The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead by Howard Bloom Page B
Authors: Howard Bloom
Tags: Islam, Terrorism, World history, 911, jihad, mohammed, marathon bombing, prophet, osama bin laden, jewish history, jihadism, muhammad, boston bombing, islamism, muslim
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militants were more successful. Islamic fighters commandeered four passenger jets, flew two of them into World Trade Center’s boxy skyscrapers, flew another into the Pentagon, and were prevented by the passengers of the fourth plane from destroying yet another Washington target. I stood on my roof in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and watched as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burned and collapsed.
It was agonizing. For twelve years I’d been trying to warn of attacks of this kind. So had others. One of my books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History , used Islam as one example of how ideas, social groups, biological self-destruct mechanisms, hormones of victory, and battles for status shape your fate and mine. Two Amazon.com reviewers called The Lucifer Principle the book that had predicted 9/11. A Moslem Amazon.com reviewer said the book was his new source of truth, his new “Bible.” 31
Another book I’d written and published before 9/11, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21 st Century , had focused on the way subcultures battle to take over the mass mind of a society. One chapter had zeroed in on a man only a handful of others had paid attention to, Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani Moslem reader called Global Brain the only book that tells it like it is about militant Islam. Yet, like other watchmen at the gates, I’d utterly failed to get my warnings across.
I did not want to fail again. So I set aside my work in the science of mass behavior and focused full-time on the puzzles of militant Islam.
Militant Islamic history is extremely hard to follow. The 4,000 pages I’d compiled on the topic were jumbled like jigsaw puzzle pieces. They refused to tell a coherent story. So when I was asked to give a speech I called Islam’s War to Save the West at the New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2004, I spent six months compiling a 159-page timeline of militant Islam from its beginning in the seventh century to the present, a timeline complete with a world map showing the reach of militant Islam’s colonialism and imperialism, a colonialism invisible to us because of its astonishing success as an indigenous culture-eraser and new-culture-shaper.
The armies and merchants of Islam, the map revealed, had achieved something you and I are never told about. They had pieced together the biggest empire in world history—twelve times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States. The timeline finally gave the story of this extraordinary colonialist crusade, pinpointing 2,156 key moves along the 1,380-year-long Islamic fight for conquest.
The Osama Puzzle
But I was stymied by yet another puzzle. I’d completed a compilation of every public statement ever made by Osama bin Laden, intending to publish it in book form, then realized that to the average Western reader Osama’s words were gibberish. Bin Laden spoke brilliantly on behalf of his militant beliefs. But he referred over and over again to a historical weave of names, places, and events I could not track down. He referred to places with obscure names, names that in some cases didn’t even appear in any English language encyclopedia—Assam, Fatani and Ogadin. 32 He referred to “knights of Mohammed the conqueror” 33 and the causes they fought for using names of ancient heroes and events that weren’t traceable on Google and didn’t show up in Western or modern Moslem histories of the Middle East. He referred to a past that gave a powerful but mysterious foundation to militant Islamic thought. What was this history? Why couldn’t I find it? Why was it not in the books I dug up in Islamic bookstores or in English-language Islamic websites? Why was it not in the Western histories of Islam? Why wasn’t it part of your basic education in history and mine?
My computer file of research
It was agonizing. For twelve years I’d been trying to warn of attacks of this kind. So had others. One of my books, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History , used Islam as one example of how ideas, social groups, biological self-destruct mechanisms, hormones of victory, and battles for status shape your fate and mine. Two Amazon.com reviewers called The Lucifer Principle the book that had predicted 9/11. A Moslem Amazon.com reviewer said the book was his new source of truth, his new “Bible.” 31
Another book I’d written and published before 9/11, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21 st Century , had focused on the way subcultures battle to take over the mass mind of a society. One chapter had zeroed in on a man only a handful of others had paid attention to, Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani Moslem reader called Global Brain the only book that tells it like it is about militant Islam. Yet, like other watchmen at the gates, I’d utterly failed to get my warnings across.
I did not want to fail again. So I set aside my work in the science of mass behavior and focused full-time on the puzzles of militant Islam.
Militant Islamic history is extremely hard to follow. The 4,000 pages I’d compiled on the topic were jumbled like jigsaw puzzle pieces. They refused to tell a coherent story. So when I was asked to give a speech I called Islam’s War to Save the West at the New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2004, I spent six months compiling a 159-page timeline of militant Islam from its beginning in the seventh century to the present, a timeline complete with a world map showing the reach of militant Islam’s colonialism and imperialism, a colonialism invisible to us because of its astonishing success as an indigenous culture-eraser and new-culture-shaper.
The armies and merchants of Islam, the map revealed, had achieved something you and I are never told about. They had pieced together the biggest empire in world history—twelve times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States. The timeline finally gave the story of this extraordinary colonialist crusade, pinpointing 2,156 key moves along the 1,380-year-long Islamic fight for conquest.
The Osama Puzzle
But I was stymied by yet another puzzle. I’d completed a compilation of every public statement ever made by Osama bin Laden, intending to publish it in book form, then realized that to the average Western reader Osama’s words were gibberish. Bin Laden spoke brilliantly on behalf of his militant beliefs. But he referred over and over again to a historical weave of names, places, and events I could not track down. He referred to places with obscure names, names that in some cases didn’t even appear in any English language encyclopedia—Assam, Fatani and Ogadin. 32 He referred to “knights of Mohammed the conqueror” 33 and the causes they fought for using names of ancient heroes and events that weren’t traceable on Google and didn’t show up in Western or modern Moslem histories of the Middle East. He referred to a past that gave a powerful but mysterious foundation to militant Islamic thought. What was this history? Why couldn’t I find it? Why was it not in the books I dug up in Islamic bookstores or in English-language Islamic websites? Why was it not in the Western histories of Islam? Why wasn’t it part of your basic education in history and mine?
My computer file of research
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