Reverse-engineering the Prophet

by Bill Hosni
Certain details of Mohammed's life were considered too embarrassing for Muslims to be
included in his official hagiography. This article asks the question: what could they possibly
be, given that the book unabashedly credits him with almost every possible crime and
character flaw? It comes up with a surprising and very plausible answer.
Richard Dawkins famously described the God of the Old Testament as the most unpleasant character
in all fiction. Among the Divine character flaws, Dawkins lists jealous and proud of it; a petty,
unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic,
capriciously malevolent bully. In Gods defence, it should be noted that He wasnt all these things all
of the time. His character depends on which of the Old Testaments many authors we are looking at:
His so-called prophets.
It is commonly assumed by atheists that belief in a single God draws on early childhood imprints of
an all-powerful father figure. Yet the prophets of monotheism, Gods designers, are a special case, in
that many of them - Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, to start with - did not know their real fathers. As well
as being an emotional deprivation for the growing child, in tribal societies this was also a source of
shame and opprobrium from his peers. Furthermore, his guardians may not have treated him with the
tenderness they would give their own sons. The budding prophets defence strategy in this powerless
situation must therefore consist of inventing an invisible father figure to protect him from the slights
of others, and invert the feeling of shame into one of superiority. In addition, he needs to defend
himself against the abusiveness or cruelty of the stepfather by deflecting it towards others (other tribes,
sinners, or unbelievers). Finally, to be effective, the imaginary being must outrank his real earthly
guardians, and by extension, all authority. His childlike awe of that stepfathers total power over him
is projected into the property of omnipotence accorded to the divinity. In this light, Jesuss claim to be
the son of God makes perfect sense to a psychoanalyst, although step-son may be nearer the mark.
God the stepfather
In this struggle to create and forge belief in an invisible protector and ally to fortify the stunted self,
the quality of goodness simply does not enter the equation. In fact the stepfathers mean side becomes
magnified and turned into the weapons of the prophets vengeance on the world.
In this simplified picture I use the figure of the stepfather to stand for the sum of the deprived childs
early experience of adult and peer power. While we cannot necessarily identify the individual
wielders of that power, it should be theoretically possible to reverse-engineer books of prophecy
and make novelistic surmises about a prophets early life.
Naturally, in most cases, the lack of independent corroboration would render this work unverifiable
and liable to be dismissed as fanciful musing. But one outstanding exception would be the prophet
Mohammed, whose bowdlerised biography, variously known as Siraat-rasuul-allah and As-siraat al-
nabawiyya, or here simply as the Sirah, offers tantalising glimpses of his early life. In addition, many
of the rants in the Koran itself sound like verbatim quotes from a raging parent figure. As for
Mohammeds vision of God, we shall have to assume it is a composite of various parental figures, as
he never knew his own father and had several guardians in quick succession at a very formative stage
in his development. His Allah is certainly just as unpleasant as the God of the Old Testament, if not
more so, and it is not easy to decide which of those unpleasant traits were directly borrowed from the
Hebrew Scriptures and which are products of Mohammeds own fancy. One example of the Divine
capriciousness is a theme which runs through the Koran of the Hell fire which awaits the unbelievers.
But who are these unbelievers, and why do they not believe? They are the ones whom Allah has not
rightly guided and Allah guides whom He pleases to the right path. (That quote comes from Koran
2.213, but recurs in various forms throughout the book). So in fact it is Allahs fault that they do not
believe in the first place, and yet one of the main themes of the book concerns the painful
punishments that await them. Did He create unbelievers just for the fun of torturing them? He
certainly seems to savour their pain, adding some gothic details:
22:19 for them will be cut out a garment of Fire: over their heads will be poured out boiling water
23:104 The Fire will burn their faces, and therein they will grin, with displaced lips
44:45 Like molten brass; it will boil in their insides,
4:56 Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast into the Fire: as often as their skins are roasted
through, We shall change them for fresh skins, that they may taste the penalty: for Allah is Exalted in Power,
Wise.
If we were in any doubt about Allahs perverse nastiness, there is the Hadith about Allah telling Adam
that of every 1000 souls, 999 were due for Hell fire (Bukhari 6:60:265).
