Excellent article.
Actually, it’s a bit of both. Islam was essentially just another vehicle for extending and consolidating Mohammed’s reign of crime. I won’t call them military victories, because they weren’t military: Mohammed was just another member of a primitive, caravan-raiding Arab tribe, albeit a particularly violent and crazy one, who took advantage of the fact that after the fall of Rome, there no longer existed a great power that could support or protect the weak non-Arab kingdoms of the ME. They were trading or commercial societies, often very developed intellectually, generally pagan although sometimes with significant Christian or even Jewish populations, but they simply weren’t up to defending themselves against the ultimate caravan raider.
Mohammed and his goons would sweep in and destroy these places, and then take them over. The “religion” came to him then as a way of consolidating his power by creating a system that declared his rule essentially divine. People who accepted it then received “peace,” that is, SLM, the root word of Islam, because once they submitted to his rule, he stopped attacking them.
The ME at the time suffered not only from political weakness and fragmentation, but from religious fragmentation. What Mohammed did was have a “vision” where he took little fragments from each religion and put them together in a self-serving cult: that is, he took parts of Jewish law and OT prophecy; certain Christian figures, drawn mostly from heretical Arian or Donatist beliefs and apocalyptic concepts; and a lot of pagan fertility and moon-worship traditions, such as the worship of that peculiar female-genital shaped moon rock in the Kaaba. This was supposed to satisfy all of the different groups that he was subjugating and made him the ruler not only of their political lives but of every aspect of their lives.
This was even more the case because of its negative, voluntaristic aspect, which essentially prevents its adherents from developing any realistic theology, since God is not knowable and in any case may decide to be or do something entirely different in an instant. This strikes at the very basis of reason, and is why Islamic societies are so retrograde. The famous “Muslim achievements” are all things that came out of the societies they took over, which continued to limp along until Islam finally, usually after about 100 years or so, managed to snuff out the light of reason.
Because Mohammed had no direct male heir, there was nobody who could automatically follow him, and this is the source of the division between the two branches of Islam. However, their other beliefs are the same.
So we have to understand the origins of Islam to understand what it really is. The subsequent history of it thus is nothing but a quest to take over all of society (simply for purposes of the enrichment of its leaders, using the “religion” to ensure this), although it is marked by disputes between the two main sects of Islam. However, the “Caliph” is theoretically the point of union here and that is one of the reasons this current situation is so dangerous.
“There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist…. From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven. He had set down some ridiculous compositions in this book of his and he gave it to them as an object of veneration.”
St. John Damascene (d. 749), Syrian Arab Catholic monk and scholar. Quoted from his book On Heresies under the section On the Heresy of the Ishmaelites (in The Fathers of the Church. Vol. 37.