Jahiliya was here

Before Mohammad got Allah on board with Islam and fixed everything for the Arabs, none of the men and certainly none of the women, we generally assume, were Muslims; but that was much to Mohammad's chagrin. Some Egyptians have an understanding of this but can't come right out and say it. Now I'm not a huge fan of Zahi Hawass, the poster boy of Eqyptian Egyptian archeology, but he's certainly not a kook and and he seems to have a genuine sense of history without all of the nagging problems that his sculpture smashing, image loathing, jahiliya-obsessed Arab and muslim co-religionists bring to the table. Jahiliya, the Arabic name for the condition that existed during all those nameless, shapeless, inchoate, blobby Pre-islamic times, when the despised religious cultures (e.g. Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, Christian, or Zoroastrian, etc., etc.) produced all manner of things vile and non-islamic. Their icons and artifacts, ignoble creations all, are to be expressly and affirmatively obliterated by muslims and forgotten. Instead, the cultural lodestone imposed by Islamic sharia law is to be nothing more, or less than the wisdom contained within the Qur'an, the hadiths and the sira of Mohammad. Because, in fact, jahiliyah still exists in the world, the utter eradication of non-Islamic culture is, ipso facto, the ultimate imperative of the Islamic global jihad.

Mohammad placed himself in the Abrahamic tradition, against the indigenous Arab polytheists of his time, as the final prophet of his tradition. Islam was sold on the basis that it was culturally superior to polytheism and its adherents were accordingly morally superior (and naturally, therefore entirely deserving of the polytheists' wives and goods). Curiously, and logically in a way, all of the sympathetic biblical figures Mohammad evoked in the Qur'an, starting with Adam and Eve, the very first man and woman, were incipient muslims, if not actually, and were thus not of the jahiliya which is said to have arisen in those geographical areas not yet touched by Islam. Even Jesus and his mother were retroactively reverted. Well now this week it was announced that fossil human footprints have been found, and in Egypt, no less, which were reputedly stomped down over two million years ago. Were they Muslim footprints? What are we to make of this? Allahu akbar. If an Islamic future doesn't seem bad enough for you, how about throwing in an Islamic history to boot that just keeps penetrating further and further into the past?

"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.