Netti,
The first time I got into discussion here with you was when you were trying to play down the injustices carried out on people under Islamic law. Again here on this thread we broached the subject of Muhammad being a warlord and this is why at the root Islam is anything but a peaceful religion. You refuted that analysis.
So now I return to this and make it clear why I state this to be a fact.
The Koran is said to have been delivered from Allah to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. To Muslims it is the directly related will of the almighty. My argument is that he was a warlord who was aware of what Constantine had done with Christianity and adopted a similar method for himself. Let us examine this now in more detail.
In the beginning Muhammad was a powerless wannabe. In Mecca where he received his first "revelations" he was concerned about forming alliances and getting people on his side. And it is in these Koranic writings we find any mention of peace and acceptance of other beliefs and faiths. He at that point in his rise to power could not afford to have everybody as an enemy and so his talk reflected that reality. He would go on later to say that lying to the enemy is perfectly acceptable behaviour. (Sahih al Bukhari, Vol 4, Bk52,Hadith 269 :"war is deceit" and chapters 3 v28 and 16 v 106 of the Koran amongst others). For Muhammad it was a simple equation. You were either of the House of Islam, or of the House of War. You were either his follower or his enemy. Modern apologists and politicians have tried to spread the lie it is called the House of Peace. But that is what it is, a lie. The Arabic translation is clear it is the House of War. And that is what is taught in Islamic schools.
So we have established that Muhammad deliberately lied to form alliances in Mecca and in the 2nd part of the Koran (chronologically), written in Medina, when he has advanced his quest for power and won some battles his language changes dramatically. The first thing he says in the Koran is that everything he says from now on supersedes that which was revealed to him in Mecca. In fact this is where the Islamic calender begins. Not from the birth of Muhammad but from when he becomes a military and political leader in Medina. The first victory of Jihad is the start point and this has well hidden but, to fundamental Muslims, very important symbolically recurring patterns on all subsequent Jihad. And we cannot forget for one moment that the separation of spiritual dimensions within Islam from political ones is not only impossible, it is heretical. This is in the Koran. It is irrefutable being the word of Allah himself, not up to negotiation or reinterpretation. In Medina Muhammad superseded all his lies in Mecca and said that all the enemies of Islam, (non Muslims), were to be killed or reduced to slavery.
So we can see that from the outset Muhammad had a vision alright. And it was a vision of a megalomaniac warlord seeking complete power over everybody both politically and spiritually. Muhammad himself, by his own hand, is attributed to have beheaded 600-900 Jews in one incident alone where his army forced the already subdued prisoners to dig their own graves, lined them up beside them and beheaded them. In other incidents he cuts off opposite hands and feet and allows them to bleed slowly to death. A practice that goes on to this day in Sudan where Muslim extremists have murdered 1 million innocents.
So when you say he was "also a diplomat" yeh he was. But he was a self-confessed liar as a diplomat and his only aim was absolute power for himself as a warlord. This man ruled by the sword and used divine sanction as a justification. But I posit that he knew his "revelations" from the angel Gabriel were utter lies. He was a liar, a murderer and his megalomaniac legacy by its nature to this day presents humanity with one of its greatest problems. Islam has begun its 3rd stage of expansion. It uses lies to fool the "enemy" into a false sense of what it is. And we remain blind to its real purpose at our peril. Muhammad negated all the peaceful lies he spoke in Mecca. The real Islam, that which all Muslims are commanded to follow is the one of what the apologists would call extremists.
The west is caught in the Doctrine of Prof. Said and his book Orientalism where it is said any critical expression toward Islam is racist. This is a lie. This is the lie the Koran demands its believers to tell. Islam is supremacist and warlike, all its peaceful elements were lies and superseded by the command to subdue and destroy the enemies of Islam, everybody that is not an Arabic speaking Muslim.
I could write for a long time citing chapter and verse to support these claims and if you insist I will. But what I have written is the truth. He was a megalomaniac warlord and I will never climb down from that position.
tao
