Yet before he moved to Medina, Mohammed was nothing
but a failure as a preacher. According to the scholars of
Islam, after more than a decade of non-violent preaching in
Mecca, Mohammed only managed to get around 150
followers.^251 By contrast, after less than a decade of piracy,
assassination and massacring Pagans and Jews around
Medina, Mohammed had acquired 10,000 followers. Even
Wikipedia confirms this discrepancy:
In 630, Muhammad marched on Mecca with
an enormous force, said to number more than
ten thousand men. With minimal casualties,
Muhammad took control of Mecca.^252Of course, the Wikipedia article says nothing about just
how, less than ten years after leaving for Medina,
Mohammed was able to return and conquer Mecca with
few “casualties”. The Pagan Meccans, who had tolerated
his insults and abuse for so many years, surrendered
when he returned to Mecca with his army because the
Pagans who had previously tolerated him had since heard
how horrific was his treatment of those who resisted his
army of jihadis (remember: according to the accounts
passed down to us by Muslim writers, Mohammed
slaughtered those who surrendered, and then sold the
wives and daughters of the slaughtered into slavery).
Despite years of listening to Mohammed talk about Islam,
the Pagan Meccans had preferred their own flexible system
of many gods, instead of Mohammed’s totalizing system of
one god. But when faced with the prospect of being wiped