-wrong zombies goes way way back, go see Mel Gibson's Braveheart for the 50th time and bring three hankies. Not that the ideal Western heroes aren't the coolest cats who ever lived, like James Bond 007. Churl is French for a freeman, and after Charles the Big, it seems that every French king wanted to be named either after him or Frankish kingdom founder Clovis I, who didn't have any Muslims to worry about, just heretic Arian Visigoths. Yes, I know, Charles the Big would dance his daddy Peppy the Short on his knee while swigging French wine and eating French squab, them Frenchies have a streak of genetic troubles with their pituitary glands, either too little or too much juice, witness any Andre the Giant match with Sky Low Low. Charlemagne kicked a lot of Saracen butt, he never ran out of Saracen butt to kick it seemed, but once after raiding the Saracens, kicking some butt, then trying to get back over the Pyrenees, his rear guard commander (chief Paladin) Roland (d. 778) ("renowned land") (his nephew) got his butt fatally kicked at the Battle of Roncesvalles (Roncevaux Pass) in the Pyrenees on Aug. 15, 778, as memorialized in the Song of (Chanson de) Roland, becoming his greatest regret in life. Big C also won a lot of battles against pesky holdout pagans, including the Saxons (in Saxony) and Frisians (in the Netherlands), founding both the French and German monarchies, and becoming the Father of Europe, getting crowned as the first Holy Roman Emperor on Xmas Day, 800 by slap-happy Pope (795-816) St. Leo III (-816), and setting a mark that every Christian king after him tried in vain to reich, er, reach, later becoming known as the First Reich.
What was going on back in Fortress Constantinople in the 700s? Were they separating church and state and pumping up their science and technology budget and developing jet airplanes to take on the Muslim hordes closing in on them? No, they were tearing themselves apart over the Iconoclasm Controversy. You might call it a propaganda V for the Muslims, who as Jewish Frankensteins were taught to give up all graven images a la the Ten Commandments, settling for at most calligraphic signs in their mosques and homes. When refugees from Muslim territories made it to Constantinople and saw all the icons of Christ hanging around, they started grumbling and launching a movement, and in 727 Leo III and his son, future emperor (741-75) Constantine V Copronymus (718-75) (Copronymus is Greek for "name of shit", the name being given to him because he started shitting while being baptized, the origin of the phrase "holy shit") issued an edict forbidding veneration of icons (sacred images), followed by another ordering their destruction ("iconoclasm" means image-breaking in Greek), ordering the icon of Christ over the Chalke Gate in front of the Great Palace of Constantinople removed and replaced with a cross, only to have iconophiles murder some of the workers, which only made him more determined to root them all out, stick 'em up, stop in the name of shit, drop that Christ porno or we'll shit, er, shoot. Not being content to spread his holy vandalism habit in the Byzantine world, Leo III attempted to crack down on Italy and make it obey him rather than the pope as secular prince, and started levying heavy taxes on the great landowners, which really got to Italy's biggest landowner, Pope (715-31) St. Gregory II (-731), who officially okayed icons, starting a dual-empire war as well as a civil war in the eastern empire, causing Gregory to convoke a synod in 730 that formally condemned iconoclasm as heretical and excommunicated all iconoclasts, including Leo. Too bad, the messengers carrying the papal letter were arrested in Sicily by Leo's men, so it never made it to Constantinople to cause trouble. In 730 Damascus-born Christian big brain theologian St. John of Damascus (John Damascene) (676-754), who wrote in defense of icons in 727 retired as a financial officer of the Muslim caliph of Damascus to the monastery of St. Sabas near Jerusalem, where he was ordained a priest and began writing theological tomes and preaching throughout Syria against iconoclasts, gaining the name Chrysorrhoas ("stream of gold") for his oratories. To make a long story short, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, dominated by Byzantine empress (797-802) Irene the Athenian (752-803), the original Madonna Like a Virgin Material Girl (who called herself emperor not empress) officially backed the dildo, er, dear icons, temporarily reuniting the Eastern and Western churches. Too bad, her successor, emperor (802-11) Nicephorus I (Greek for "bringer of victory") (760-811) was an iconoclast, and ramped the war back up. Perhaps this all caused the creation of an eternally hostile anti-icon element in Constantinople that could be milked by Muslims for all it was worth, at least they weren't a solid block religiously any more. Even worse, the pesky polytheist polygamous pagan Bulgars (Bulgers) from Central Asia were chased by the Turkish Khazars into modern-day Bulgaria after they first tried China and were distracted from invading by placing naked women on top of the Great Wall of China, where they began squeezing the Byzantines, sieging Constantinople in 717-8, but at least helping them by killing Arabs so they could fight over the crumbs. Speaking of crumbs, Bulgarian khan (803-14) Krum the Terrible (-814) kicked Nicephorus' can at the Battle of Pliska (Varbitsa Pass) on July 26, 811, and killed the emperor and annihilated his army, after which Krum liked to drink his wine from a cup made from Victory Bringer's skull. This cancelled out all the damage the Bulgarians did to the Arabs, and left Constantinople more vulnerable than ever as they clung to their icons of Christ and prayed for him to finally return in vain.
Meanwhile in 786 Harun al-Rashid (763-809) ("Aaron the Rightly-Guided") became Abbasid caliph #5, the most famous, establishing the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) in Baghdad, launching the Islamic Golden Age of Learning (ended 1258) as his scholars began scouring the Earth for ancient Greek and Syriac manuscripts to bring back and translate into Arabic and/or Persian, including the works of Aristotle, Plato, Galen, and Hippocrates, and Sanskrit botanical and medicinal works, lucking out and learning the secret of papermaking from Chinese POWs captured at the Battle of Talas in 751. The laugh of it was that the horrible neverending wars waged by the Muslims caused them, Europe and everybody else they touched to waste their resources on military expenditures instead of investment in basic S&T. In 799 a delegation sent by Charlemagne arrived, and he gave it a famous clock, which the superstitious Christian monarch thought was possessed by the Devil because of the sounds it made, if an areligious scientist could have just got one good look at it they'd have had warp drive by the year 1001. Harun al-Rashid is the subject of the famous 1001 Arabian Nights, there's the meatloaf, yuk, new stretchable drawstring, I'll get back to it later. Okay, in passing I'll mention that he was Islam's Elvis Aaron Presley (1935-77), the King, the word Elvis meaning elf-wise as in House of Wisdom, as in he got his thing sucked every night in every hotel he came to, just like Aaron Rightly-Guided, his great-great-great-something granddaddy. After Harun died, in 813 Al-Mamun (al-Ma'mun) ("trustworthy") (786-833) won the power struggle, murdered his brother Al-Amin ("honest"), and became Abbasid caliph #7. The Shiites hate al-Mamun for poisoning their 8th imam Ali al-Rida (Reza) (765-818) with poison grapes, and their big Shrine of Al-Rida (Reza) in Mashhad (Mashad) (Persian for "place of martyrdom") in Razavi Khorasan Province in E Persia 500 mi. E of Tehran is their Shiite Mecca, visited by up to 20 million pilgrims each year, don't ask what happens if you're an infidel and they catch you there, they'll riddle ya body with bullets for Allah.
We're now deep into the 800s, let's call it Wild Turkey Time. First, the Turks, who didn't start out in Turkey but in Central Asia, including S Russia, N Caucasus, and the Crimea found themselves in a sandwich between the Byzantine Christians on the W and the Muslims on the East, and some stayed pagan, some went Muslim, but the tribe of the Khazars decided to become Jews, forever messing up the pure hooked, er, blood lines from Israel but giving the faith new life, and future Hollyweird some of its best directors. Funny, the Christians liked to talk about the Wandering Jew, and the meaning of the Turkic word Khazar is wandering, but these goys, er, guys hunkered down and created a powerful empire that ran S Russia, W Kazakhstan, E Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and parts of N Caucasus, Georgia and the Crimea. Too bad, the Russians of Kiev kicked their cans in 965-9 and made them vassals, and the Mongols of the 1200s caused them to disintegrate and disappear as a distinct group, back to the wandering mode.
Back in the West, we're now at the 200-year point after Prophet M's death, how many millions of zombies, slaves and corpses has Islam caused, and the big bad Christian Crusades are not two but three hundred years ahead. Spain and France not going so good, in 813 the Bad Neighbor Policy Saracens began a century-long attempt to invade and conquer popeland in Italy, starting with a surprise attack on Centumcellae (Civitavecchia), capturing Messina, Sicily in 843 and threatening Rome itself, I need a better pizza. In 846 they ransacked Brindisi on Italy's heel and conquered Taranto (until 880), and on Aug. 28 another group from Sicily sailed up the Tiber River into Rome, sacking the city and stripping its treasures, including St. Peter's Basilica, which they desecrated, until the Lombard army of Duke Guy (Guido) I of Spoleto (-860) arrived and chased them to Gaeta, where naval reinforcements from Naples, led by Duke Sergius I Naples arrived just in time, defeating the despicable illegal immigrant thieves in the Naval Battle of Licosa Point off Paestum. The Muslims regrouped and destroyed a Venetian fleet, but in Nov. a storm damaged their fleet, and their great invasion of the pope's home base fizzled, although they kept trying into the 900s, they're such a religion of love and peace not.
Big Charlie the Main Man of France was made the first Holy Roman Emperor in 800, but he got too big for his britches and decided to convert the pesky Norse up in Norseland, which until the age of better geography they used to call Thule, as in if you try to pee it will freeze your tool. And he did it his way, via what he called the Sword and Cross method, meaning take the Cross or I'll give you the sword (forced conversion, an idea no doubt suggested by the Muslims, reversing hundreds of years of Christian tradition of voluntary conversion only, at least of the rulers), stirring up the hornet's nest and causing the Norse to turn into mean piratical Vikings (meaning people from the fjords who go on overseas expeditions) to get even, dropping the Blonde Bomb and terrorizing France and all of Europe for two centuries in their cool long ships with dragon prows, long after Big C bit the dust, and setting the cause of civilization in Europe back just as long. Luckily, while they couldn't 'get' the Christ thing, a faggot going around with a beard, robe and sandals with 12 homo disciples and never doing it with hot women, then accomplishing nothing militarily or politically other than getting his butt kicked too easily and crucified like a whimp while his pitiful few remaining disciples all hid and/or denied him, while they on the other hand worshipped Thor with his Thunder Hammer, and didn't want to go to Christian Heaven where the Bible says there is no sex, but to the Heroes' Hall in Valhalla where they get to fight all day, die, get resurrected, and screw gorgeous Swedish babes and get drunk on mead all night, then sleep to noon and start over, forever - whew, let me catch my breath - while they couldn't 'get' this whimp and his cult for centuries, one thing about all pagans is that they are by nature superstitious and like to cover all bases, so as the Big Year 1000 (Da Millennium) approached, they finally got spooked by all the missionary talk (before they raped them and slit their throats) that Christ himself would return to judge the living and dead, and the hype worked, because in the late 900s they all decided to quit being bad and lined up to take a bath and join up. It also helped that Thor's Thunder Hammer was the same shape as Christ's Cross, so they didn't have to shell out for a new set of bling, and everybody needs a bath once a year or so. Okay, when their children got brought up as Christians they finally understood that sex outside marriage is sin, that Christ was the perfect man who never yielded to temptation and sinned, and that he purposely let himself be sacrified as the Lamb of God to save humanity, hello to Anglo-Saxon sex guilt and the stoic Swede. At least Christian Euros could finally go back to civilization building, having slipped behind the Muslims and now finally able to make up lost time. While the Danish and Norwegian Vikings terrorized mainland Europe and the British Isles, including Ireland, the Swedish Vikings headed east towards Russia, which was named after the Swedish Rus tribe, meaning rowers of longboats. In 862 Swedish Viking Varangian prince Rurik ("famous ruler") (830-79) was allegedly invited by the people of Novogorod to rule their city, founding the Russian tsar (named after Caesar) dynasty, and reopening the Viking trade to the east which had been cut off by the Huns and Avars in the 5th and 6th cents. In 865 the Rus rowed down the Dnieper River and across the Black Sea and sieged the fabled treasure city of Mickelgard (Constantinople), which was saved by a storm which the inhabitants attribute to the Virgin. In 879 Rurik's brother-in-law Prince (879-912) Oleg ("holy") of Novgorod (-912) declared Kiev "the mother of all Russian cities", uniting the eastern Slavs and stopping payment of taxes to the Khazars, establishing Russia from Kiev N to Lake Ladoga, with Kiev as the capital of Kievan Russia until 1169. In 865 the pagan Turkic Bulgars converted to Orthodox Christianity after the Byzantines put Khan (852-89) Boris ("battle glory") I (-907) under pressure to forestall a possible German-Roman conversion attempt. He first entertained Muslim envoys and contemplated conversion to polygamy-friendly Islam, but was finally pussy-whipped by a Byzantine princess, whom he married, making Christianity the official religion of the Bulgarians by 870, forcing his subjects to be baptized and reinvent themselves, starting with family relationships, giving up polygamy (with a max. of 3 divorces), and then reforming the govt. along Byzantine lines. In 922 the Volga Bulgars were converted to Islam by Ahman ibn Fadlan, causing them to be systematically attacked by the Russians, after which they were finished off and absorbed in the 1230s and 1240s by the Mongol army of Genghis Khan. In 988 after his envoys experienced the Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and were so wowed that they convinced him to choose Christianity as the designer religion for the Russian people, and the Bulgars tried in vain to interest him in Islam with the soundbyte "We believe in God, and our prophet has taught us that if we do not eat pork or drink wine we shall go to heaven and be waited upon, each one of us, by seventy beautiful women", to which he replied "Drinking is the chief pleasure of the Russians and we could never live without it", Russian prince St. Vladimir ("renowned prince") I (958-1015) of Kiev converted to Orthodox Christianity, and took his people with him. To be fair, he also checked out Judaism, but when he learned of the Diaspora, he uttered the soundbyte "What? You are trying to teach others, you whom your God has punished? He would not have done that if he had loved you and your laws. Do you want the same thing to happen to us?" To be even more fair, he sent ten envoys to Germany, Bulgaria, and Constantinople, and the report was that the Bulgars found no joy in their worship, the Germans found no beauty in theirs, but that with the Byzantines "We found ourselves in the presence of God. We can never forget that beauty." The deal was clinched with the soundbyte "If the Christian faith were a bad one, your grandmother Olga, the wisest of women, would not have adopted it." So, at his "urging", mass baptisms of Russians in the nearest available freezing cold rivers were orchestrated, and that was that, pass the vodka. Just kidding, vodka wasn't introduced until 1386, by ambassadors from Genoa, Italy. In the 1140s the city of Moscow was founded by prince Yuri Dolgoruki ("long arms") (1099-1157), who in 1156 began building the fort called the Kremlin, which was burned to the ground in 1237-8 by the Mongols, who gave the Swedes a dose of Mongol blood at the same time.