So the first conclusion we would draw from looking at this portrait of a vicious parent figure is that its
author, if it was indeed Mohammed, was subject to some child-rearing practices which we tend to
regard these days as outmoded, and which are certainly discouraged by the social services in most
advanced countries. Some of the specific traits peculiar to his case include:
- extreme fear of mockery or criticism, to the point that laughing at anything at all could be construed
as an insult;
- aversion to nakedness (gymnophobia) - apart from wanting all women covered up, he even banned
his male followers from urinating in a standing position, which would involve raising their robes;
- an obsession with female genitalia with some forty references to gardens under which (rather than
through which) waters flow;
- concern for the welfare of orphans, in particular the protection of their inheritance rights;
- the obligation to submit, without protest or cries, with bending over as a sign of submission;
- the ever-present threat of graphically described sadistic punishments, with nowhere to hide either
ones inmost thoughts or ones physical self;
- sedulous braggadocio, vaunting of power and superiority with hyperbolic imagery.
Childhood abuse
Mohammeds ninth-century hagiographer Ibn Hisham edited his work from earlier sources, removing
the parts of Mohammed's life story which could be embarrassing to Muslims. This tradition has
naturally given rise to much surmise about what could possibly be more embarrassing to Muslims
than the fact that their leader was a lying paedophile and incorrigible philanderer and rapist, a
treacherous warlord and physical coward, a corrupt thief and robber, a mass-murderer, a slaver and a
heartless sadist, who may have been cuckolded by Aisha in revenge for his swiving the glamorous
Jewish captive Juwayriyah. That Mohammed is a walking compendium of character flaws is
copiously illustrated by the stories which Ibn Hisham thought fit to include, so what on earth could he
have felt obliged to suppress?
The clue came to me after reading countless stories of rape victims being stoned to death while their
attackers walked free in Shariah hellholes such as Somalia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan,
(just try Googling rape victim stoned). Muslims who have not been corrupted by Western morals
seem quite sanguine about raping, as has recently been shown in countless reports from the front lines
of the so-called Arab Spring. Rape jihad against non-Muslims occurs in all countries where
Muslims and Kuffar live together, from Sweden to Sudan, and serves as much as a tool of humiliation
as a sexual outlet. The only thing Muslims would find embarrassing is the shame of being a victim.
Upending the widely held but quite unsupported belief that paedophilia is a universal taboo, Lloyd
deMause, founder of the Institute and Journal of Psychohistory, in his article The Universality of
Incest outlines all sorts of institutionalised pederasty, including the widespread practice of farming out
ones children to others for the purpose, sometimes in the context of a mutual exchange. It may seem
unbelievable to todays loving parents that people could even dream of treating children in this way,
so a brief sketch of deMauses hypothesis might be helpful here.
His researches into all sorts of offbeat sources have shown that childhood in antiquity was very
different from what it is today. Only very recently, and only in more enlightened family lines, has it
evolved from a nightmare of violence, neglect and sexual abuse to something approaching child-
friendly. Lloyd deMause describes six stages in this evolution, ranging from the Infanticidal Mode
(Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.) and the Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.) to
the Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century) and todays socializing and empathic modes practised in the
better kindergartens. Obviously many families are behind their times; but a few lead the way forward.
Sixth century Arabia was probably behind the times according to the deMause chronology with
female infanticide still rampant. In that phase of child-rearing history, it was obviously not the little
dead children who made history, but their traumatised siblings. And in the grown-up world, male to
female population ratios of anything up to 160:100 were an incitement to conflict over females,
especially in a polygamous context. As for boys, it was a fairly common practice among city-folk to
hand them over to wet-nurses from birth, and the Sirah mentions a fair where Bedouin women would
tout their services to mothers in exchange for cash. Mohammeds mother Amina was cash-strapped,
and the woman who took Mohammed in after some hesitation, could well have been motivated by the
boys good looks and the possibility of making money through the all too common practice of renting
little boys out for pederasty. Parents at the time could not have been totally unaware of this and
presumably turned a blind eye. One of the reservations of fathers who sold an unwanted daughter into
a life of sex slavery concerned not the sufferings of the child, but the eventuality that one might one
day find oneself in bed with her without realising it. This line of reasoning is perfectly normal where
morality is hedged with taboos rather than founded on ethical principles of do-as-you-wouldbe-done-
by.
At any rate something traumatic did happen to Mohammed while in the care of that Bedouin woman.
