4
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interested in being treated as the Jews had been the previous year.
They gave up with scarcely a fight. Thanks to the heavily armed
Islamic squadrons parading through the streets, Mohammed was able
to convert Mecca's inhabitants to the beliefs they had formerly scorned
as the ravings of a madman.
The sword of Islam was not sheathed once Mohammed's birth-
place had been conquered. The city's wealthy traders and illiterate
Bedouins joined the army that had begun in Medina, and went out to
conquer the world for their new belief. They were astonishingly
successful. In short order, the legions of Islam overran the ancient
empires of Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt. During the next hundred
years, the Mohammedan hordes spread across northern Africa, taking
Algeria, Morocco and Libya. They invaded India--attacking the towns
that had defied even the invincible Alexander the Great. They snipped
off parts of Spain and nearly conquered France. They even faced the
mighty forces of the Chinese army at Talas in central Asia.
Within a few generations of Mohammed's death, these followers
of a streetcorner ranter, these men from backwater towns and primitive
desert tribes, had built an empire of awesome size. But their victories
wouldn't stop there. In coming centuries, Mohammedans would
repeatedly make the Europeans tremble--eventually attacking even
Vienna5. They would seize African lands as far away as the Sudan and
the Niger. They would convert Afghanistan, win over the Mongols,
and spread their rule as far as the Pacific islands of Indonesia and the
Philippines. The notions of a man who had claimed to meet an angel
in a cave would spawn battles whose bloodshed would soak the earth
for the next 1,400 years.
ck to his old home town. The Meccans were not particularly
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