Oh yes, Muslim Science, check out the one-sided Ben Kingsley vids and get back with me. Yes, the rise of the Roman Catholic Church and its suppression of all free thought caused it to hold back the rise of Science and stink itself up because all works of ancient pagans, including Greek and Roman scientists were considered works of the Devil and banned, like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Ironically, the Church even suppressed other Christians, particularly those who wanted the Bible alone to be their authority, not Church synods (they later split off permanently as the Protestants starting in 1517). The Muslims, on the other hand, had an elite cadre in Spain (Al-Andalus) and another in Mesopotamia at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad funded by the caliphs, who studied the captured wisdom of da ancient infidels and actually advanced Science a bit, about to the modern pre-calculus high school level, no, the 5th grader level, starting with Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (801-73) (AKA Alkindus) in Baghdad, who supervised the translation project and introduced Indian numerals to the Islamic world, which made their way to the Christian world and were called Arabic numerals. He stole them from Hindu mathematician Bhaskara I (600-80), who in 629 wrote a verse commentary to the "Aryabhatiya" (499), first using the decimal number system and making it known to Indian scholars. The 499 work was written by Hindu superbrain Aryabhata (476-550), who advanced the theory that the Earth rotates on its axis, gave the correct explanation for eclipses of the Sun and Moon, the value of pi as 3.1416, and solved the quadratic equation with the first known use of algebra, with the soundbyte "The Moon consists of water, the Sun of fire, the Earth of earth, and the Earth's shadow of darkness. The Moon obscures the Sun and the great shadow of the Earth obscures the Moon." Now that the scholars had their Kindles, they ramped things up between their quintuple daily prayer breaks, with Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (780-850) developing algebra (Arabic for restoration), Abu Baker Muhammad Razi (865-925) ("the Islamic Hippocrates") et al. developing medicine and alchemy (Arabic for art of transformation) (the start of chemistry), Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham) (965-1038) of Egypt (who tried to lay low from the caliphs by feigning madness) founding modern optics, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037) of Persia becoming their best all-around raghead brain man. Too bad, it's pretty hard to engage in a laborious lab research project when you have to stop and pray 1-2-3-4-5 times a day to the non-existent Blaalah while Islamic police hold scimitars over your necks, and since religious dictators control society, any and every advance you make is immediately subjected to scrupulous examination for potential heresy, which they call Bid'ah ("innovation"), plus why aren't you out there with everybody else, Abdul, killing infidels for Allah, what are you, a draft evader? Hence, Islam had its chance to prove to the world that it was the leader in science and technology who would turn Earth into a paradise, and blew it bigtime, forever proving it to be the opposite, watch that pothole it might contain an IED, which to be fair puts it on a par with the horrible mean Roman Catholic Church, let's rack 'em up, it seems like the Devil takes over all big organizations after enough time, which is why the little guy has to know who's at the top, God or the Devil, and bypass the organization as necessary to get to the real dude. Not that it's all the Muslims' fault. The House of Wisdom was destroyed by the Mongols of Hulegu Khan in 1258, after which the waters of the Tigris River ran black for 6 mo. from all the ink from the ruined books. Speaking of heresy, Islam did produce one known Arab rationalist skeptic, Ibn al-Rawandi (827-911), who repudiated Islam and all revealed religion. No surprise, all his works got lost on purpose, and all that's left are quotes from works claiming to refute him. So, why did the West become #1 in Science? Simple, the scientists dethroned the Church and its authority over the mind, while the Islamic world never did, now here we sit. Maybe it has something to do with White Is Right, and whites just make the best scientists, other than maybe yellows that is, check back with me after they completely decode the human genome and have a definitive answer.
Did I mention Muslim splits and sandwiches? You might call the 900s the Shiite Sandwich Century. In 891 the strict vegetarian Qarmati (Qarmatian) (Karamita) ("those who wrote in small letters") sect of Ismaili (Isma'ili) (Sevener) Shiites began a revolt against the Abbasids in Kufa, spreading to Iraq, Syria and Bahrain, and becoming cock of the walk in the Persian Gulf for much of the 10th cent. They believed that the 7th imam Isma'il (d. 760) was the last, and that therefore the Ismaili Fatimid regime founded by a later imam is bogus. In 899 they set up a utopian republic in E Arabia. In 903-4 they invaded Syria and sieged Damascus. Believing that the Hajj is a superstition, in 906 they ambushed a caravan of Hajj pilgrims returning from Mecca and massacred 20K. In 923 under madass leader Abu Tahir Sulayman Al-Jannabi (906-44) they raided Basra, followed in 927 by Kufa, then in 929 unsuccessfully attempted to raid Baghdad, leaving after extracting tributes from pilgrims trying to go on Hajj, and sacking the countryside instead. In 929 they captured Mecca after lying that they were only there to worship in peace then massacring pilgrims, desecrating the Well of Zamzam with their corpses, after which they prevented pilgrims from going on the annual Hajj until they were booted out in 950, causing Muslims to switch to Jerusalem, where they rubbed elbows with pesky Jews and increased their intolerance of them noticeably, why does something tells me that them Jews will pull strings in Christendom to get even. Al-Jannabi also stole the holy evil Black Stone from the Qaaba in an attempt to set up his own Mahdi-Caliph, a young Persian prisoner named Abul Fadl al-Isfahani, hiding it in their base in Ahsa, Bahrain for ransom. Too bad, after ordering the burning of Muslim religious books and restoring the age-old Zoroastrian worship of fire, the squirt went too far and ordered the execution of Bahrain nobles including Al-Jannabi's family, causing A-J to change his mind about him and have him executed. Al-Jannabi, who might have been a rationalist heretic, we can hope, is known for the immortal soundbyte "In this world, three people have corrupted mankind: a shepherd, a physician, and a camel-driver, and the last one was the worst pickpocket and prestidigitator of all time". Too bad, he died of smallpox in 944, and the movement began to collapse, although the Black Stone wasn't returned until 951, wrapped in a sack and thrown into the Friday Mosque of Kufa with a note attached reading "By command we took it, and by command we brought it back." Too bad, it was broken into seven pieces, who says it wasn't a fake? By the way, royal families that claim to be directly descended from Prophet Mohammed are what they call Sherifian, meaning they have the right to guard the holy cities and shrines of Mecca and Medina, hyo-silver. Meanwhile on Jan. 5, 909 the Shiite Fatimids from Ifriqiya (Tunisia and Algeria) took over Egypt along with the caliphate, founding the city of Cairo and ruling the Maghreb ("place of the sunset") (NC and NE Africa), Levant (E Mediterranean incl. the Holy Land), Sicily and Malta until 1171. They considered Christians as dumb animals compared to their high civilization, and were the ones who had to take on the pesky backward filthy illegal immigrant Crusaders, who might have set back the cause of Christ a thousand years with their atrocities, no, not maybe.
Back in Spain, in 981 Al Mansur (Almanzor) (938-1002) took over as caliph of Cordoba, winning 57 straight campaigns and pushing the Muslim boundaries by 1000 to their maximum extent, bunching the remaining Christians in the NW in the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, and Pamplona. Too bad, he brought in Berber mercenaries to win, who stayed and later took over. Later, Hollyweird released the 1964 flick The Long Ships, with Sidney Poitier portraying Al Mansur, who titillates white U.S. audiences when he gets all the white babes he wants and they like it, kiss me with a hammer, ride the Steel Mare.
Back in Afghanistan, Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030) (descendant of former Turkish slaves) turned the city of Ghazni S of Kabul into the capital of an extensive Muslim empire extending into Iran, Pakistan, and NW India, becoming the first to use the title of sultan ("authority"), while acknowledging the suzerainty of the caliphs. When he wasn't persecuting Fatimid Shiites for his Abbasid caliphs, in 1008 he invaded India and pillaged, looted and destroyed numerous Hindu and Buddhist temples, including the great Temple of Krishna in Mathura, followed by the Temple of Shiva in Somnath, Gujarat in 1024, personally hammering the golden lingam (phallus) to pieces and carting the temple's stones back to Ghazni for use in the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). Ever since, Hindus hated the Muslims' guts. Sultan One did use some of his loot to patronize Persian poet Firdawsi (Firdausi) (Ferdowsi) (935-1020), who produced the Shahnameh, Iran's national epic, telling of Iran's mythical past from Creation to the Islamic conquest, which revived the Persian language after it had been smothered by Arabic.
With the gigantic threat of Islam looming, you think this would have caused Rome and Constantinople to kiss and make up, but split happened to them as well, and they schismed religiously in 1054, the same year that Chinese and Arab astronomers first recorded the Crab Nebula (no Euro astronomers did, they were too backward), the Eastern church ending up being called the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church, the Mona Lisa isn't oil on canvas but oil on wood.
One good thing came from the Vikings and Millennium Fever: Shakespeare. How? The Normans, who started out as Norwegian Vikings, then settled in the bad side of France in 911 after agreeing to become Christians, which they ended up calling Normandy (Duchy of the Northmen), finally invaded and took over England from the Anglo-Saxon Germans (who ruled it since the fall of Rome) in 1066 under mean Norman warlord William I the Conqueror (1027-87), who used the coincidence that Halley's Comet appeared just as the big Millennium Fever date of 6/6/1066 came around, freaking out the superstitious Saxon pop. into believing that God was sending them a skywriting message that they will lose their island to some kind of Antichrist, and saw his chance, sending recruiters all over Europe promising mercenaries spoils for joining his cause of stealing the British Isle, which turned out to be a cakewalk. No wonder the Anglo-Saxons were whimps, they got into Christian liberalism and even streaking, like Lady Godiva (1020-80), easy off, good food deserves a good oven, spread a little love today, spread a little something to remember, love stinks yah yah. The haughty Normans kicked the Anglo-Saxons down, calling them dogs, and tried to force them to speak French, after all they learned it, but the Anglo-Saxons resisted, speaking it only to their Norman lords while continuing to speak German in their huts, until several generations went by, garbling up the hut talk and ending up with the mixture called English, hence voila, Shakespeare.
Speaking of the year 1066, after getting jealous of their superior er, culture and attainments, on Dec. 30, 1066 a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace of Granada, Spain and assassinated Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela (1035-66), then massacred the Jewish pop. of the city, killing off 1.5K Jewish families, about 4K total, about the same as the Spanish Inquisition of 1478-1833 killed over several centuries, Islam is always light years ahead in the killing field. No coincidence, about the same time, the office of Ra'is al-Yahud, the official Jewish leader for Fatimid Egypt was created, and in 1176 Spanish-born immigrant rabbi Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon) (1135-1204) (guess why he left Spain?) was appointed, after which the position stayed in the hands of his descendants until the early 15th cent. Maimonides worked with Spanish Muslim big brain Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (1126-98) to revive the study of Aristotle in the backward West, which later backfired when they wouldn't give it up no matter how wrong the dude was on science.
On Aug. 26, 1071 the Battle of Manzikert (Malazgirt) was a giant V for the Turkish Sunni Seljuk Dynasty (1037-1194) under sultan #2 Alp Arslan ("valiant lion") (1029-72) over the Byzantines under emperor (1068-71) Romanos IV Diogenes (1030-72), after which Turks began moving into Asia Minor permanently, eventually turning it into Turkey as they contracted the Christians back toward Constantinople and turned their churches into mosques, including the Seven Churches of Asia that St. John the Evangelist had written his Revelation to, I guess it was past the Millennium and they weren't needed anymore for the big punchline.
Around 1090 the Persian Shiite sect of Assassins (Hashshashin) was founded by Hassan-i Sabbah (1050-1124), which loved to assassinate its enemies with daggers, incl. the Fatimids, Seljuk Turks, even the famed Saladin. For a long time Westerners thought they smoked hashish, but they forgot that they weren't love-peace hippies, and had the clean-burning mental fuel of pure Islam hate and the orgasm of holy murder and didn't need it, sorry. Still, the hash-assin story is too good not to tell history ignoramuses.
After Al Mansur died, a big breakthrough for the Christians in Spain was made by El Cid (Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar) (1043-99), Doctor of Military Arts (Campeador), who on his warhorse Babieca (Spanish for stupid) conquered the plum, er, orange city of Valencia in 1094, and tried a mini-megamerge, allowing both Christians and Muslims into the army and administration. Too bad, after he died the Muslim Berber Almoravids (new kids on the block in Morocco in 1040-1147) recaptured it on May 5, 1102, and put Christians back into their 9th class places.
