Although Islamic historians have rewritten and whitewashed large chunks of their history, many descriptions of Islam from its formative years have survived. From those texts, and from the long record of Islam’s dealings with the West, characteristics of the old gods shine through in the teachings of Muhammad.
By the time of his “revelation” in 610 AD, most of the known world—at least, the world known to us Westerners—had abandoned polytheism for a monotheistic faith.[1] Yahweh was worshiped from Mesopotamia to Britain, while the Zoroastrians of Persia followed Ahura Mazda.
Obviously, this analysis doesn’t consider the religions of the far corners of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. But since the supernatural war of rebellion is for control of the har môʿēd, the “mount of assembly,” the lands closest to Israel are most relevant. That’s why the Fallen used them to launch their counterattack.
Arab tribes continued to worship the old Mesopotamian gods long into the Christian era. Names changed and their roles sometimes shifted—for example, the split of the dual-gendered god/dess of sex and war Astarte/Attar into male, the war-god Ashtar, and female—either al-Lat (“the goddess”), al-’Uzza, or both. Worship of the moon-god and sun-god continued under various names, and regional gods never lost their importance to the tribes that lived on their home ground—for example, Qôs, the national god of Edom, who was adopted by the Nabataean Arabs as their national god, Dushara, when they settled in the Edomites’ former territory.[2]
Alone among the peoples who lived in and around Israel in the centuries after the Resurrection, most of the tribes of Arabia, with the notable exceptions of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids in the north, retained their polytheistic paganism. They also practiced rituals that were absorbed into later Islamic doctrine, such as the annual pilgrimage to a place called the Al-Masjid al-Haram, or the “forbidden gathering place.” But the real question is this: How did this new coalition of pagan gods, united under the banner of Islam, guide Muhammad and his followers when they brought their new religion to the world?
We’ve discussed the connections between death and “the” god in an earlier article. In brief, the evidence suggests that Allah is the entity who led the rebellious Watchers to the summit of Mount Hermon, called Shemihazah in the Book of 1 Enoch. For their sin, the Watchers, the angels of Genesis 6 who “kept not their first estate”[3] were sentenced to spend all of time until the judgment chained in darkness. Peter’s description of the imprisonment of these angels in Tartarus, based on the Greek word tartarōsas, identifies these rebels with the Titans of Greek myth. They were led by Kronos, the god who ate his children to forestall their rebellion.
Other names for this dark god over the ages include El, Enlil, Dagan, Kumarbi, Saturn, and Baal-Hammon, all of whom had some link to the realm of the dead. And the religion founded by Muhammad, which serves a deity called “thegod,” Allah, is likewise inextricably linked to death.
It’s well established that Muhammad began his ministry around 610 AD. His first ten years of preaching met with little success. It was only after his fellow Qurayshi tribesmen, tired of Muhammad preaching against their polytheistic ways, drove him and his followers away from the masjid al-haram to take refuge in the oasis of Yathrib (later renamed Medina) that Muhammad had an epiphany that changed everything. Even sympathetic mainstream historians acknowledge his change in tactics, although they tend to try to justify it:
Muhammad and the emigrants from Mecca had no means of earning a living in Medina; there was not enough land for them to farm, and, in any case, they were merchants and businessmen not agriculturalists. The Medinese, who were known as the ansar (the helpers), could not afford to keep them gratis, so the emigrants resorted to the ghazu, the “raid,” which was a sort of national sport in Arabia, as well as being a rough-and-ready means of redistributing resources in a land where there was simply not enough to go round.[4]
You can spot the holes in that story from thirty thousand feet. Muhammad’s band was made up of merchants and businessmen, so they couldn’t farm to support themselves. But somehow, almost instantly, they became an elite fighting force that conquered the Arabian Peninsula within ten years? And stealing property from others was nothing more than “redistributing resources”? Now, here in the United States, that’s how looting has been rationalized and justified since the George Floyd riots of 2020, but it’s a good bet that people on the wrong end of Muslim swords had different words for it.
The “national sport” Muhammad played wasn’t to keep himself and his ragged band of followers alive. The principalities and powers behind the prophet had a longer game in mind, and his first efforts hadn’t yielded results quickly enough.
That Muhammad had only won over some one hundred followers after a decade of peaceful preaching in Mecca—but nearly the whole of Arabia after a decade of successful raiding, “an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually”—speaks for itself.[5]
In a nutshell, losers in the caravan raids had two choices: death or submission—which is, after all, what “Islam” means. Submission required the recitation of the shahada, the first pillar of Islam: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Those who refused to submit were killed or enslaved.