It is recounted twice, the first time by Halima, the wet-nurse:
It was not longer than a month after our return that his milk-brother came running to me and
his father, saying, That Qurayshi brother of mine, two men dressed in white garments have
taken hold of him and have thrown him on the ground. They ripped open his belly, and are
squeezing him. I and his foster-father hastened out and found him standing apparently
unharmed but with his countenance quite altered. We questioned him, and he said, Two men
dressed in white garments came to me, who threw me down, opened my abdomen and
searched in it for I know not what. We returned with him to our tent, and his foster-father
said to me, O Halima! I fear something has happened to the boy. Carry him to his family ere
the injury becomes apparent!
and the second time in more hallucinatory language and with more befitting tableware by
Mohammed:
Whilst I and my milk brother were pasturing some animals in the rear of our houses, two men
came to us dressed in white garments and bearing a golden platter full of snow. They took
hold of me, opened my belly, extracted my heart, split it open and took out of it a black lump
of blood which they threw away. Then they washed my heart and belly with snow, until they
had purified them. Then one of them said to his companion, Weigh him against ten of his
nation. And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier than they. Then he said, Weigh
him against one hundred of his nation. And he weighed me with them, but I proved heavier
than they. Then he said, Weigh him with one thousand of his nation. And he weighed me
with them, but I proved heavier than they. After that he said, Leave him; for if you were to
weigh him against his whole nation, he would outweigh it. Later, the apostle of Allah was in
the habit of saying that there was not a prophet who had not pastured sheep. When they asked,
You too, O messenger of God? he answered, Me too!
Whatever we are to make of this story hinges partly on the exact meaning of (alaqah translated
as lump, but normally meaning leech). It could be an echo of the alukah of Proverbs 30:15, one of
the most enigmatic verses of the Bible:
The horseleech hath two daughters, crying Give, give. There are three things that are never
satisfied, yea, four things that never say enough. (Proverbs 30:15).
The two daughters, the Womb and the Grave, suggest that the horseleech is identified with Ishtar, the
goddess of Love and Death
1
, or Al-Laat in the pre-Islamic Arab pantheon. Some commentators
identify it with a night-demon. Not to be missed either is the echo of the two men in shining garments
who stood by the Holy Sepulchre after Jesuss resurrection (Luke 24:3) and reappeared as he rose into
heaven: They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed
in white stood beside them (Acts 1:10). They are also reborn as a cinematic clich: the two men in
white coats who come to cart overwrought characters to the lunatic asylum
2
. In fact the whole passage
reads like a heavily embroidered screen memory borrowed from earlier scriptural sources, with the
only clue to what really happened being the reaction of the foster parents, anxious to cover up the
injury to the boy. Which they clearly succeeded in doing with this fable.

1
in The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953) Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, p.209
2
I have restored some of the story tellers repetitive style to the translation of the passage.
In his psychobiography of the Prophet, Understanding Muhammad, Ali Sina interprets this as the
onset of Mohammeds temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a rare disorder which in his diagnosis was at the
root of all of Mohammeds quasi-religious experiences. We certainly need some rare disorder to
explain Mohammeds extraordinary career, something empowering. The pattern of run-of-the-mill
childhood abuse can explain his lacklustre adolescence, his later embitterment and violent paranoia
that he presumably shared in similar measure with his followers. But he certainly had exalted
moments of great inspiration, beautiful in their confusion, even though as we see in the above passage
with the gold platter and the weighing machine, it all rather went to his head.
In today's climate of anathematizing of paedophilia, it is hard to imagine a culture in which it was not
only rampant but actually preferred to such adult pursuits as homosexuality. Lloyd deMause quotes
from Louis M. Epstein:
Even the Jews, who tried to stamp out adult homosexuality with severe punishments, were
more lenient in the case of young boys. Despite Moses's injunction against corrupting children,
the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation
with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a
whipping, as a matter of public discipline.
3

In todays Iran, the devout paedophile may indulge his tastes with the blessing of the Ayatollah
Khomeini no less:
A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not
penetrate. If he penetrates and the child is harmed then he should be responsible for her
subsistence all her life. This girl, however would not count as one of his four permanent wives.
The man will not be eligible to marry the girl's sister
4
.
Paedophilia is, as we know, transmitted from generation to generation; though while most abused do
not become abusers, most abusers were once abused. Its recognition as a crime against the child is
relatively recent, and is not even universal today. In the United States, New York became the first
state to institute child protection laws (1875) that made abuse against children a crime, and other
states soon followed with similar laws. In 1974 the U.S. Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention
and Treatment Act, which encouraged remaining states to pass child protection laws and created the
National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Amazingly, under Shariah law, sex is allowed with
children as young as babies on condition the child's orifices are not harmed. Even that stricture
probably did not apply to orphans or children outside one's own tribe in sixth century Arabia. But to a
child, the trauma is the same regardless of whether it has society's approval or the blessing of clerics
who are as often as not the perpetrators.
