How Islam Spread Through Force NOT Peace

Raymond Ibrahim (0:00)

The founder of it is Prophet Muhammad. How has he been so successful at spreading his message worldwide? You know, I think what makes Islam very successful, and this isn't an original idea to me, it's actually a lot of Christian theologians, historically, not today, but I mentioned them in the books, was basically the genius of Muhammad, is that he basically created a religion that catered to man's most primordial desires and lusts.

So, he basically created a religion that... So, this is what they would say. They would say that, the Christians would say, the reason Islam is so popular amongst these people is, it's the easy religion. Today, we have the conception that it's so hard. It's actually not. It was easy because, okay, all you have to do is say a few words. Now, you can be a pirate in a plunderer, and you can go fight, and you can go kill, and you can rape, and you can enslave, and you could get rich, and you either get all that, and if you die, well, you get the same stuff in heaven, because you're going to go straight to heaven, okay? The greatest martyr is the one who dies in the jihad, and he goes to heaven where he has nonstop sex with supernatural women known as al-Huris, okay? And this is all in the Quran. This is Islamic doctrine. So, to the simple Bedouin's mentality and other nomadic people, this was very appealing. And also, the other genius of Muhammad is, what he did is he took his tribalism, right? Arabia, 7th century, immensely tribal.

And he re-articulated it in a way that he basically threw a theological paradigm. So, tribalism is, you know, you and me, okay, we're brothers and everyone's our enemy, right? And that's tribalism. We're one tribe and everyone out is, we're hostile against him.

And it keeps extending. And you and me, and Weld, and our cousins also, and etc. Okay. So, he took that idea, which was just innate to tribal peoples like the Arabs, but he changed it subtly. And he said, okay, so now, your loyalty, and that's the word in the Quran, is to fellow Muslims. And as far as non-Muslims, you have to hate them, and you have to disavow them, even if they're your fathers, and your brothers, and your sons, and your wives. And he said, this is in the Quran. Okay, so he made a very distinct line, just like tribalism does. Tribalism is very distinct. It's us against them. But now us became Muslims, the Ummah as it's known, and them became the kuffar. And it didn't matter if they're your relatives or not. Many caliphs and companions of Muhammad in the various wars were praised because they killed their relatives who were not Muslim, because that's what made them enemies. So that idea became very popular, and it resonated with tribal peoples. So first the Arabs, but then the Turks also who came from the steppes, like I said, these are nomads. And also lots of the Mongols, not all of them, but some of them converted to Islam, the Berbers in North Africa. So the idea was that these nomadic people, nothing changed because their life was about raiding the other, enslaving and killing and plunging. So Islam gave those peoples the same right to do all that, so it fit very normally. And at the same time, it was even better because now, oh, if I die, I'm a holy martyr, and I get more of this in paradise. And whereas to be a Christian was hard, Christianity, you're supposed to curtail your violent impulses. You're not supposed to go rape and that sort of thing. So that, I think, is one of the reasons that explains its popularity then and now.

It's weird to just have that make it this big. But who was Prophet Muhammad? Who was he? Who was he? Well, he was born from the Qutish clan, and the dates that are given for him are 570 He's born there. He was an orphan raised by his uncle.

And then sometime around, I think, 610, he starts getting revelations. So he supposedly goes to a cave where the angel Gabriel appears to him and tells him, Ikra, which means recite, okay?

Now it means read, but it meant basically recite because he was ignorant or illiterate. And he would supposedly recite what Gabriel was telling him, which became the Quran. I'm giving you the Muslim version because the non-Muslim version, the scholarly Western version says all of that is nonsense. There's even one theory that Muhammad never existed, that he was made up by Arabs because they needed some backstory for themselves. I personally believe, by and large, I believe the Islamic traditional. So what is the Western, if you want to go a little bit deeper, what is the Western idea of who Prophet Muhammad was? Well, it's not consistent. Some would agree with the traditional Muslim. I think most people would.