    4

    ba

    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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