In passing, I must mention one Muslim that is almost good enough to emigrate to the West even today, the freethinking wine-loving Persian brain man Omar Khayyam (1048-1122), known for his epic treatise on algebra, and his cool poem The Rubaiyat ("Quatrains"). The truth is that he was so cool because he was Persian first and Muslim last, i.e., areligious, imagine how great Persia could have become if it weren't for Islam. It's too bad the Iranians of today don't chuck Islam and that Shiite shiite and get with it like him, they'd become a magnificent culture again. "Some go for the pleasures here below/ Others yearn for the Prophet's Paradise to come/ Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,/ Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum." "A book of verses underneath the bough,/ A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou/ Beside me singing in the wilderness/ Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!" "The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,/ Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,/ Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it."
It was now 1095, 450 years after the death of Prophet Muhammad, and 95 years after Christ's failed Second Coming, and you'd think that the Christian world would finally drop deadbeat dad Christ for areligious secularism and Science like in the good ole Roman days, and unite with the whole non-Muslim world to create a circle of steel around the Muslim world and contract it until they killed or converted every last one of them world stinkers to stop them from breeding, then turned Mecca into a giant casino. But no, they would never give up Christ, and all other religions, especially the Christian one have moral principles, and can't come up with the resolve to start the job and finish it if it don't look like self-defense, else they might have got lucky and got the Saracens in a sandwich with the Mongols. And there was no Internet they could all communicate on to wise up and organize, rather, they were just emerging from the Dark Ages and many even thought that Muhammad was a Christian heretic. Worse, St. John's Revelation seemed to be talking to them and telling them to wait for Christ to lead an army of angels and finish them off, but that he was waiting for them to show their faith by taking Jerusalem for him first, yes, that's it, he's waiting for us to make the first move. Anyway, love stinks, and starting in 1095 the Christians began the misguided Crusades, not to finally exterminate Islam but merely to regain Jerusalem, with the leaders wearing white tunics with the bloody red cross of Christ on them, announcing that they wanted to make infidel Saracen blood flow so they could get a free pass to Heaven from the pope, Rome's Dancing With the Stars on ABC. Pope (1088-99) Urban II (1035-99) preached the first Crusade, er, First Crusade, promising a set-up-house plenary indulgence from sins for all who joined, causing every robber, rapist, murderer and other criminal in Christendom to flock in, while the royals snubbed it, the highest ranking noble being leader Godfrey de Bouillon (1058-1100), duke of Lower Lorraine, who later got a promotion to king of Jerusalem but turned it down because he didn't want another David Letterman extortion case. Like the Sword and Cross program of Charlemagne, Christianity seems to have been corrupted by the Muslims themselves, their perception that they could get away with the convert-or-die thing working on their minds, as in the grass is redder on the other side and keep up with the Shits and Shinolas, so call it the what goes around comes around effect, act like a man, what's the matter with you. Sure, the Christians were only coming to the rescue of poor illegal immigrant pilgrims after hearing of Saracen atrocities, then got caught up in the moment, start pursuing your career in Christian criminal justice today. The Seljuks were the their first targets. On June 7-July 15, 1099 the Siege of Jersualem captured the Jewish capital for Christ, which they immediately stunk up by massacring Muslims and Jews as if they were the Allahu Akbars, with the soundbyte that the Crusaders "were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles". "They went together through the streets with their swords and spears in hand. All that they met they slew and smote right down, men, women, and children, sparing none... They slew so many in the streets that there were heaps of dead bodies, and one might not go nor pass but upon them that so lay dead... There was so much blood shed that the channels and gutters ran all with blood, and all the streets of the town were covered with dead men." (12th cent. historian William of Tyre). After the remaining Jews (who had helped the Muslims defend the city) holed-up in their synagogue, the Christians burned them alive, allegedly singing "Christ, We Adore Thee", God's Weight Plan, only 100 calories each. Starting with Crusade #2, the royals took them over in order to get the credit. One permanent thing the Crusades generated that changed Euro history was the Knights Templar, named after the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, who were supposed to guard Christian pilgrims in their dangerous journeys to and from the coastal port of Jaffa, but ended up becoming the richest international organization in Europe with special protection from the papacy, getting into traveler's checks and banking and ending up with every royal in Europe owing them money, causing them to finally be ruthlessly exterminated starting on Friday the 13th, 1307 after being accused of worshipping Baphomet, a combo Satan, Muhammad, and goat, with Madonna's breasts but no bustiere, causing the remnants to mole into the Catholic Church with a plot to destroy it from within as the so-called Illuminati, see about a zillion Web sites or the profound super-accurate historical tomes and films of Yankee Templar-wannabe Dan Brown (1964-), nyuk nyuk.
Too bad, each time the Christians captured Jerusalem, the Muslims would regroup and take it back, one of the coolest leaders they produced being cool-black-clothes-wearing Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) (1138-93), a Kurdish Sunni Muslim warlord who dissolved the Shiite Fatimid Caliphate in 1171-4 and founded the Ayyubid Dynasty in Egypt and N Africa, Hejaz and Yemen, Syria, and N Mesopotamia, with capital in Damascus, which lasted until 1341. Saladin had a rep even in Europe (e.g., in Boccaccio's Decameron ca. 1350) for chivalrous behavior despite being a Muslim, and recaptured Jerusalem after the Battle of the Horns of Hattin near the Sea of Galilee 6 mi. from Tiberias on July 4, 1187, defeating 20K Christians with his 30K men after using desert tactics to trap them then make them fry and die of thirst, and killing 17K of them, but sparing their king Guy de Lusignan with the soundbyte "Real kings don't kill each other". I know, you're going to tell me that the Muslims are no worse than the Christians when you check back on their hostile history, but there is a big difference, namely, that Christ didn't order his followers to kill for him, but Muhammad did. Christ only said to go out and preach the Gospel to gentiles, it was the Church (pope etc.) that twisted it, which is why there was always an intellectual underground fighting it, which could win because they could go back to the words of their founder, while any enlightenment movement in Islam had to fight theirs. Small wonder that after nine Crusades the Saracens finally kicked the pesky Crusaders out permanently in 1270, their history books describing them as mere pimples on their ass, gimme more, gimme more, gimme more, after which they kept the Holy Land until the mighty U.S. and U.N. forced the state of Israel on them in 1948, and kept Jerusalem until the Israelis took it during the Six-Day War in 1967. Not that Judaism isn't also a sick totalitarian cult, but at least they haven't taken to converting others to it by force, recently :)
After Saladin kicked the Crusaders out of Jerusalem, the next Crusade was led by English king Richard ("strong ruler") I Lionheart (1157-99), who never made it to Jerusalem because he got hung up in Egypt after first stinking himself up by executing 2.7K Muslim POWs in Acre to free himself for the Sept. 7, 1191 Battle of Arsuf, which he won after learning the lesson of the Horns of Hattin and bringing plenty of water horns and hats in, with a far different result, 7K Muslims vs. only 700 Christians killed, Richard I shouting the new hip battle cry "Sanctum Sepulchrum Adjuva!" (Help us, Holy Sepulchre!), after which having alienated some key nobles and watching them bug out, he decided to bypass Jerusalem and take Saladin's main supply base of Egypt, but gave up and struck a 3-year truce with Saladin before returning to Europe, only to be captured by his half-Byzantine half-Austrian enemy Duke Leopold V of Austria (1157-94), whom Lionheart had insulted by throwing his banner into the acres of mud of Acre, causing him to invent the red-and-white triband Austrian Flag using a white strip of cloth found under his bloody tunic after the battle, and develop a lifelong grudge, holding him for a kingsize 150K mark ransom before allowing him to return to Merry Ole England and pardon Robin Hood and his mean backstabbing younger brother Prince John, who in 1199 after Richard got killed in France by a mere boy with a crossbow and a frying pan shield who was getting even for his dead daddy and brothers became king John I (1166-1216), who was called Lackland because his daddy Henry II didn't give him any lands to rule, only a sum of German marks, which permanently warped his personality, not that he wasn't a lameass in bed, with the second nickname Softsword. Just kidding, a lameass in battle, which turned out to be a good thing, because he was such a hated ruler that his barons refused to fight for him, causing him to tax them to pay for foreign mercenaries, until the barons revolted against him and forced him in 1215 to sign the Magna Charta (Carta), a greata charta of their liberties, particularly no taxation without representation and the right to a jury trial, which set the West off on the course of secular democratic republican govt., starting with the idea that despite the divine right of kings b.s. a king isn't above the law and has to answer to Parliament before taking their property or money, and can't summarily order executions but has to let a jury decide, while the Muslim countries forever labored under the Quran and its theocratic Sharia govts. run by Muslim clerics who claim authority straight from Ass Clown Allah and are above the law, while its secular rulers rule by any means they can get away with it via the dog eat dog top dog rules the pack theory, AKA despotism. So for the last 800 years the West has systematically been improving its form of govt. while the Islamic countries have had their heads stuck in the 7th cent., which is why historyscopers like moi are necessary. By the way, after Lionheart executed his Muslim POWs, Saladin responded by executing all 1.6K of his Christian POWs, so much for using the Crusades as an arguing point for the equality of Islam with Christianity except as a limbo contest of how low some of the leaders on both sides could go.
Back in N Africa, the Almohad Dynasty of Berber Muslim Unitarians set up shop in Morocco in 1121, conquering the Maghreb east as far as Libya, and also taking over Al-Andalus (Spain), moving their capital to Seville and lasting until 1269.
To skip a little, after 500 years of fighting back inch by inch, step by step, on July 16, 1212 the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was a giant V for the Christians of Aragon, Castile, Navarre and Portugal over the Almohad Muslims in Spain, after which they ran scared, losing Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, and by 1252 only the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada in the south (founded 1238) (the place where the pesky Jews of Elvira originally helped them invade) remained, along with some territory held by their rivals the Marinid Dynasty (1244-1465), who lost their last fortress in Spain in 1344, sharing N Africa with the Hafsid Dynasty, which ruled Ifriqya (Tunisia) from 1229 to 1574, becoming pirates of Christian shipping and using the loot to build up their arts and culture. Granada survived by becoming a tributary state of Castile in 1238, supplying it with troops while becoming a trade hub with the Muslim world.
The Crusades weren't all bad. The multicultural exposure spawned the mini 12th Century Renaissance in Europe, after which Spanish Castilian king (1252-84), Alfonso X the Wise (1221-84) hired Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars to translate manuscripts on astronomy, astrology, and history, fixing the Spanish language as an intellectual vehicle, rocketing it ahead of Italian, German and English and making them play catch-up. Italian (Venetian) merchant Marco Polo (1254-1324) then wowed Europe with his Description of the World (The Travels of Marco Polo), AKA Il Milione (The Million Lies) by his critics, describing heating coal ("black stones"), oil lamps, asbestos, Chinese scholars wearing eyeglasses, crocodiles, yaks ("grunting oxen"), coconuts, how the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan's harem was filled with 100 new concubines every two years by special emissaries, the Pacific Ocean, his route across the Asian continent, and all the cool wonders and sights, the interior workings of unsaved China, everything except the Great Wall of China. Too bad, it took two centuries for his claims to be believed by members of the Holy Mother Church and its infallible Pope with a pipeline to Christ and God, I never had an STD, I never lie, don't smoke, and always take my meds.
Time out for a recap. The sudden explosion of this obviously Satanic cult from a godforsaken neck of the woods in 6 divided by 3 equals 2 caused the Christians to believe that Satan was finally sending his son the Antichrist to destroy them by the Big Year 666, the chances of this virus showing up are virtually nil, yikes, it's airborne. At first the Muslims made a big dent in Christendom, pioneering the techniques of Shock for Allah, contracting the Byzantines around Constantinople, taking the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa, followed by Spain starting in 711, but luckily their hate cult sprung a leak and began schisming and chewing itself up, and never finished the job, allowing the dazed Christians to regroup and retrench, what is this, happy hour, and it took a long time, but a pope did finally make it official, Pope (1198-1216) Innocent III (1160-1216) in 1213 calling King John, er, Prophet Muhammad the "Beast of the Apocalypse", no way, way, and by the early 1300s Pope (1305-14) Clement V (1264-1314) showed that the Christians were swinging to the offensive, declaring the presence of Muslims on Christian soil an insult to God, giving the Christian kingdoms of Spain a blank check to finish kicking the last Muslim butts back to Africa. Too bad, the Muslim mindset of executing apostates automatically with no church-state distinctions to worry about had infected the Catholic Church so deeply after 600 years that it set up the horrible Holy Catholic Inquisition during the reign of Pope (1227-41) Gregory IX (-1241), which used gruesome tortures to make the suspected heretics confess, proving their guilt so they could be handed over to the secular authorities for burning at the stake, call it the separation of church and state for legal paperwork purposes only.
Did I mention Kublai Khan? Starting in 1206 the Muslims finally got what's coming to them, the horrible Mongols, run by Genghis Khan (1162-1227), who came out of NE Asia with his hordes of nomadic tribes and ended up building the biggest empire in history, including China and most of Central Asia, and kicked the butt of the Persian Sunni Muslim Khwarezmian Dynasty (founded 1077) (the successor to the Seljuks) in 1220, taking Bukhara and Samarkand, and finishing it off by 1231. The remnants of the Khwarezmian military went to Iraq and Egypt and served as mercenaries, conquering Jerusalem on July 11, 1244, then destroying the Christian relief force on Oct. 17-18, 1244 at the Battle of Harbiyah (La Forbie) NE of Gaza, the biggest battle in the Holy Land since 1187.
