If Muhammad will not go to the mountain, Trump will find him from space
You need a whole AI-generated search engine, perhaps one of those software gadgets that the Palantir Technologies chief executive Alex Karp employs to help Israel commit genocide in Palestine and mass murder children in Iran, to monitor and catalogue the mere number of unvarnished stupidities Donald Trump commits every single day of his miserable existence - but this one gets the cake.
During an interview with Fox News (where else?), he was blabbering away to the host Bret Baier about the US Space Force's ability to surveil Iranian nuclear sites:
Space Force, which I created, has got cameras - nine different cameras - in space on that site. We know everybody that moves there. We can read the name of a person. If his name is Muhammad something - and most of 'em are Muhammad, you can guess about 50 percent right - we can read his name right on his tag from space.
Let us see now how many Muhammads there are anyway.
We Muslims have a hadith (the sayings and doings of our Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him) that says: "God is beautiful and he loves beauty."
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"Muhammad" (from the Arabic trilateral root H-M-D) means "he who has been praised, loved, graced" and is therefore praiseworthy. What is wrong with that?
So first and foremost there is nothing wrong with the precious name Muhammad or any of its variations like Mahmoud, Ahmad, Hamed, or yours truly, Hamid. Our parents have loved our prophet and named us after him or his children, or else find our name in the Holy Quran through bibliomancy.
But we also carry the names of other prophets or saints we hold respectfully and dearly like Isa (Jesus), Musa (Moses), Mariam (Mary), Ebrahim (Abraham), Ya'qub (Jacob), Nuh (Noah) and others. We love and respect them all. We name our children after them too.
They are our prophets too.
Have you ever seen a Christian or a Jew named Muhammad or Ali? You will find many Muslims named Musa (Moses) or Isa (Jesus) or Ebrahim (Abraham).
Now, who is embracing the world and all its precious traditions more fully? A Muhammad or a Donald Trump?
Among them Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (circa 780-850), the legendary Iranian scientist. The most famous Palestinian Isa is of course Isa ibn Mariam, Jesus the son of Mary.
Now, who is embracing the world and all its precious traditions more fully? A Muhammad or a Donald Trump?
It is only vagabond carpetbaggers like Donald Trump and other Islamophobes he inspires and empowers who have no clue where their names come from.
Donald is actually a Scottish masculine given name, derived from the Gaelic name Domhnall. Alas, it is wasted on this particular Donald. Donald Duck is a far better specimen of the name.
The larger question, upstream from Donald Trump's incurable racism and bigotry, is not how utterly and irredeemably illiterate and xenophobic the US president is. The question is the Islamophobic environment that has informed, sustained and enabled his racism.
Through Muslim lenses
Now consider those cameras Donald Trump says are in the sky watching over Iranian nuclear facilities, and all those Muhammads looking after them. Who invented those cameras?
Look closer at their lenses.
The Arab Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (circa 965-1040), known in the Latin West as Alhacen or Alhazen, was born in Basra in southern Iraq, hence he is also known as al-Basri.
He is the father of modern optics, who revolutionised experimentation with lenses, mirrors, refraction and reflection. Plenty of Muhammads feature in his ancestry and scientific heritage.
Now, Sir (Trump loves to be called "Sir"), before you look down at those Iranian sites with all those lenses that Ibn al-Haytham, a Muslim scientist, helped to invent, look at the stars around those cameras and you will see half of them are named after Arab or Muslim scientists and astrophysicists - among them plenty of Muhammads.
While you are at it, look up the name of yet another Muhammad: Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973-1048).
Astrophysicists from around the world have honoured his name and his immense scientific legacy in the solar system by naming a major lunar feature and a planet after the Persian polymath. Look into the moon now: a prominent 81km impact crater on the far side of the Moon, near the eastern limb, is also named after him.
Jesus, you cannot get rid of them Muhammads.
My Columbia colleague George Saliba spent a lifetime documenting the most detailed and scientific account of the impact of Muslim scientists on astrophysics. Look up one of his major books, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT, 2007).
Sane and reasonable people will learn how hundreds of stars got their Muslim names, many of them Muhammad.
Paid to hate
Look at the genealogy of that Islamophobia. Look at the roster of their ignoble names: Valentina Gomez, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Laura Loomer, Bret Stephens, Dana Bash, Van Jones, Hillary Clinton, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, ad nauseam.
If anywhere in the world other than the US you do not know who half of these people are, just count your blessings and move on with your life.
You look at these contemptible names and ask yourselves: what are the two common denominators that hold them together?