However, Muhammad’s instructions to his followers forbid them from taking the lives or possessions of those who chose to submit.[6] Obviously, that was a powerful tool for evangelizing. As an added incentive for new converts, Muhammad preached that the carnal rewards of a raider—wealth, slaves, and women—were even better in the afterlife for those who died during jihad.
“I guarantee him either admission to Paradise,” said Muhammad, “or return to whence he set out with a reward or booty.” As for “the martyr”—the shahid—he “is special to Allah,” said the prophet. “He is forgiven from the first drop of blood [he sheds]. He sees his throne in paradise.… Fixed atop his head will be a crown of honor, a ruby that is greater than the world and all it contains. And he will copulate with seventy-two Houris.”
The houris are supernatural, celestial women—“wide-eyed” and “big-bosomed,” says the Koran—created by Allah for the express purpose of gratifying his favorites in perpetuity.[7]
For hot-blooded young men, this was a win-win.
Note that the rewards promised by Muhammad are all carnal, things that appeal to the flesh—food, drink, gold, and physical pleasures, a sharp contrast that with the promises of Jesus. The rewards for Muhammad’s potential recruits were in terms they could easily understand. Join the army of Allah! Win the fight and take home all the loot and women you can carry! If you die, you get even more!
No wonder Islam overwhelmed Arabia within a decade. After a few key victories early on, it wasn’t hard for any man who could wield a sword to figure out which way the wind was blowing.
For the dark, child-eating god chained up in the abyss, there must have been some satisfaction in knowing that an engine of death had been loosed on the world—one that would swiftly capture Zion and march right to the very gates of the most powerful city in Christendom.
If there is only one thing we can learn from the last fourteen hundred years of Muslim history, it’s that Islam has relied on the sword for expansion since the very beginning. Remember, the faith went only as far as Muhammad’s closest relatives until he revealed Allah was not only okay with caravan raiding but had decreed that it was a holy calling.
Christendom has had its share of war over the centuries, without question. But war as a tool for converting unbelievers, much less for profit, is not sanctioned in the Bible.[8] Rather than spreading the gospel by force, Jesus told His disciples to just shake the dust from their feet of a town that refused to hear their words.[9] Islam, as we noted earlier, only began its explosive growth when Muhammad began pandering to the basest instincts of men who could fight well enough to take what they wanted.
Here is where we detect the influence of the god, or gods, of war. This is an area in which several of the deities worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia had some expertise. The storm-god, Baal/Zeus, and the plague-god, Resheph/Nergal/Apollo, were also believed to be warriors. They were usually depicted in a smiting pose, with one arm raised, holding a club or mace. But it’s the mindless, unrestrained violence and bloodshed of the goddess Ishtar/Inanna and the war-god Chemosh/Ares/Mars behind the wars of Islamic expansion and modern Islamist suicide bombers. Those spirits have convinced millions over the centuries that shedding blood in the cause of Allah is a holy act.
While Christian missionaries traveled peacefully as far as Ireland and China within a few hundred years of the Resurrection, Islam took a quicker path to grow its numbers—conversion or death. That tactic yielded many new converts, but it also spilled a lot of blood. We assume that either outcome was acceptable to the infernal council.
Within half a century of Muhammad’s death in 632 AD, the armies of Islam had ended the four-century rule of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia (651) and besieged the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople (674–678). A century after Muhammad’s passing, in 732 AD, a Muslim army fought the Franks led by Charles Martel at Tours, deep inside what is modern France.
If the Romans or Franks had lost either one of those battles, European history—and thus American history—might be very different from the one we know.
[1] “Henotheism” is a more accurate term. It’s the belief in multiple gods, but only one supreme, transcendent God.
[2] E. A. Knauf, “Qos.” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Second Extensively Revised Edition)(Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1999), 676.
[3] Jude 1:6 (KJV).
[4] Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Random House. 2002), 18–19.
[5] Raymond Ibrahim, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West (New York: Da Capo Press, 2018), 2.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 6.
[8] The conquest of Canaan was neither. For an excellent treatment of the concept of kherem, or “under the ban,” see chapter 25 of Dr. Michael Heiser’s excellent book The Unseen Realm.
[9] Matthew 10:14; Mark 6:11; Luke 9:5, 10:11.