In 1258 the Mongolians, er, Mongols led by Hulegu (Hulagu) Khan (1217-65) (grandson of Genghis Khan) came in from the eastern wings and sacked Baghdad, destroying the Abbasid regime, although the Mamluk (Mameluk) ("owned") wing of it (Kipchak Turkish slaves who got the right to carry weapons and used them to take over in 1250) ruled Egypt until 1517, when the Ottomans (who got their start taking peoples fleeing from the Mongols and regrouping them under their banner to fight other Turks) took them over, along with everything else in Muslimland, but let them continue on as Ottoman footstool vassals, from have to to want to. Speaking of the Mamluks, on Nov. 23, 1249 Sultan (since 1240) as-Salih Ayub, last Ayyubid ruler of Egypt died in battle in Mansourah fighting the Crusaders, and his wife (a Turkish Mamluk slave) Shagarat ad-Durr ("Tree of Pearls") concealed his death to rule in his name, becoming the first female ruler of Egypt since Cleopatra, walking like an Egyptian, way-oh-way-oh-way-oh-way-oh.
In 1260 Kublai (Khubilai) Khan (1215-94) became Mongol Great Khan #5, founding the Yuan Dynasty in China, which eventually reached from the Urals to the Pacific, and from Siberia to Afghanistan, 20% of the world's inhabited landmass. In 1256 he built the fabled city of Xanadu (Shangdu), which he filled with gorgeous babes like Olivia Newton-John on skates. It was unearthed in 2009, and Olivia wasn't invited to attend? In 1274 and again in 1281 Kublai Khan's invasion fleet (largest in history until D-Day in 1944) was destroyed as it attacked Japan by a typhoon, which they call Kamikaze ("divine wind"), thank my lucky clit. Did I say that the Muslims got what's coming to them with the mean Mongols? Wrong, they turned out to be meaner and longer-lasting, switching back to Da'wah when the nasty Mongols who ended their military threat failed to exterminate them or convert them out of Islam, never underestimate the power of the Dark Side of the Force. "The religion of the Muslims had conquered where their arms had failed" (Philip Khuri Hitti). In 1295 Ghazan (1271-1304), Mongol ruler #7 of Persia converted to Shiite Islam even after being raised a Christian and taught Buddhism by a Chinese monk, taking the Mongols with him, over 25 flavors of Islam's Pope Tartars, made for fun. He converted to Islam because it's the "stronger" religion, making it the official religion and telling people to call him Mahmud, and with his chief minister (a Jewish physician who wisely converted to Islam, and wrote a giant Islamic history) Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) he tried to reform the govt., stop overtaxation, restore agricultural land and integrate the Mongols into the Islamic mindset, starting by teaching the violent side of destroying Buddhist temples and going back to tried and true restrictions on the rights of pesky Christians and Jews, it's good to know that the God Who Hates is alive and well in the inscrutable East.
Too bad, losing the west side of Europe militarily didn't stop the badass Muslims, but only made them concentrate harder on the east side, which was anchored down by the super fortress city (three concentric rings of walls) of Constantinople, which, as you remember, was founded way back in 330 C.E. as the original capital of Christian Rome and held by Christians ever since, but schismed religiously with the Roman Catholic Christian Church in Crab Nebula Year 1054, causing them to excommunicate each other and no longer er, talk, which later helped them lose the Crusades. Meanwhile the Sunni Ottoman Empire, founded by Seljuk Turk Osman I the Black El-Gazi (1258-1326) (black meaning he attained the highest degree of manly beauty, and Osman meaning bone-breaker not the Osmond Brothers) began taking over the Muslim world in 1299, lasting until 1929, er, July 24, 1923, while systematically eating away at the Byzantine Empire, turning what they used to call Asia (now Asia Minor) into Turkey. Ottoman clan leaders liked to call themselves "ghazis", meaning warriors for Islam, sounds so peaceful, and as they captured Christian towns and turned the population into slaves, their Devshirme system would take the boys away and bring them up as fanatical Muslim soldiers called Janissaries ("Yeni-ceri" in Turkish means New Army), who were starved for sex and only allowed to have it after capturing a Christian town, after which they got a 3-day pass for rape and pillage, I'm Joseph you're Mary, no virgin birth this time. Since Ottoman sultans went on jihad virtually for half of their careers, and had to guard the empire the rest of the time, they decided to skip the Hajj.
Speaking of black, the Black Death (bubonic plague) hit Europe in 1347-50, killing a third or half of all the people and animals, after which the intellectuals finally realized that the Church didn't have a pipeline to God like it had been pretending, and thus couldn't cut off your path to heaven via excommunication, at least it's worth risking it to make the world a better place, causing them to actually start approaching the infidel Muslims to get some of them ancient manuscripts to look at. At first they had to translate back from Arabic to Latin, causing many inaccuracies, but after Roger Bacon (1214-94) of England (a Franciscan friar) showed them the way of checking all their facts via experimentation based on his studies of Plato, plus leaked intel from Muslim scientists, and the Old Skool Scholastics who clung to Aristotelian Physics, which claimed that a light ball falls slower than a heavy one (just don't check it from the Leaning Tower of Pisa or anything, take my word for it) were overthrown, Western Science began to take off, and passed the decrepit Muslim world up like it was standing still starting in the 1400s. Meanwhile honorable mention should be given to Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who wrote the poem The Divine Comedy, which consigned Muhammad to the 9th Ditch of the 8th Circle of Hell for those who have caused religious schism, among the Sowers of Religious Discord. Back then, European intellectuals were often polymaths and universal thinkers who also made breakthroughs in the arts, literature, philosophy, economics and politics, resulting in the West developing all the wonderful concepts of individual rights and controls on government tyranny, culminating in the super-duper every-country-should-have-it U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights of 1787, whose principles are totally at variance with Islam and its union of church and state under mental slavery. "No one can be a true Muslim and a true American simultaneously. Islam is both a religion and a state, and to be a true Muslim you must believe in Islam as both religion and state. A true Muslim does not acknowledge the U.S. Constitution, and his willingness to live under that constitution is, as far as he is concerned, nothing more than an unavoidable step on the way to the constitution's replacement by Islamic Sharia law." - Wafa Sultan
But I'm getting off the subject. No I'm not. The future of Planet Earth is either a government based on its principles, or on Muslim's horrible Sharia, it's like two scorpions in a bottle, only one can remain, and since I'm an atheist, er, optimist, I know that there has to be an end to Islam in the world's future somewhere, and that great day will become a worldwide celebration, and I hope to live to see it though I don't really think I will, because the bad side of human nature is here to stay for some time until it drinks its fill, which it never will. Still, I can hope.
Speaking of bill of rights, two scorpions in a bottle, and big celebration, let's not skip mean Persianized Turkish Muslim conqueror Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) (1336-1405) from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, who married into Genghis Khan's family then built a giant empire of peace and love in C and W Asia, it's like sausage, yummy as long as you don't watch it being made. To a Muslim, an infidel is an infidel, and doesn't have to be a Christian or Jew, Hindus are fair lame, er, game. Worse, they're not People of Da Book, thus they are devil worshipping animals entitled to no consideration. On Dec. 17, 1398 Timur the Lame conquered Delhi, India, sacking it and massacring the Hindu pop. in cold blood. In his own words "In a short space of time all the people in the Delhi fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off, the sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects, the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers... Their women and children and their property and goods became the spoil of the victors. I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death. One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a counselor and man of learning, who in all his life had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives.... On the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty... No other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword." What happened to Miranda rights and civilian trials with Jewish defense attorneys? And you thought Hitler was bad, or the Crusades or Inquisition. After what Islam did to it, Delhi took a century to recover. So even almost 800 years after Ass Clown gave his original orders to all true Muslims to go out and produce zombies, slaves and corpses, it was working like gangbusters, I bet you want a bunch of them moving into your neighborhood for multiculturalism and diversity, especially if you're post-Christian and not People of Da Book, not, think of what they could do in New York or Chicago with them swords of Islam, party like it's 1999. I can just see mass murderer Tumor Lameass up in Heaven with Christ and Moses now after Islam proves to be the only true religion like Ass Clown said, chuckle.
Meanwhile Constantinople held out and held out, protecting Europe's ass, er, rear. Slobby Dan Milosevic can tell you more than I know, but after taking Gallipoli in 1354 and moving up the Balkans, on June 15 (St. Vitus' Day), 1389 the Ottomans under sultan (1359-89) Murad I "the Godlike" (1326-89) kicked the butts of the Christian Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo on the Field of the Blackbirds, setting the world up for WWI, while isolating Constantinople. At least a lucky Serb got the sultan after getting into his tent somehow. In 1391 reeling Byzantine emperor (1391-1425) Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425) uttered the immortal soundbyte "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached", trying to reason with a learned Persian Muslim that "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason propertly, without violence and threats. To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death", to which the Muslim replied that his God isn't bound even by his own word, and that nothing can make him even reveal the truth to Muslims, and that he could even make them practise idolatry if he wanted, sounds like a perfect description of the Devil. I wish I made this up, but it's history and I'm just scoping it for you, sorry, it's over 600 years old. In 1394 the Ottomans under partly-Greek sultan (1389-1402) Bayezid (Beyazid) I "the Thunderbolt" (1347-1403) conquered Thessaly and began the First Ottoman Siege of Constantinople, blockading it to starve it out, the sultan telling the emperor "Close the gates of the city, for I own everything outside." Lucky for the Christians, the Mongols came along and defeated the Ottomans in Ankara in July 1402, ending the seige and giving them a breather, although much of the pop. of the starving plague-filled city had fled the sinking ship. To make a long you know what short, after the West refused pleas for help, and Ottoman Sultan (1451-81) Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-81) reneged on his oath on the Quran to the Byzantine embassy on his accession in 1451 that he would respect their territorial integrity, only to siege the city in Apr. 1453 using sappers and giant cannon, the Ottomans took Constantinople on May 28-29, 1453 (Mon.-Tues.), massacring, raping, plundering and enslaving the Christian population, and turning the Church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque, after which they had an open back door into Eastern Europe. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, meaning in the city or downtown, the city that connects Europe with Asia, which went from the capital of the Roman Empire to the capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1123 years thanks to Mad Mahomet the Prophet of the people that Jehovah said were wild asses. They did tolerate the Greek Orthodox Church, as long as they accepted 9th class citizenship. The entire Ottoman push was offensive and unprovoked, Islam and fun go hand in hand, Allahland, where a kid can be a devil. Big C now a done deal, Mehmed II went to work on Albania, which became a symbol of resistance to Christendom as it was bravely defended by Roman Catholic convert Skanderbeg (1405-68) and his 30K men from 1443-68. Finally in 1478 Kruje fell after the 4th siege when Mehmed II promised the defenders safe passage then reneged, killing the men and enslaving the women and children and taking the younger women as wives. In 1479, having resisted the Ottomans since 1474, Shkodra (Shkoder) in N Albania finally fell to Mehmed II after a heroic struggle, the peace treaty with the Venetians on Jan. 25 permitting the defenders to leave unharmed for real, after which many fled to Italy, Greece, Egypt and other countries, leaving the Turks a free hand to Muslimize Albania, how sorry can you feel for somebody on the wrong side of the Adriatic.
Speaking of Black Death, wild asses, Ottoman sultans, and off the subject, I must mention Wallachian Prince Vlad III Dracula (the Dragon) (Son of Da Devil) Tepes (the Impaler) (1431-76). He was an example of what happens to a Christian who spends too much time hanging out at the Ottoman court, in this case of Sultan (1421-51) Murad II Kodja (1404-51), where he was held as a hostage during his youthful formative years, and watched horrific tortures until he began to like them, no love them, no need them. He lived on to the time of Mehmed II, and when he got loose, leggo my eggo, he outdid the Ottomans in his horrific cruelty in the Carpathians, spawning a whole genre of literature, what would we do without it? But from a historical viewpoint, we might think of him as a victim of Islam who had to spend his life on the Christian-Muslim border and had one foot in each camp. Maybe if you're a Goth who likes to wear black and Twitter, that sounds good, but we're talking about real impaling here not some cool nighttime parties where you might get laid. And sorry, he didn't become an immortal vampire who looks like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise, he lived a miserable life and had a miserable death, although his tomb in Snagov 25 mi. from Bucharest was opened and found to be empty in the 1930s, don't miss reading Elizabeth Kostova's 2004 novel The Historian while popping Resveratrol pills.
Meanwhile after giving up on ending Muslim control of the Mediterranean Sea, by the early 1400s Western Euro powers began improving their ability to navigate on the seas using stolen Muslim astrolabes, and set out south in search of another route to India and China so they could get hold of yummy spices to make their unrefrigerated rotten meat more palatable, plus so that they could steal anything that wasn't bolted down. It didn't take long for the Portuguese to discover Africa, taking back their first African slaves in 1434, that was no sweat, but the big breakthrough for the world war between Christians and Muslims was in 1492, when Spanish-backed Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) discovered America AKA the New World, thinking it was was part of the Old World, India, because he knew the world was round despite the official opinion of the Church, but vastly underestimated the circumference. In 1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) finally found a route around Africa to India, reaching Kappakadavu near Calcutta on May 20, and discovering that Arab merchants had beat him to it, but going on to kick them out. The discoveries made Spain and Portugal rich with stolen loot, including tons of gold, and gave them a strategic advantage in future fights with the Muslim Hive, although it exposed them and their Roman Catholic Church backers as cruel greedy genocide artists and slavemasters, the intellectual backlash causing them to eventually concoct the theory of white supremacy as a justification.