They are all genocidal Zionists who are as illiterate about Islam as Donald Trump is.
They are all committed to the racist apartheid state of Israel, astoundingly ignorant of Islam, and cannot tell the difference between an Arabic, a Persian, a Turkish or an Urdu sentence if their miserable lives depended on it.
And yet they are lucratively paid to spread their pathological fear and hatred of about two billion human beings.
The next obvious question is why they have become so active in the aftermath of the US-Israeli war against Iran, into which they duped Donald Trump to join them.
The answer is also similar. They are losing America, if they ever owned it.
Look at the speed with which they are crawling out of the woodwork: Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, Tommy Tuberville, and then this new character Valentina Gomez, a far-right Republican candidate who is not too far from entering the US Congress with Aipac and ADL active support.
Most notorious of them all is this Sam Harris character, who made a reputation for himself as a "neo-atheist".
One hears of the so-called "neo-atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris camouflaging their Muslim hatred (while endorsing genocidal Zionism) with a delusional sense of atheism.
The cultured and literate world knows of two seminal poets, the Syrian Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (953-1057) and the Persian Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), who made a sublimely humanist legacy of their atheism and agnosticism.
If we can read al-Ma'arri and Omar Khayyam's poetry and bask in their humanist agnosticism, why should we bother with hatemongers like Harris?
Our own house
Before we get too carried away, let us also remember Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (made palatable to Trump as MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (made palatable to Jared Kushner as MBS).
They too are Muhammads, right?
And so are a whole gang of other corrupt and cowardly rulers from one end of the Muslim world to the next, whom Trump and his son-in-law Jared "Ivanka" Kushner actually love to rob blind of their wealth. They too are "Muslims". Right?
Marking the particularities of Islamophobes in the US or elsewhere does not mean we Muslims are entirely blameless in our own midst, or innocent bystanders in world affairs.
Who provided Jeffrey Epstein with a piece of Kiswah, the cloth hanging over the Kaaba?
How many millions of Muslims, particularly in the Arab world, stood idly by as Palestinians were being slaughtered in their tens of thousands by Israel? Are people in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and elsewhere not Muslims?
What did they do when genocidal Zionists were mass murdering Palestinians or Lebanese, or waged vicious war against Iran? Who stood up to the murderous Zionists? How many Muslim-majority countries joined Jared Kushner's "Abraham" Accord?
How many Muslim countries give their territory as military bases to the US, and by extension to Israel, to carpet bomb Palestine, Lebanon and Iran - while stealing what is left of Palestine and moving into Syria too?
How many Muslim leaders were customers of the notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein?
Who provided Jeffrey Epstein with a piece of Kiswah, the cloth hanging over the Kaaba? Who were the Muslim American leaders who would go to iftar with US presidents precisely when those presidents were providing arms to Israel to slaughter Palestinians?
We Muslims have some serious housecleaning of our own to do too.
A rising generation
Look at the attack on Muslims in San Diego on 18 May. Who instigates so much hatred against Muslims, and why?
The answer is simple. Genocidal Zionists are scared. They know Muslims are rising in power.
We are outnumbering, outwitting and outsmarting them, and will soon outrun them - "them" meaning the Randy Fine type of characters - in populating the democratic institutions of this country.
It is the pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson's gambling dollars against the bold and brilliant Muslims of the next generation of Americans.
If you thought the congresswomen Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar were too radical, you did not notice the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York. Genocidal Zionists led a massive attack against him, and he defeated them all to become the mayor of our city.
Now you just wait for the next generation, like Abdul El-Sayed, now running for the Senate in Michigan.
If you do not know who the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker is, and what he is up to in revolutionising the Democratic Party, you have not been reading the panicked pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on him.
We are not tribal, though - we go wherever our democratic socialism takes us.
Our senators, mayors, congresspersons and widely popular influencers are not committed to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, or the Egyptian or Iranian ruling elites the way genocidal Zionists are "Israel First" fanatics.
We are ecumenical. Personally, I think of the Armenian sister Ana Kasparian, co-host of The Young Turks, as an honorary Muslim, or else proudly call myself Armenian in her company.
Now, as for those Trump cameras watching over Iran, do you think the people who put their names on half of those stars around your cameras do not know you are looking at them?
How do you know that what you think you are looking at is not staged to make a damn fool out of you, the way they made a damn fool out of the entirety of the Mossad intelligence apparatus, thinking they could change the regime in Iran "in four days"?
Count those days again. Theirs and yours.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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