The Goat Boy
When he was six, Mohammed was returned to his mother. She died a year later and the boy was given
over to his grandfather, Abdul Mualib. The Sirah has this curious passage, which bears all the
signs of having been bowdlerized and possibly mistranslated:
The Apostle, still a little boy, used to come and sit on [the bed] and his uncles would drive
him away. When Abdul Mualib saw this he said: Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a

3
Louis M. Epstein. Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism (New York, 1948), p.136
4
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Tahrir-ol-vasyleh, Fourth Edition. Darol Elm, Qom
great future. Then he would make him sit beside him on his bed and would stroke his back
with his hand. It used to please him to see what he did
5
.
The narrative thread has been broken, and the odd detail of the stroking of the boys back, with his
hand no less, and then liking what he saw is suspicious. Why describe such a humdrum act so
graphically, or at all? Unless, of course, it wasnt the boys back that he stroked the words for penis
(zubr) and back (uhr) being easy to confuse in the mind of a devout editor
6
. Furthermore, in the
above extract, Guillaume has innocently translated the phrase wa huwa ghulaam jafar ( ) as
still a little boy. While bowing to his expertise as a great Arabist, it should be pointed out that
ghulaam is cognate with ghalama to be in rut, and can be translated as adolescent or lusty lad. But
even more perplexing to several Arab scholars whom I asked, was the choice of the qualifier jafar.
The only online explanation I could find refers to a kid when it has just been weaned from the mother
goat. Whether the universal association of goats with the Devil and rampant sexuality stems from
their precocious sexual maturity
7
, or from the resemblance of their horns to a small erect penis, or all
of the above, is immaterial; the significance of goat boy is too obvious to ignore. The grandfathers
protestation Let my son alone, for by Allah he has a great future otherwise makes no sense in the
context
8
unless he was making a joke about how well hung the boy was for a seven-year-old, and
showing off his (presumably erect) member to the assembled relatives. This is the kind of unintended
humiliation the memory of which can make a young lad cringe for life and be hypersensitive to
mockery.
No-one should find these suppositions shocking. The point needs to be made that in sixth-century
Arabia such salacious humour and innocent child-baiting was totally normal. But by the time all these
events were recorded in writing Arab society had undergone a sea change from the uninhibited
bawdiness of Mohammeds early years to the tight control of the early Abbasids, who had to tailor
Islam to a much wider audience of different cultures spread over a far-flung empire. A young dynamic
cult had been made respectable with layers of formalised reverence, so that any reference to the
Prophet by name or even as him had to be followed by the little invocation alaatullaahu alayhi
wa sallam (Gods prayers and peace be upon him) thankfully shortened these days to (pbuh) or
(saws). Similar (but shorter) prayers follow the mention of any of his wives, companions or
descendents. Mention of the Koran without some epithet such as noble, holy etc., came to be
deemed disrespectful as the dead hand of orthodoxy descended. And that spelled the eclipse of a
whole tradition of ribald humour and poetry with the elaborate metaphors and double-entendre at
which Arabs excel and which the Arabic language encourages, and whose offshoots can nevertheless
still be found in Algerian shabi songs
9
. In a way, we owe this change to Mohammed's inability to
take a joke.
The charge of paedophilia has become one of the favourite jibes directed at Mohammed by critics of
Islam. We are told that Mohammed asked his friend Abu Bakr for the hand of his 4 year-old
daughter Aisha. According to the account, the ever loyal Abu Bakr was becomingly reluctant at first,

5
Sirat Rasul Allah p.73
6
Albeit elsewhere in the Sirah the diminutive term for penis, zubayba, is preferred.
7
Male goats will start to show secondary sex traits around 3 to 4 months of age provided they are developing
properly and have adequate nutrition. The traits of mounting other goats and appearance differences start to
show around this time and around the time of puberty. Most goats will demonstrate mounting and erections
more during the normal rutting season that starts after the summer equinox and day length begins to shorten.
Younger goats generally will display these traits more than older ones during this time.
8
A great future is a very free translation of shanan, which could just as easily be rendered as important
matter or even luck, destiny. The grandfathers elegant choice of words is thus lost in translation.
9
Rachid Aous, Les Grands Matres Algriens du Chabi et du Hawzi. Editions El Ouns, Paris 1996
but allowed Mohammed to marry her when she reached six. On
reaching nine, the child had to put away her dolls when her husband
came to consummate the marriage, as they came under the Islamic
prohibition against representations of the human form. And yet all
this criticism may be misplaced. The story shows signs of having
been manipulated, most likely in order to whitewash Abu Bakr, who
had pimped his daughter in order to secure the succession to the
command of the Muslim army, already a force in the land. So it may
be unwise to draw too many conclusions from this much quoted
episode of the Sirah. Child marriages were often used in tribal
societies to cement treaties, (as they still are in Afghanistan to plaster
over feuds,) and the practice was not confined to them. In 1396
Richard II of England married the six-year-old Isabelle of France for
very similar reasons, though we are not told what became of her hymen.