Meanwhile on June 18, 1452 after requests by Afonso V of Portugal, Pope (1447-55) Nicholas V (1397-1455) (a humanist and lover of ancient Greek and Latin pagan works, who hired hundreds of scholars and translators, pumping up the Western Renaissance) issued the bull Dum Diversas, authorizing him to conquer and subdue diverse dumb African Saracens and pagans, and consign them to indefinite slavery, launching the West African slave trade. On Jan. 8, 1455, after getting over the shock of the 1453 capture and rape of Constantinople, and wanting to bless the adventurous but devout Portuguese and Spanish with global holy mojo, Nicholas V finally decided to take off the gloves and issued the bigger bull Romanus Pontifex, creating the Roman Catholic Doctrine of Discovery, with the soundbyte "We bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes... athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith... to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and ... to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate ... possessions and goods, and to convert them to ... their use and profit." Call it the Christian worldwide counterjihad, which, if it had limited itself to contracting Islam back around Mecca until the A-bomb could be invented, might have been okay, but too bad, it was forever confused with the white supremacist thing, starting with black African slaves, many of whom were Muslim, and extended to any non-white non-Christian, and stunk the white race up, but that's a different story. Not that their dear savior Jesus Christ ever gave orders like this, but by now the Church was totally corrupt and the scum had risen to the top, so the Devil was pretty much running both operations, East and West, like in that Star Trek episode Day of the Dove starring Syrian-American actor Michael Ansara.
In 1491-2 after 780 long hard years, Ferdinand II (1452-1516) and Isabella I (1451-1504) of Aragon and Castile kicked the butt of the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Muhammad XII (Boabdil) (1460-1533) out of Spain back to North Africa, completing the Reconquista (begun in 711). Given safe passage with his family after surrendering, Big Boabdil took one last look at the ultra-cool Alhambra ("red fortress") from El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro (The Moor's Last Sigh) Bridge, and his mother uttered the immortal soundbyte "Weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man." Three hankies please. No surprise, the "Catholic Kings" Ferdinand and Isabella also expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, so again no surprise, while they were still in Granada the panicky Jews sent closet Jew (Marrano, which is Spanish for swine, a Jew faking conversion to Christianity to foil the Holy Catholic Inquisition) did-I-mention Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), who tricked them into financing his emergency expedition to find a new homeland for the Jews, making Mel Gibson right once again, the Jews actually discovered America and brought the horrible Catholics in, causing all the wars of extermination, although you can't blame them too much, they thought they were just finding an escape route to the east coast of India where they could be far from both Christians and Muslims, the car, is it running, it's running, make for the driver's side, ready go. Back in Granada, since they actually hoped to convince the Muslims that Christ was right and Muhammad a bum by pure logic, Fred and Ethel graciously permitted them to stay, and when that didn't work, in 1499 pissed-off Franciscan Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros (1436-1517) (who reformed the Franciscan order in Spain, making them give up their concubines, causing 400 monks and friars to flee with them to Africa and convert to Islam, making him only more determined) got tired of trying to reason with the Mudejar (Muslims remaining in Granada) and started forced conversions and baptisms to save their damned souls from Hell, causing the Muslims to revolt, after which in 1501 the Castilian crown rescinded the amnesty and ordered them to convert or leave, causing the majority to convert, becoming Moriscos, Catholics of Moorish descent, most of whom remained secret Muslims ready to support a new invasion like the Jews had done in 711, after which on Apr. 9, 1609 Spanish king (1598-1621) Philip III (1578-1621) ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos (incl. Jews) in Spain, expelling 275K by 1614, that's Levi Johnston, father of Sarah Palin's grandchild.
Twenty-five years after Columbus discovered the New World, the greed and corruption of the pig-troughing Church finally caused Catholic monk Martin Luther (1483-1546) to nail his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany on Oct. 31, 1517 (Halloween), launching the Protestant Reformation, which didn't exactly work out as he planned, not reforming the Church but instead creating a new one that fought a long bloody war for survival that only ended in 1648, and later bolstered white supremacy even more, since the Germans who ran it were blonde-blue so-called Aryans, and you know what they did to da Jews, not to mention what the Yankee gringos did to the aborigines in North America. Not that the discovery of America by the Muslims wouldn't have been far more horrible, both there and back in Europe as they used the new riches to finally take it, check out my new novel when it comes out.
While the Spanish and Portuguese were busy raping and pillaging the New World in a not un-Muslimlike fashion, the Ottoman Empire reached its peak during the reign of sultan (1520-66) Suleiman I the Magnificent (1494-1566) (known for his magnificently huge turban), who did everything he could to destroy Christianity and take over the last territory run by the Byzantines, invading Hungary in 1526 and crushing the Hungarian army at the First Battle of Mohacs in S Hungary on the right bank of the Danube River on Aug. 29, 1526, followed a week later by the town of Pest (home of a lot of guess what, Jewish pests) across the Danube River from Christian-held Buda, opening the way to the Danube Basin and leading to the partitioning of Hungary between the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Monarchy of Austria, and the Principality of Transylvania. Suleiman I then tried to magnificently finish Europe off from the over-easy sunny-side-up east side with the unsuccessful but scary Siege of Vienna on Sept. 27-Oct. 14, 1529, but luckily, when Westerners get outnumbered they become heroes, and they held back the horrible Muslim hordes for the time being. After they invaded again in 1532, 800 Hungarians held the 80K-man Ottoman army back for 25 days in the Siege of Koszeg, causing them to have to regroup before they occupied Buda (on the other side of the Danube River from Pest) in 1541, setting it up as the capital of a Muslim province. Buda was a V for Suleiman I only through trickery, since he invited Hungarian gen. Count Balint Torok (Bálint Török) de Enying (1502-51) to a sumptuous dinner in his tent, giving him the first coffee tasted by a Euro, along with the first Euro caffeine buzz, I wish I had been there, while sending his best soldiers to take Buda Castle, from con man to CEO and the love of my daughter's life. After 80K Ottomans took Temesvar (Timosoara) in W Romania in July 1552, along with most of Transylvania, on Sept. 4, 1552 they took Szolnok in C Hungary, after which 150K-200K Turks began the Siege of Eger in N Hungary E of the Matra Mts., where 2K Christian forces under Capt. Baron Istvan Dobo de Ruszka (1502-72) successfully fended them off, checking Ottoman expansion into C and E Europe. In May 1566 despite a 1562 truce, Suleiman I the Magnificent left Constantinople with 100K-300K troops on his last Hungarian campaign against the Hapsburgs, with the goal of capturing Vienna. But the West is Heroesville, and on Aug. 5-Sept. 8, 1566 the Battle of Szigetvar (Szigeth) in Croatia near the Hungarian border saw 2.3-3K Roman Catholic Croatians under Nikola Subic Zrinski (1508-66) defend their fort to the last man after killing 20K Ottomans, holding back the Ottoman attack on Vienna, causing Cardinal Richelieu to later call it "the battle that saved civilization". After capturing the strategic fort of Gyula (until 1695), Suleiman I fell ill and died on Sept. 5/6/7, 1566, and was succeeded by his blonde-haired sauce-loving sexually-debauched half-Ukrainian (Ruthenian) only surviving son Selim II "the Yellow" "the Sot" (1524-74), who took the title of "Universal Lord of Everything Under the Sun, Descendant from Divine Lineage, Destroyer of the Christian Faith, Dominator of the Universe", then retired to his harem, leaving affairs of state to his Bosnian grand vizier Mehmet Sokullu (Sokollu) (1506-79) (a product of Devshirme), causing his princes to do the same, setting a bad example for the future as palace hos and eunuchs got their chance to rule behind the sultan's skirts, er, whatever they wear in the Sultanate of Women, while military affairs were left to viziers. Note that when the Turks took Temesvar in 1552, they allowed large numbers of Spanish Jews fleeing the Catholic Inquisition to immigrate. As you could probably guess, it wasn't long before one made it to a place behind the sultan's throne, Spanish Marrano Jewish financier Don Joseph Nasi (1524-79), who became the sultan's diplomatic rep. and was appointed duke of Tiberias, soon working with his super-rich aunt Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510-69) to finance the rebuilding of Tiberias in Palestine as a center for Jewish learning in 1561, and unsuccessfully trying to resettle Jews there only to come up against Muslim anti-Semitism and the pesky Venetians, maybe this is where the Jews decided to play both sides of the great divide against the middle in order to angle for a new Israel. When Prince Eugene of Savoy took Temesvar back in 1716, and ordered all the Jews out as Turkish spies in 1718, Europe got the Jewish PC professor.
This pesky and stubborn defense of Christian Europe for Buddha, er, Christ caused the sultans to give up and decide their empire was big enough for the time being, giving the West a much-needed breathing space to ramp up their hi tech military with all the New World wealth. Not that Dark Turban's successors didn't make their try, especially sultan (1595-1603) Mehmed III (1566-1603), who defeated Austria-Hungary and Germany on Oct. 24-26, 1596 at the Battle of Kerestes just as they were about to defeat him and kick his Quran asses out of Bulgaria and half of Hungary. Speaking of the sultancy degenerating because of harem poontang and eunuchs, when Mehmed III's daddy sultan (1574-95) Murad III (1546-95) died, he invited his 19 brothers (all sons of harem slave girls like him, ages 11 and under) to the palace and had them strangled with silk cords by deaf mutes to get rid of competition, the Ottoman law providing for the royal right of fratricide. He then clogged up the Bosphorus with the bodies of his daddy's pregnant mistresses, and enjoyed watching women's breasts scorched off with hot irons while orgying 24/7/365. Meanwhile his Venetian mommy Sofia (Sophia) ("the light or pure one") Baffo (1550-1603) (a gorgeous blonde who was captured in the 1560s and turned into a harem girl then worked her way up 6 inches at a time, becoming Murad III's main squeeze and real ruler, and even got away with accepting a carriage from Queen Elizbeth I of England in 1599 and riding around in it with the windows covered) continued to rule the Ottoman empire behind the scenes, and ended the traditional practice of sending princes to governorships along with the need for fratricide with the supposedly more humane Golden Cage or Kafe in the 400-room Ottoman Imperial Harem (Seraglio) in Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, where all Turkish princes were caged and served by deaf-mute eunuchs in order to ensure that they became totally degenerate ignoramus incompetent ninkompoops unable to plot to take over, although when the sultan died one of the degenerate Muslim monkeys had to be let out to become the new sultan, man I want to see another Turkish caliphate let loose on the Earth. The Seraglio was run by the Chief Black Eunuch (all his gear removed), while the palace bureaucracy was run by the Chief White Eunuch (balls only removed), the idea being that white women won't go for blacks unless and until they can see that their gear is three times as big. As for the Muslim cult bringing a Golden Age of anything but whorehouses, in Jan. 1580 Sultan Murad III ordered the destruction of the astronomical observatory in Constantinople after Muslim religious leaders objected to it.
Meanwhile the Persian Timurid Muslims finally took over Hindustan in N India in 1526, founding the Mughal Empire, known for its top mogul (1556-1605) Akbar the Great (Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar) (1542-1605), reaching their peak about 1700, controlling most of India from Bengal in the E to Balochistan in the W, and from Kashmir in the N to the Kaveri basin in the S, ruling over 1.5M sq. mi. (4M sq. km) and 110M-130 victims until it began to crumble starting in 1725 under the weight of the New Kid on the Block British, who split it up along with the Maratha Empire (1674-1820) in India, the Durrani Empire (1747-1823) in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Sikh Empire (1733-1849) in NW India. The last king Bahadur Zafar Shah II was cornered in Delhi, captured and exiled after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, ask Queen Victoria about it.
In the last days of the Suleiman the Magnificent era, the Christians began a long hard attempt to retake the Mediterranean. On May 9-14, 1560 the naval Battle of Djerba saw the Turks under admiral Piyale (Piali) Pasha (1515-78) and admiral (Tripoli pasha) Dragut (Turgut) Reis (1485-1565) defeat the mainly Spanish Holy League fleet under Italian Genoese admiral Giovanni Andrea Doria (1539-1606), great-nephew of old fart admiral Andrea Doria (1466-1560) near Djerba Island off Tunisia, sinking half its 120 ships, then taking the Spanish fort at Djerba after a 3-mo. siege. After taking 5K POWs, the Ottoman reps of the Muslim religion of love and peace of today massacred them in cold blood, the bones forming 20-ft.-high Skull Fort, which lasted three centuries, pretty hard to cover up, book your reservations now, maybe there's a dark cave with Talking Allah inside. Finally, on Oct. 7, 1571 after the new riches from America and hard lessons learned to never give an inch to an Allah Akbar finally changed the odds in their favor, the Battle of Lepanto on the Gulf of Patras in W Greece (last major naval battle fought between rowing vessels) was the first-ever V for Spain, Venice, and other Roman Catholics over the Muslims on the Mediterranean, reversing control and later making Club Med possible. Bald, white-bearded future saint Pope (1566-72) Pius V (Antonio Michele Ghislieri) (1504-72) allegedly saw the V in a vision in Rome at the exact moment it happened, ascribing it to intercession by Our Lady the Virgin Mary, even though he wasn't informed of it officially until Oct. 21, Playtex, who knows you like we do? This is the same pope who in 1570 excommunicated English king Henry VIII's daughter Queen (1558-1603) Elizabeth I (1533-1603), "the Virgin Queen", calling for all true Catholics to kill the "serpent of wickedness", which led to a 400-year culture war between the Protestant English and Catholic Spanish, with the English taking over half the world for the language and race of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) before the Germans could stop them, maybe he was right. Speaking of Spanish Shakespeare, future "Don Quixote" author Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), who was wounded in the battle called it "The most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen or future generations can ever hope to witness". The technological superiority of the West now became their blessing and curse, as they began to rely on it more and more to take on enemies who surrounded and outbred them, requiring each Western soldier to have to be able to take out dozens, hundreds, thousands to survive and thrive, no wonder they love the hero stories and even consider Terminator to be a hero. By the way, Virgin Queen Elizabeth I was a typical Euro Islam history ignoramus, who tried diplomatically courting Sultan Murad III, claiming that Islam and Protestantism had "much more in common than either did with Roman Catholicism, as both rejected the worship of idols", sending munitions to them and proposing a military alliance against Spain, imagine if they could just walk in and set up shop again.
