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eleventh century a term was invented for killing non-Christians, since this was not to be considered homicide. It was malicide, Latin for the killing of a bad person.
    Islam—the root of the word is salam, peace—was founded by the seventh-century A.D. prophet Mohammed and takes much from Judaism, including a few of the many dietary laws and numerous historical characters, such as Abraham, Moses, and David. Islam also recognizes the Christian founder, Jesus, but does not accept his divinity. The prophet Mohammed was troubled by the growing materialismof his people. Like Jesus, he had no intention of founding a new religion but wanted to bring the spiritual values of monotheism to Arabs. Mohammed, who was not literate, claimed periodically to have revelations, each one about a paragraph in length, and after twenty-one years these revelations were put together in a book, considered a masterpiece of Arab writing, called the Quran. Central to the Quran is the building of communities with a just distribution of wealth. Mohammed's approach shunned abstract debate and encouraged pragmatic solutions. He always emphasized negotiating solutions, and by tradition there is tremendous emphasis on negotiation in Muslim history. Mohammed's attempt at a perfect society in Mecca enforced a complete ban on violence, which made Mecca prosper as a center of trade. During the hajj, the required pilgrimage to Mecca, the faithful Muslim was not allowed to carry weapons, even for hunting, nor to commit any violence, including words spoken in anger.
    Islam, an unusually open faith whose early adherents came from many backgrounds, including Judaism, began to change after 622, when Mohammed and his followers moved from Mecca to Yathrib, a town 250 miles to the north, which was renamed al-Medinah —the city. One of the most bitter disappointments of Mohammed's life was that the Jews of Medina, apparently more tradition-bound than those he had known before, refused to accept him as a prophet. At this point Jewish prophecy was already several thousand years old and they viewed a man who claimed to get messages from God with the same suspicion that most people today would. Mohammed physically turned the prayer meeting around so that worshipers now faced Mecca rather than Jerusalem.
    But the establishment of Medina had an effect on Islam not unlike that of Constantine and Rome on Christianity. It was not that Mohammed was interested in conquest and empire like Constantine, but Medina had become, in effect, a state—territory that had to be defended when it was attacked by men from Mecca who vowed to destroy it, and in 625 they almost succeeded. The defense of Medina, in several major battles, began Islamic military history and included the first Muslim-Jewish conflict, in which Mohammedmassacred an armed Jewish group that rose against him. By the seventh century it was already an old pattern: the religious doctrine of peace meets the power politics of state, the rules are bent for the “just war,” and once the first few doses are administered the state becomes an addict that will tell any lie to get its narcotic. War is simply the means. The real narcotic is power. As Hungarian writer György Konrád said of the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1980s, “Men can invent few libidinous fantasies more enjoyable than those of world domination.” The African-American poet Langston Hughes called the leading nations “the nymphomaniacs of power.”
    Mohammed, so the rationale goes, had to defend Medina. The Quran says, “Permission to take up arms is hereby given to those who have been attacked because they have been wronged.” There is no provision, however, for preemptive strikes. Wars of aggression are immoral and forbidden. Wars to spread the teachings of Islam are also not permitted. But seventh-century Islamic warfare was never justified on the grounds of building an empire or even spreading Islam. Mohammed did not want to convert Jews and