Another story points to Mohammeds dislike of being naked. When carrying stones with his friends
before his revelations began, he was the only one to keep his clothes on; while the others used their
robes to hold the stones. In another hadith he orders his followers to urinate in a squatting position,
rather than lifting their robes and displaying their members. His unfashionable modesty was glossed
as piety, but again it could be related to his childhood abuse.
Believe or die
But to me, the ultimate clue to this childhood abuse is to be found in one of the central elements of his
prophetical message, the idea of total submission and the name of his religion, Islam. The child
translates the powerlessness of the catamite, being told to bend over and be quiet into a form of
worship:
[68:42] The Day the shin will be uncovered and they are invited to prostration but the
disbelievers will not be able. [68:43] Their eyes humbled, humiliation will cover them. And
they used to be invited to prostration while they were sound [68:48] Then be patient for the
decision of your Lord, [O Muhammad], and be not like the companion of the fish when he
called out while he was distressed.
[33:36] And it behoves not a believing man and a believing woman that they should have any
choice in their matter when Allah and His Apostle have decided a matter; and whoever
disobeys Allah and His Apostle, he surely strays off a manifest straying.
Finally, there is Surah 111, the five-line curse of the wicked Uncle Abu Lahab, the Father of the
Flame, so nicknamed for his fiery temper. Ostensibly this is a chapter sent down in revenge for Abu
Lahabs very astute diagnosis of Islam's weak point the promise of posthumous and therefore
unverifiable reward. But the vehemence of the language and the inclusion of Abu Lahabs wife, seem
out of proportion to the crime.
[111:1] Perdition overtake both hands of Abu Lahab, and he will perish.
[111:2] His wealth and what he earns will not avail him.
[111:3] He shall soon burn in fire that flames,
[111:4] And his tale-bearing wife,
[111:5] Upon her neck a halter of strongly twisted rope.

Curses were no laughing matter at the time, and poets were a feared lot. Mohammed himself sent
hitmen after one Kab ibn al-Ashraf for having composed amatory verses about the Muslim women,
and another was dispatched to kill a satirical poetess, Asmaa bint Marwan while she suckled her
babe
10
. The inclusion of such a curse as a chapter in the Holy Koran gives it the strongest possible
weight. Which all brings us back to his grandfather's bed in the shadow of the Kaaba, and whatever
did, or did not happen there.
If all this were just a personal issue it would have been lost in the sands of time. But there was one
gaping weakness in Mohammeds invocation of his invisible champion Allah to rebuild what T. E.
Lawrence might have dubbed the citadel of his integrity. As pithily put by Delos McCown The
invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. An energetic campaign was needed to lend
reality to the creation. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has summed up the basic tenet of the Koran thus:
It says the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and
Im right, and if you dont believe me, tough youll burn for ever. Thats basically the message of
the book. To counter the objection that Allah is invisible, the book builds its argument by turning all
observable phenomena into signs (ayaat) of his existence. People who cannot see these are
therefore blind an insult to boot.
It was this need to exact belief in Allah from others, if necessary at the point of a sword, which gave
birth to a religion which in many ways perpetuates Mohammeds original deprived childhood down
through generations of devout Muslims. Fathers (and imams) are authorised to sexually abuse their
children and beat them to make them pray, and their wives if they fail in their duties. Allah is a
tailor-made alter ego for a deeply traumatized child, tortured by shame as well as guilt. The business
of praising this entity, who if he were he really omnipotent and omniscient obviously wouldnt need
any praise, can thus be interpreted as a process of shoring up ones own confidence in his existence
and boosting his power to intervene. Praising him aloud can also strike fear into the enemy or
enemy substitute. Plainly, the chief threat to such a child comes from those who would attack his
belief, and thereby undermine his psychic defences. Seen in this light, the Korans main message is
the tirade of a fragile and stunted mind, full of the grandiosity so typical of the disorder. The boy
invents a divine champion to issue a challenge to his persecutors. It turns out he is not the only one
with a scarred mental makeup, and thus under the banner of his champion he acquires followers. The
resulting mess then goes viral.

10
Before this event, according to the Sira (p. 676), those who were Muslims concealed the fact. That it should
take such a heinous crime to bring Islam out of the closet merits a moments reflection. Brazen atrocities have
often heralded the emergence from the shadows of new hate ideologies.