But the horrible Ottomans still had a grim grip on the Balkans. In 1598 the Orthodox Christian Bulgarians attempted a revolt in the First Tarnovo Uprising, only to get crushed, then did ditto in the Second Tarnovo Uprising in 1686. Meanwhile the Spanish founded a fort in Zamboanga in Mindanao, Philippines in 1635, but abandoned it in 1663, allowing a swarm of Muslim states to consolidate their power in the south. In 1666 Millennium Fever hit the Christian world again, and this time Smyrna-born Qabbalistic Jewish rabbi Sabbatai (Shabbethai) Zevi (1626-76) milked it for all it was worth, proclaiming himself the Messiah in 1648, moving to Cairo and getting rich, proclaiming himself again in 1665 in Aleppo, Syria in a Jewish synagogue, making him famous throughout Europe and causing groupies from as far away as France to arrive. Too bad, in the Big Year 1666 he made the mistake of going to Constantinople to crown himself sultan with the help of Jehovah, who didn't go along with it, and he was arrested and imprisoned, but bribed his way out, and escaped beheading by pretending to convert to Islam and donning a turban, which pleased the real sultan, who made him the royal doorkeeper, but after he was caught trying to convert Muslims to Judaism on the sly, he was banished to Montenegro until he croaked, after which his diehard followers continued his Sabbatean Cult to this day, with 100K true believers in today's Turkey, some of whom were alleged to be behind Zionism and Freemasonry, stay forever young. By the way, 1666 was another big Millennium Fever year that was fueled by the Great London Fire of 1666, but it was also the Annus Mirabilis of the #1 scientist of all time (like TLW, ever-single but unable to stop his giant brain from having constant lightning storms, so what woman could have stood him?) Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), when he had the episode with the apple in his mommy's orchard in Lincolnshire and discovered the basic physical laws of the Universe, friction equals male organ times apple, he had his brains on the problem. Oh yes, Newton was a secret Arian, leaving a Bible-thumping treatise preaching against the Trinity along with his trunk full of alchemical researches, call him the Middle Man, one foot in the stuperstitious past, the other in the Allah-free George Jetson future, pass the Fig Newtons and Vaseline. But even a brainy English goy needs help if he's going to get to the Chosen People. Lucky for Newton, about the same time as him, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-77), a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin created a rationalistic atheistic-pantheistic version of Judaism, including modern Biblical criticism, taking on the age-old mind-body dualism in his posthumous "Ethics", and perhaps doing more to create the modern secular Westerner than anybody because he caused an exodus of the brainiest Jews from the theological and philosophical camp to the scientific camp just as the horrible Ottoman Empire was being rendered impotent militarily. Lucky for us Westerners, the Jews were living on our side of the Christian-Muslim divide by then.
Which brings us the watershed year 1683. After a thousand years of Islamic terrorist attacks on innocent Christian Europe since Maddass' Death in 632, giving the West time to pass them up permanently in military technology, on Sept. 11-12, 1683 the Battle of Vienna (Kahlenberg) was a giant V for a combined army of 84K Catholic and Protestant troops, led by Catholic Polish King Jan (John) III Sobieski (1629-96) and his 3K mounted Winged Hussars, along with Catholic Austrian Hapsburg Duke Charles V of Lorraine (1643-90), who kicked the butts of 150K-250K Muslim losers under sultan (1648-87) Mehmed IV (1642-93), leaving 10K Muslims dead and 5K wounded, and 5K taken POW, while losing only 2K Christians dead and 2.5K wounded. In the interest of forgetting their religious differences while throwing out the Saracens, the Catholic battle cry of "Maria help" was modified to a combo Catholic-Protestant battle cry of "Jesus and Maria help", there wasn't a dry eye in the house, despite Catholic Hapsburg-hating French king (1643-1715) Louis XIV (1638-1715) refusing to send help, and Protestant Hapsburg-hating Hungarian Count Imre Thokoly (1657-1705) aiding the Turks in hopes of becoming their vassal prince of Transylvania. After Buda was retaken in 1686 and the pesky Jews (who sided with the Turks) kicked out, the Ottomans were then thrown out of Hungary hopefully for good on Aug. 12, 1687 in the Second Battle of Mohacs with 60K Christian soldiers kicking the butts of 60K Muslim soldiers and losing only 600 vs. 10K Turks, after which the pesky Muslims never again attempted to subjugate Europe militarily, although they left all the other options on the table including mass migration to just take it over without firing a shot, giving illegal immigrants a bad name, just give me a generation of Islam history ignoramuses and PC professors. Meanwhile they did give the West one good thing, coffee, drink up, professor.
1683 represents the year when the Muslim world's military threat to the West ended, and the West began to leave it and its population and its stinking Allah along with the Medieval Ages in the rearview mirror as the ass-crack-sniffing Islamic world failed to keep pace with the West, not only in science and technology, but in all key aspects, including the construction of public clocks, implementation of standardized linear measurements, and modernization in general, compounded by pervasive autocracy. First the Protestants and Catholics had to have it out, resulting in a permanent truce in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years' War in Germany and the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands, after which fledgling Western Science was now pretty much free to romp unmolested by any organized religion, and it immediately began producing a long ever-growing line of super scientists building on the work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) of Italy (read the catalog), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) of Poland (heliocentric theory), William Gilbert (1544-1603) of England (electricity and magnetism), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) of Italy (theory of momentum), and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) of Germany (laws of the Solar System), including Rene Descartes (1596-1650) of France (analytical geometry), Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) of England (law of gravitation, optics, calculus), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) of Germany (modern notation for calculus et al.), Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) of Sweden (biological classification and nomenclature), Antoine Lavoisier (1743-94) of France (law of mass conservation, metric system), Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) of Sweden (chemical formula notation), Michael Faraday (1791-1867) of England (electromagnetic induction, electrolysis), Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-84) of Austria (genetics), Louis Pasteur (1822-95) of France (germ theory of disease), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) of Scotland (electromagnetic field theory), Dmitri Mendeleyev (1834-1907) of Russia (Periodic Table of the Elements), Albert Einstein (1879-1955) of Austria and the U.S. (photoelectric effect, mass-energy equivalence, relativity theory), and Niels Bohr (1885-1962) of Denmark (quantum theory), the honor list grows exponentially, no Muslims but scads of Christians and Jews on it, gee, Allah, what happened, they were all infidels and should have been beheaded by your faithful Muslim fucktards so we could continue to grovel in the Muslim Golden Age of cubic equations and the search for the process for transmuting lead to gold, if I get a broken back will I still be able to walk? And then there's the applied scientists and inventors, including Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) of Germany (printing press), Galileo Galilei of Italy (already mentioned) (telescope), Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) of the Netherlands (microscope), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) of the U.S. (electricity), Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) of Italy (electric battery), Robert Fulton (1765-1815) of the U.S. (steamboat), Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) of France (photography), Charles Babbage (1791-1871) of England (computer), Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) of Scotland (telephone), Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) of the U.S. (light bulb, phonograph, moving pictures), Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913) of Germany (diesel engine), Marie Curie (1867-1934) of France and Poland (radioactivity), Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) of Italy (radio), the Wright Brothers of the U.S. (airplane), Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882-1945) of the U.S. (rockets), Philo Taylor Farnsworth (1906-71) of the U.S. (TV). Where are the Muslim inventors? Oh yes, the auto clit slicing machine, the Wifi chastity belt, the IED, the butt bomb and shoe bomb, the Black Hole of Calcutta, all invented by Mohamed something. And I don't have enough megabytes available to cover Western art, literature, music, etc., while on the Muslim side there's about enough to fill a donkey cart, and anything good in it is probably by secular or skeptical or ex-Muslims.
But the Ottoman Empire wasn't kaput yet, and the Islamic clerics who really ran the show weren't about to chuck the basic problem of horrible Islam just to let their people have a happy prosperous society when they still had plenty of mentally enslaved manpower who thought living a life of Hell on Earth and dying in horrible pointless jihads was worth them 72 white quinnies, the cousins, the ants, the France, and after the Russians under 7-ft.-tall (but skinny) Tsar (1682-1725) Peter I the Great (1672-1725) attempted to modernize their military then tried to kick their butts in the Russo-Turkish War of 1710-1, only to get theirs kicked, and lucked out with easy peace terms when the Turks could have captured him and kept Russia down, it might have been a bribe who can prove it in court, the Turks decided to take back Hungary for Allah and avenge Big Hurt 1683, starting the Austrian-Turkish War of 1716-8, in which Prince Eugene of Savoy (Savoy-Carignan) (1663-1736) showed the turkeys how far behind they had fallen during all them prayers by kicking their 120K-man army's butts with only 60K men on Aug. 5, 1716 in the Battle of Petrovaradin (Peterwardein) in Serbia, killing 30K Turks as they fled in panic, including the grand vizier, how many rolls of Allah Toilet Paper is that and they never saw Europe, after which I already mentioned Savoy took Temesvar in mid-Oct. 1716 and ended 164 years of Turkish rule before going after Belgrade and taking it on Aug. 16, 1717 with his 40K troops, this time routing 200K Turkish buggers whose Allah was no match for good old Chinese gunpowder. At least Peter's attempts to modernize Russia worked slowly but surely, despite the resistance of the Orthodox Church, which even stalled the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar because it was Roman, which is why they now have their own nuclear wessels, see any Star Trek movie. Too bad, Turkey was put up to declaring war on Russia in 1710 by Orthodox Catholic Russia's Protestant enemy Charles XII of Sweden, setting them on a long course of backward jealous Russia, which was slower to give up its retro Christian superstitions vs. leading edge Allah-free freethinking Western Europe, which culiminated in the Cold War between the Christian U.S. and atheist Soviet Union after WWII, which was won by the U.S. after it went more areligious than ever while Russia started to regress back to religion, with Jews ping-ponging from one to the other, countries I mean, but I digress.
Seeing the Ottoman Empire contracting, Peter I the Great began a long-term effort to fill the vacuum and expand to the Persian Gulf so Russia could finally become a world naval power with its nuclear wessels, requiring it to get through pesky Muslim Persia, which like all Muslim countries was on the losing team militarily and stunk like Shiite. In 1694 dwarf (under 3.5'-tall) Soltan Hosein (Hosayn) (1668-1726) became shah of Persia, appointing Shiite cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi (1616-89) as the first head mullah (mulla bashi), who went on to work to eradicate Sunnis, Sufis, Zoroastrians, Jews, and pesky Christians, and build up the power of the Shiite clergy, making it virtually independent of the ruling govt to this day. In 1722 Afghan Ghilzai Pashtun leader Mir Mahmud Hotaki (1697-1725) of Kandahar invaded Persia and defeated the Persians at the Battle of Gulnabad near Isfahan, then took Isfahan after a 6 mo. siege, causing Husayn to abdicate in his favor, ending Safavid rule in Persia. But his regime was soon ended by Turkish-speaking Sunni Afshar leader Nader (Nadir) Shah the Great (1688-1747), who kicked the Afghans out of Persia in 1729, followed by the Ottomans and Russians, and founded the Afsharid Dynasty in 1736, becoming the Napoleon or Alexander the Great of Persia, the last great Asian conqueror, moving the capital to Mashhad, and going on to extend his conquests beyond the frontiers, starting with Herat and Oman, and going all the way to India, while bankrupting the country with taxes and trying to convert Persia to the Sunni faith by a trick of proposing that a 5th Sunni law school called the ooh-baby-baby Ja'fari School be created to combine them, push it, push it good. Too bad, it didn't push too good, and when he was assassinated in 1747, it was a stillborn baby. Fast forward to 1794, when the Qajar (Ghajar) (Kadjar) Dynasty was founded by Turco-Persian eunuch Muhammad Khan Qajar (1742-97), which lasted until 1925. Despite having no balls, this shah was cruel, crushing Georgia in 1795 and reducing Twoballs, er, Tbilisi to ashes, then moving the capital from Sari to the village of Tehran at the foot of the Tochal Mts. (which became the largest city in the Middle East, known for its immense network of highways, museums, and resorts on the Alborz slopes, call it the Shiite Denver, with ski burqas instead of ski bunnies) before being killed by his servants for threatening to behead them for eating a slice of melon. On June 17, 1797 he was succeeded by his oversexed nephew (700 wives) Fat'h Ali Shah Qajar (1772-1834), who systematically lost battle after battle to the Russians in the Russo-Persian War of 1804-13, flirting with Napoleon in the May 4, 1807 Treaty of Finckenstein, until he made his ultimate mistake in the 1812 French Invasion of Russia and lost his army, causing the shah to boot the French out of Persia and make terms with the British and Russians, resulting in the Treaty of Gulistan of Oct. 24, 1813, which ceded Azerbaijan, Dagheston, and E Georgia to Russia. In 1826 he tried to take the lost territory back, resulting in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-8, which was a dismal defeat for Persia, which had to pay a 10M ruble indemnity. On Oct. 23, 1834 Abbas Mirza's son Mohammad Shah Qajar (Mirza) (1808-48) became shah, soon dying of gout, and on Sept. 17, 1848 Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1831-96) took over, stinking the Qajar Dynasty up with a totally dissolute sex life for almost 50 years, allowing Russia to iran all over Persia, occupying the Aral coast in 1849, Tashkent in 1864, Bukhara in 1867, Samarkand in 1868, and Amudarya and Khiva in 1873, culminating in the Treaty of Akhal on Sept. 21, 1881, which ceded the last parts of Khwarezm to Russia, including Turkestan and Transoxiania, including Merv. On May 1, 1896 Naser al-Din Shah Qajar was assassinated, and his son Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar (1853-1907) became shah, doing little if anything for the country while enjoying his wives and boys, and once giving Tehran's main garrison to his boy ho Little Satan while drunk, sparking the Persian Constitutional Revolution, which forced him to sign a constitution complete with a parliament called the Majli. Too bad his son Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar (1872-1925) dissolved the Majli and fought the constitutionalists and lost, abdicating on July 16, 1909 in favor of his son Ahmad Shah Qajar (1898-1930), after which in 1911 Persia became the first Asian nation with a constitution. Ahmad was known for letting Russia achieve ascendancy over Persia while enjoying as many European hos as he could afford, until he was forced into exile in France in 1923 and deposed on Oct. 31, 1925 by Reza Shah Palavi, allowing him to do the wild thing 24/7, dying in 1930 in Paris after once losing and gaining 200 lbs. in a 2-year period. Oh, did I mention that oil was discovered in SW Persia in 1908, followed by Iraq after WWI? Meanwhile, I'll bet you noticed how women are not in the picture except as cattle, harem playmates, and breed mares, I bet you want to let millions of Persians immigrate to your Western country soon so all men can become Bond, James Bond, get out my double oh oh tape measure. Speaking of women going around bikini-proud France in burqas, did I mention that after the atheistic 1789 French Revolution, followed by a religious reaction that stunk itself up with blood and oppression, followed by the triumph of Darwinism, France disestablished the Roman Catholic Church and separated church and state in 1905, then at the same time officially recognized Islam as a religion, tolerating Muslim immigration and setting the pattern for other Euro countries, let's hope it doesn't become their biggest mistake. The popularity of anti-Semitism in France actually caused them to later often side with Arab nations against Israel and the U.S.
So while the West passed it by, Islam kept its mindset in the Allah-Muhammad 7th cent. and its science and technology in the 11th, but you can't accuse Islam of not trying to reform itself internally. The problem is that they did it in the wrong direction, backwards to A-M, like a hamster in a cave, er, cage. In the 18th cent., while Europe was enjoying the Age of Reason and Science, unitarian (the opposite of trinitarian, like the pesky Catholics, who believe that Christ is God, which has to be wrong, since there's only one God) back-to-cube-one Sunni reformer Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (1703-92) came along in Arabia, proclaiming that anything that had been added to Islam since Prophet Muhammad's days was false, and wanting to get rid of the obvious idolatry of worshiping the Big Black Cube, placing fancy domes encrusted with jewels over graves, and other non-unitarian jazz. Too bad, Big M ordered everybody to worship the Damien Cube, he was an idolator, which was the problem with Islam all along since it claims to believe in only one God but also worships a man, er, so does Christianity, but it at least tries to rationalize it via the Trinity, pick me a shamrock, call it a copycat clone on the Dark Side of the Force, so of course upstart al-Wahhab was rejected by the majority and kicked around, but he was finally taken under his wing by Muhammad ibn Saud (-1765) in 1740, whose descendants took over Arabia in 1922, turning it into Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile in Apr. 1802 the Wahhabis captured Shiite haven Karabala, Iraq and destroyed the jewel-encrusted dome over the grave of Big Man Husayn, keeping the change, and did ditto with Mecca in 1803, plundering the Khazinat an-Nabawiyya (Prophetic Treasure) and other monuments to Muslim saints, and covering the Cube with two sheets of black cloth called Qailan, which I guess means it's not idolatry anymore. Being health nuts, anybody trying to smoke a hookah was beaten, which was probably too much even for the Ottoman sultans, who ordered the Wahhabis kicked back to the desert. The Ottomans became kaput during WWI with the help of Arab nationalists led by royal Sherifians including future Jordanian king (1921-51) Abdullah I bin al-Hussein (1882-1951) and Iraqi king (1921-33) Faisal I (1883-1933), with assistance from British lt. col. Thomas Edward Lawrence of Arabia (1888-1935) (who thought he was winning the bedouins over to the British side, but was actually being used as a source of moolah and little else, which didn't stop him from becoming the British Andy Warhol, making himself famous by tooting his own horn to Islam history ignoramus Westerners) and Omar Sharif (Michael Demitri Shalhoub) (1932-) (in the movie version), and in 1925 the Muslim Dubyas under King Ibn Saud (1876-1953) took control of Mecca and Medina permanently, and even attempted to demolish the dome of Prophet Muhammad's mosque, declaring the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 and becoming the Middle East Beverly Hillbillies in 1938 with the discovery of oil, resurrecting the kaput Muslims from the grave and making them world players again. In 1953 Ibn Saud was succeeded by the eldest of his 45 sons King Saud (1902-69), who was so seduced by Western luxury and degeneracy like Jethro Bodine that he was thrown out in 1964 for his younger brother King Faisal (1904-75). Faisal was assassinated in 1975, and was succeeded by his half-brother King Khalid (1912-82), who was succeeded on his death by his half-brother King Fahd (1921-2005), who was succeeded on his death by his half-brother King Abdullah (1924-), who acted as de facto ruler since Jan. 1, 1996 when Fahd had an incapacitating stroke. Meanwhile on May 25, 1946 the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan was granted independence, shortening Transjordan to Jordan on Apr. 3, 1949, run by semi-secular (suit-tie or military uniform) Muslim Arabians from the Hejaz in W Saudi Arabia who claim to be directly descended from Prophet M (might be true they are so ugly), including Abdullah I from 1946-51 (assassinated), his son King Talal (1909-72) from 1951-2 (resigned for health reasons, probably schizophrenia), his son King Hussein I (1935-99) from 1952-99, and his son King Abdullah II (1962-), there's more to being a leader than being a jerk, the world will never know. The essence of this Puritan Arab Wahhabi movement was that everything Muhammad did was A-OK, especially the killing part, which is why they are the backbone of the so-called fundamentalist extremist radical Muslim terrorist movement. Many times they claim they're not Wahhabis but Salafists (Arabic for salafely sticking to the beliefs of their predecessors, as in the first three generations only), even though it's the same thing, call it disinformation to infidels. To a Wahhabi/Salafist, every Muslim who has adopted any modern belief (since 632 C.E.) is an infidel and a radical, not them, thus the statements made by history ignoramus Pres. George Dubya Bush after 9/11 that Islam is not about fundamentalism or terrorism but is a religion of peace are moose hockey, sorry, the whole fundamentalist Islam outfit is dung, and the world doesn't need them no matter how cool they dress. Who doesn't believe that the Saudi royal family secretly greased the wheels of 9/11 then covered their greasy tracks, including paying for Bush's oily praises of "good" Muslims? What other country routinely decapitates dolls at the airport since they conflict with their idea of Sharia? Don't think that just because Wahhabis are puritanical nut-cases that they're all violent radicals like Osama bin Laden. One case in point is Juhayman ibn Muhammad ibn Sayf al-Otaibi (1936-80), who led 1.3K-1.5K jihadists to occupy the Grand Mosque in Mecca on Nov. 20, 1979, holing up for three weeks behind the reinforced doors, which tanks failed to break down, while waiting for the Mahdi to arrive and help Islam conquer da world. After the Pakistani army under gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1924-88) (pres. #6 of Pakistan in 1977-88) called in three French commandos to help despite being infidels, they were expelled after 250 were killed and 600 wounded, and Juhayman and 67 others were later beheaded. Too bad there still is a Mecca, maybe, I'll cover that later. Guess what, they're sending Jethro to College to be a rocket scientist after the movie producer school kicked him out. After squandering billions of oil dollars on Rolls Royces and fancy palaces, the Saudis finally decided to squander another $10 billion on their all-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened in Sept. 2009. Of course, if a Westerner leaves the zoolike compound and wanders around, he/she might get their head lopped off, but then, who would be dumb enough to want to go there in the first place?
Modern Afghanistan was born in 1747 with the Durrani Empire, founded in Kandahar by Sunni Muslim Ahmad Shah Durrani (1723-73), a Pashto-speaking ethnic Pashtun (who claim to be descended from the lost Israeli tribe of Joseph), who united its 60 major tribes and 400+ sub-clans, and invaded India eight times, on the 4th getting lucky and sacking Delhi but failing to topple the Mughals, then stinking himself up on his way back by attacking the Golden Temple of the Sikhs in Amritsar in 1757, filling its sacred pool with the blood of his victims and starting a sick Hatfield-McCoy feud between the sick long-haired Sikhs and the religion of peace Afghans. After his death, don't miss his turquoise-domed mausoleum in Kandahar, the empire shrunk fast, and endurranied only until 1823. In 1826 Dost Mohammed Khan (1793-1863) (another Pashtun) founded the Barakzai Dynasty, which ruled Afghanistan until 1973, when Mohammed Zahir Shah (1914-2007) was ousted in a Soviet-backed coup by his first cousin Mohammed Daoud Khan (1909-78), who was assassinated in the Soviet-backed Saur Revolution in 1978, which set up the Marxist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which lasted until 1987, then became the Republic of Afghanistan under Babrak Karmal (1929-96) in 1979-86 and Mohammad Najibullah (1947-96) in 1987-92 until it was toppled by U.S.-backed rebels in 1992, giving the retro Taliban its chance to take over when the U.S. just pulled out and forgot about it. Meanwhile most Afghans didn't give a shit and just wove carpets. Maybe Afghanistan is the great laboratory for Westerners, who still think they can convert Muslims into their way of thinking, first Communism then American-style democracy, at least it's far away and we're not worried about them moving in with us until they give the retro 7th cent. Muslim Allah Akbar crap up.
Not that the West grew up without massive upheavals and revolutions. It took 1300 years after the fall of Rome to get its head right with the American Revolution in 1775-83, a new beginning for humanity that reached back to the ancient Greeks and made use of all the wisdom since, becoming the greatest breakthrough in human liberty ever seen, making the U.S. Da (don't say Great White) Hope of Da World ever since. No Mel, it wasn't a Jewish plot, or if so, they must have made up with the ancient pagan Greeks who liked to exercise naked with their uncircumcised dongs swinging like your Celt ancestors, how'd you get so rich? Some of the great Founding Fathers included George Washington (1732-99), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), James Madison (1751-1836), John Adams (1735-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Where did the U.S. Founding Fathers get their great ideas? Answer: they were historyscopers. Back then they didn't have the Internet like TLW, so access to historical materials was limited to the wealthy, and only those with great gobs of leisure time could absorb it all, so there these white English dudes were, hanging out in the libraries and studies in their mansions while their slaves supported them. No wonder they had an ambivalent attitude toward slavery, knowing that it was wrong but also not wanting to have to get a day job, but hedging their bets by laying the groundwork for racial equality on paper, while playing it safe and leaving the matter to posterity. Benjamin Franklin was an exception, a self-made man, so no surprise that he finally made peace with his conscience and denounced slavery just before he croaked of ripe old age. Thomas Paine was a radical Freethinker who saw the French Revolution firsthand, and was always living off the income from his sensational writings, so of course he was the most vehement in denouncing slavery, knowing that they'd consider all his ideas kooky but cool enough to read in the loo. They were all ahead of their time, and the rest of the world is still catching up to their sound ideas, the world's main chance. Sorry, there wasn't a Muslim among them, and shouldn't be unless he's a plant, but there were a lot of Freemasons among them, and they even laid out the U.S. capital city Washington, D.C. in a Masonic configuration. There were also Jews among them. In Germany in 1776 the mysterious Bavarian Order of the Illuminati was founded by Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830), allegedly secretly funded and masterminded by German Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), the father of international banking (a Spinoza disciple), with a general plan of destroying the Christian order in Europe by infiltrating and turning nation against nation until it all turns to crap, then stirring the crap to create a New World Order (NWO), and which somehow was allegedly behind the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the U.S. Civil War, the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II, the League of Nations and U.N., and which is supposedly on its game to this day and will be there if/when there's an Armageddon, stay tuned to Armageddon Idol starring Simon Scowl. Alexander Hamilton was allegedly a secret Rothschild agent, which is why he pushed the creation of the First U.S. National Bank on Feb. 25, 1791, which became the mission of U.S. pres. #7 (1829-37) Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) to free the U.S. from, which he did, only to have it come back bigtime on Dec. 23, 1913 with the Federal Reserve, Illuminati shark music here.
Too bad, ever since Edward Gibbon (1737-94), whose great work on the decline and fall of the 2200-year Allah-free Roman Empire came out about the time of the American Revolution, and who had the Battle of Vienna and the Ottoman threat safely in the rearview mirror, is that Granada I see or only Asbury Park, there had been a sad trend for Euro thinkers to glamorize distant Islam and Prophet Muhammad, probably as a way to get back at the Roman Catholic Church, which they were fighting to free Euros from the grip of while sweating at the thought of being handed to the Inquisition, so it was like an enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thing, especially with the English Anglican Church and its spinoffs in the U.S. Here's a couple of typical Gibbon quotes: "The greatest success of Mohammad's life was effected by sheer moral force without the stroke of a sword." "The good sense of Muhammad despised the pomp of royalty. The Apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire; swept the floor; milked the ewes; and mended with his own hands his shoes and garments. Disdaining the penance and merit of a hermit, he observed without effort of vanity the abstemious diet of an Arab." Right, he avoided pork while porking his 9-year-old wife with his 9 holy inches and massacring and enslaving pagans and Jews who got in his way and churning out Ouija Board music that teaches pure holy hate and murder to mankind, maybe Gibbon didn't get that far in his Islam history studies that were all done in decaying Rome. At least he saw through the Quran, with the soundbyte "In the spirit of enthusiasm or vanity, the prophet rests the truth of his mission on the merit of his book, audaciously challenges both men and angels to imitate the beauties of a single page, and presumes to assert that God alone could dictate this incomparable performance. This argument is most powerfully addressed to a devout Arabian, whose mind is attuned to faith and rapture, whose ear is delighted by the music of sounds, and whose ignorance is incapable of comparing the productions of human genius. The harmony and copiousness of style will not reach, in a version, the European infidel; he will peruse with impatience the endless incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept and declamation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the clouds." Not that he started it. The first Euro translation in 1704-17 of the 9th cent. The Thousand and One Nights, by Antoine Galland (1646-1715) about a mean Persian Muslim love machine king who executes each new bed partner after one night until he meets up with Scheherezade, who saves herself by telling him entertaining tales so he will take her tail to bed rather than her head to behead had already romanticized Islam to Westerners, softening them up because they thought all that oppression of women must have been in the distant past, not still being practiced, not that they really wanted to know. In 1731 French writer Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) published a life of Muhammad that painted him as a wise rational lawgiver who was a forerunner of the Age of Reason, because he claimed that Islam was a natural not revealed religion, I guess he forgot to read the Quran and missed the Dark Cave parts. Actually, the Freethinkers and Rationalists back then were pioneering Bible criticism, and their going theory was that the founders of all religions were basically good guys, but that their followers corrupted their messages and writings in order to foist horrible priesthoods on the people, the worst of course being the Roman Catholic Church, and that it must carry over to Islam whether they could even read the Quran or not, and the 18th cent. Quran translations into Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English etc. were all not only biased against Muhammad, which made them more sure he must really be all right, but since the Quran is really a musical score, it was like translating the lyrics and forgetting the music, like trying to read the lyrics of Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice without seeing the great video starring Christopher Walken, you'll never get it. At least one smart French guy knew that Muhammad sucks in every language because he was an evil fanatic, Voltaire (1694-1778), who wrote the drama Mahomet the Prophet; or, Fanaticism in 1736, but as he was a closet atheist way ahead of his time it may only have backfired on theists and made them want to circle the wagons. Let's face it, none of the Euros back then really knew diddly about the subject, they didn't have the historyscoping power yet, and were just using it as a straw man to promote their own causes.
Too bad, in 1797 after suffering for years and sending negotiators, the U.S. during the John Adams admin. signed the Treaty of Tripoli with the pesky Muslim Barbary pirates of Morocco, Algeria, Tripoli, and Tunis, and the freethinking U.S. emissary Joel Barlow (1754-1812) got cute and imaginatively translated the Arabic version into English, adding the famous Article 11: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." There actually wasn't an Article 11, but Barlow had been dipping into his Gibbon and thought he'd score one against the Christian Bible-thumpers for his personal friend Tom Paine and set the bar low, but it was the version read to and ratified by the U.S. Senate, setting it back 1200 years and undoing all the work of all Western freethinkers, I hope not, some language in a Senate treaty isn't the same thing as a constitutional amendment. You guessed, it, within months of his inauguration, U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in his June 4, 2009 Cairo Speech cited it to justify calling the U.S. a nation of Muslims, not realizing that the Barbary pirates demanded and got a giant jizya bribe to stop, their emissary quoting the Quran that all nations not acknowledging Sharia were sinners and that it was their right and duty to make war upon them and make slaves of all Yankee prisoners they took, and of course if they are slain in battle they get saved, thank you Jizzus, and go straight to Pair a Dice, roll them dice for my soul I'll take the chances, pass the booty. Obama's predecessor George Washington actually uttered the soundbytes "Would to Heaven we have a navy to reform those enemies to mankind or crush them into nonexistence", and "I plead with you to maintain your stance against the evil empire of darkness. I pray God to give you strength, courage, and knowledge in spreading the truth. Islamic followers are a formidable and dangerous enemy." After they demanded more bribes (Allah told them to make it a permanent thing, right?) and were refused, they declared war on the U.S. on May 14, 1801 (you guessed it, Thursday), starting the First Barbary War (1801-5), after which the U.S. under pres. Thomas Jefferson sent the USS Constitution, AKA Old Ironsides to land U.S. Marines on the shores of Tripoli and kick their despicable Muslim butts, as forever enshrined in the Marine Corps Hymn, see the Best of the Dean Martin Variety Show. Oh if we had Washington or Jefferson in the White House now, I'm sure they're both rolling over in their monuments, no wonder Adams wasn't given one, tell us about the Hollywood Triple Play. You guessed it again, in the Cairo speech Obama referred to the fact that big brain Jefferson had a copy of an English translation of the Quran in his giant library to justify his pro-Muslim pep talk (the library Jefferson donated to Congress to start their library), but actually he obtained it only so that as commander in chief he could study the enemy intel to help him win the Barbary War and kill hated Muslims better, not because he was a fan or devotee of it and two steps from converting. In 1804 freethinker Jefferson worked over the Christian gospels, producing the Jefferson Bible by taking scissors and cutting out all the passages portraying Jesus as divine or having supernatural powers, plus any perceived contradictions, absurdities or misinterpretations by the writers, so it's too bad he must have dropped the Quran after the war or else we'd have the Jefferson Quran too, either that or when he got done it was down to a few sentences.
What's really sick is that on-the-make freethinkers, rationalists, atheists and humanists, even Jews seized on the Barlow Article, practically turning it into a new article in the U.S. Constitution, harping on it constantly in the belief that it somehow proves that the U.S. isn't a Christian nation and hence should be an areligious nation, which TLW would be sympathetic to if it weren't for them *!?*! Allah Akbars that they thought would never actually try to move in here or else they might have dropped it and found something else. At its height, Barlowism, as promoted by American Atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919-95) et al. actually portrayed George Washington as a freethinker who was behind an insidious plot to trick Christians into unchaining the U.S. from Christianity like Bill Gates did to IBM with the PC and its open architecture that allowed him to make monkeys of the Big Blue Think men. Meanwhile the real U.S. was founded by a nation of virtually solid Christians, separating church and state only as to the establishment of one Christian sect over another, and Washington never missed a day of church in his life, and prayed on his knees in front of a chair every day with a Bible on it after moving his giant horselike thing from one tight pant leg to another, he wasn't the head of our country for nothing, one tight pant leg to another, he wasn't the head of our country for nothing, eh Martha? John Adams wrote the soundbyte: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!' But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell." Thomas Jefferson, the most freethinking of the Founding Fathers wrote all kinds of great soundbytes, especially against priestcraft, including: "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own." "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." "Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus." "Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind." Too bad, just because he was a freethinker didn't make him an atheist. He also wrote "I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be." So what's the real skinny on the Barlow Article? Simple. The U.S. govt. was a new thing in the history of mankind, because it wasn't founded on any religion, but goes back to ancient Greece and its democracy, never mind their religious fables, and thus doesn't have anything in it per se against any religion, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even Islam. But on the other hand the U.S. was founded by a nation of Christians, who obviously wanted to keep it that way, and would love every other nation to adopt their form of govt., but at the same time had a right to be very judicious about mass immigration of people of any other religion, who first have to agree to accept their new form of govt. and its rules and regulations and spirit. Too bad, when it comes to Islam, their Quran demands an intolerant theocratic form of govt. along with the horrible Sharia, thus the U.S. form of govt. can never be accepted by fundamentalist Muslims, sorry, that's what the current war on terrorism is about. The U.S. can deal with Muslim nations on a friendly basis when possible, and form treaties or alliances maybe, but the U.S. itself can never have a Sharia govt., and hence ultimately can't accept mass immigration of Allah Akbars, either they change or they're outa here, sorry, Elvis has left the building.
On Mar. 3, 1815 the U.S. declared the Second Barbary (Algerian) (Algerine) War on Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis and their Ottoman Muslime Barbary pirates, who kept plundering U.S. ships to make up for what they claimed was not enough tribute as promised by the Quran, and scoffed at the nation of shopkeeping Jonathans and Quakers. On May 10 Commodore Stephen Decatur Jr. (1779-1820) sailed from New York with a flotilla of ten ships, seized two Algerian ships in the Mediterranean and then sailed into Algiers harbor, and on June 30 the bey of Algiers capitulated. In July-Aug. Decatur ended the piracy of Tunis and Tripoli, inducing similar treaties, and the pirates stopped collecting tribute from the U.S. and instead paid indemnities. No, they didn't stop to read the Muslim slime their Miranda rights or afford them a civil trial complete with fancy Jewish attorneys. When he returned to the U.S. and was given a banquet, Decatur uttered the famous soundbyte "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, but our country, right or wrong!" The whole experience caused Pres. Madison to sees the light and "federalize", suddenly wanting a peacetime army and navy as well as a national bank, and even increasing tariffs and internal improvements, causing the Federalist and Republican Parties to reverse roles as the former took up states rights and strict construction, leaving the latter to go abolitionist and win the U.S. Civil War of 1861-5 that ended the U.S. eyesore of Muslim-like slavery, although ironically a lot of Africans taken as slaves were Muslim at the time and purchased from other African Muslims.
Getting back to Gibbon and his glowing depiction of Muhammad and Islam, it took until French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-92) founded the study of comparative religions that Westerners began to get the real picture of horrible Islam and the bad side of the 1001 Arabian Nights, starting with his soundbyte: "The liberals who defend Islam do not know it. Islam is the complete unity of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of a dogma, it constitutes the heaviest chains which have ever shackled humanity. In the first half of the Middle Ages... Islam put up with philosophy, because it could not do away with it; it could not do away with it because it lacked cohesion and was little equipped to use terror... But when Islam found that it could depend on masses of ardent believers, then it destroyed everything. Islam was liberal when it was weak, and violent when it was strong." Another good one: "Early Islam and the Arabs who professed it were hostile to scientific and philosophic spirit." Yet again: "Anyone with any knowledge of current affairs can see quite clearly the actual inferiority of the Muslim countries, the decadence of the states governed by Islam, the intellectual barrenness of the races that derive their culture and education from that religion alone. All those who have traveled to the East or to Africa have been struck by the totally narrow mind of the true believer, the kind of iron band around his head that closes him off completely from science and him quite incapable of learning anything or opening his mind to any new ideas." Another good one: "The moment a Muslim child is religiously initiated, suddenly it becomes stubbornly fanatic, full of silly pride in possessing the until then undisclosed revelation which it firmly holds to be the ultimate absolute truth, full of happiness - as if it was a unique privilege - in adoring exactly that which constitutes its inferiority and mental degradation." A hug from me and a check for one million infidels. Not that he was the only learned Westerner who was revolted by their study of Islam. Here's some samples. John Wesley (1703-91): "Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espouser of it have been as wolves and tigers to all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind." U.S. pres. #6 (1825-9) John Quincy Adams (1767-1848): "In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and fraudulent spirit of an imposter, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth... He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men." Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), the Frenchie who was wowed by the U.S., was also wowed by Islam, negatively: "I studied the Qur'an a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Mohammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself." Also: "Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others." British PM William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) called the Quran "an accursed book", adding "So long as there is this book there will be no peace in the world."
After 1683 the horrible Ottoman Empire, spawn of Satan was effectively qurantined, er, quarantined as a criminal enterprise, and fell more and more behind the West, causing Orthodox Christian Russian tsar (1825-55) Nicholas I (1796-1855) to call it "the sick man of Europe". The 19th cent. saw Britain expand worldwide via its navy, creating "the empire on which the Sun never sets" under Anglican Christian queen (1837-1901) Victoria (1819-1901). As Christian nations Britain, Russia, Austria, Germany, and the U.S. became new giant kids on the world block, the Ottoman Empire began to fracture as its former vassals revolted, starting with Greece in 1821-9, Romania in 1859, and Bulgaria in 1876-8, contracting around Turkey, which became a poor backward hellhole filled with hookah-smoking pashas, slaves and buggers, all headed straight Muhammad's paradise of Hell. Meanwhile, although there are no Muslims left in Europe, the British and French began invading Muslim lands, and in 1830 the French colonized Athens, and in 1839 the British colonized Aden. Too bad, the superior Christian White is Right British Empire stunk itself up in India in 1857 with the Sepoy Revolt, which they started by forcing Muslim soldiers to use new paper cartridges that were greased with pig fat and had to be bitten off, violating their halal food code, and compounded by a false story about a Black Hole of Calcutta set up by the Nawab of Bengal on June 19, 1756, which was to say the least exaggerated. Of course after atrocities on both sides the Brits won, and ruled India with a mean iron hand, their White Man's Burden and all that rot, pip pip, bloody bloody. Meanwhile in 1853 (100 years before TLW's birth) big brain polyglot English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) dressed up as an Arab and snuck into Mecca to wow Euros with the stories, too bad he didn't bring a suitcase nuke, along with his translations of the 1001 Nights and the Kama Sutra, thanks for the memories. Meanwhile English biologist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) published his shocking book "The Origin of Species" in 1859, causing an intellectual and social upheaval in the West as people began to realize that all revealed religion, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim is moose hockey since God didn't create man in the Garden of Eden or anything else, he evolved from apes and trilobites, a wait till later I'll give you the details but throw off religion now kind of thing, causing German Jewish intellectual (who liked to study in the British Museum in London) Karl Marx (1818-83) to get jets and find the missing ingredient in his Communist theories that wasn't supplied by the Christian Gospels, causing him to coin the immortal sayings "Religion is the opium of the people" and "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of a spiritless situation", along with the conclusion "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Too bad, the new godless Darwinian survival of the fittest rulers threw the baby out with the bathwater and dumped the entire Judaeo-Christian moral code, ruining the world with two horrible world wars and setting it