The harsh and violent ethics and tendencies of Islam are a product of the harsh desert environments in which it was born, and greening the world’s deserts may help remedy the world’s “Islam” problem by helping its disappearance.
In his book, "Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex Repression, Warfare, and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World" (Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon, 2006 revised edition), James DeMeo discusses the role which deserts played in the origins of Islam, whose harsh Sharia law reflect the harsh, barren place it originated in "the desert kingdom" region of today’s Saudi Arabia, whose 7th-century people lived in the same harsh, barren environment that its modern inhabitants live in.
Muhammad claimed that an angel dictated "The Koran" to him, which was, of course, only a false claim of a con man or psychotic. In reality, Muhammad, and his part of the world's desert environment, created Islam, as I will show in this article.
Two places in Africa – namely Sudan and Nigeria – may prove that Islam is a desert religion, whose harsh rules would be of less and less interest to Muslims over time if all of the deserts could be greened, which, as the Israelis have long proved, is an achievable goal by using cloudseeding technology to wash out the salt of desert sands to turn them into productive farmland. In both Sudan and Nigeria, the northern halves of those places, have harsh, barren desert environments, mostly populated by Muslims, while the fertile southern halves are populated by people of Christian and animist faiths who follow much less harsh laws.
Part of the reason why Islam makes more sense to desert people is the hot, dry desert winds, known as khamsin, sirocco, and simoom, which when blow off the desert, can be used as a diminished-responsibility-type defence in violent crime cases in some countries. This is not surprising, as scientists have shown that such desert winds are electrically very imbalanced, and create irritability and aggression, because they have far more positive ions of air electricity than negative ions, the latter is produced by vegetation and creates more peaceful behaviour.
So Islam's warlike jihad mentality streak is not really surprising, as much of the Muslim world is regularly influenced to be violent by the positive ion dominated desert winds. In more fertile places like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India, Islam has, historically, been more Sufi, mystical, and inward looking, and less harsh, dogmatic, and violent than the Islam of desert Arabia.
A fertile, or relatively fertile environment, for not being harsh and barren, does not produce desert winds, and is less likely to create a harsh, dogmatic, violent mentality. That is partly why of the four Asian countries – Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and India (only 2 of which have some deserts) – are part of a group of five previously or currently Hinduism and Buddhism dominated Asian nations (the other is Sri Lanka), which have had far more female presidents and prime ministers than even the 5 Scandinavian nations, which a World Economic Forum survey rated as the 5 best countries in the world for women's rights.
By contrast, the 22 members of the Arab League nations, which have desert environments, have never had any female presidents or prime ministers.
The fertile, or relatively fertile environments of those 5 Asian nations, are also perhaps partly the reason why some Indian subcontinent and Indonesian "Muslims" still hold onto their old Hindu-Buddhist culture influenced traditions alongside Islam’s. It is possible that, for those "Muslims", pure Islam is too harsh a faith to follow.
It is also true that old habits die hard. That is why some people argue that Iranians are also still heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, the religion their forefathers practised for over a thousand years before Islam. Still the Iranians often go on camping holidays in the desert, which most people in fertile countries would probably see as strange behaviour, because deserts are so featureless. This perhaps proves that they also have a more desert-influenced mentality than Muslims in more fertile parts of Asia.
As nearly half of all of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims live in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, it is no small matter that some "fertile" Muslims stick to Hindu-Buddhist influenced religious and cultural traditions, and are thus not even proper Muslims. They are unlike "desert" Muslims of the Arab world, who are far less likely to be interested in Sufism, never mind their pre-Islamic religion.
It is also true that Saudi oil money is paying for madrassas, mosques, and imam training, which are helping the spreading of Saudi Wahhabist Islam to South Asia, and making its Islam more harsh, dogmatic, and violent in the process. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, many of whom went to Saudi funded madrassas, are the product of that Saudi aid effort. It is also true that as early as 1857, the British colonial authorities noted the influence of the "Wahhabis" on the Indian subcontinent Islam as Wahhabism-influenced Muslims inspired the bloody Indian rebellion against British rule of that year, which included the Bibighar massacre of 120 British women and children. But most South Asian Muslims, who were often converted to Islam by force and other compulsions, have historically had a less harsh mentality than that of Arab Muslims. However, Muslims of "tribal areas" in Pakistani and Afghanistan, who often have a xenophobic and violent mindset, are so because people in those areas live in harsh, barren environments.
Even Pakistani Muslims, who have undergone greater Saudi Arabianisation of their Islam than the Muslims of India, Bangladesh, and Indonesian, still have certain cultural traits, which have more in common with their Hindu past than the austere pure Islam of the Arab desert. For example, a taste for (Sufi) religious festivals with lots of dancing, which is reminiscent of Hindu religious festivals, a fondness for Hindu Indian films, which also often feature lots of dancing, a liking for qawwali Sufi devotional music which would appal Islamists, who believe that Sharia law outlaws music because of Muhammad’s hostile attitude toward music and musicians, and, in the case of some Pakistani truck drivers, a tendency to drive the same brightly painted, multicoloured trucks as some Hindu Indian truck drivers.
Thousands of years of Hindu cultural traits did not disappear suddenly, because ancestors of the Pakistani Muslims began converting to Islam, often at the point of a sword, in the 8th century.
Many black African Muslims, who sometimes live in fertile places like Malawi and Tanzania, also still appear to be influenced by the pre-Islamic animist faith of thousands of years (Animism was the dominant religious faith for black Africans as little as a century ago). So it is not surprising that black African Muslims are generally worse at sticking to desert Islam's harsh sexual codes than the Arab Muslims, who have long complained about the relative laxity of black African Muslims of that area. That is, perhaps, partly why more black African Muslims are now converting to less sexually strict Christianity than Muslims of other parts of the world outside Islam's Arab heartland, which bans missionary work.
Since black African men in fertile areas of Africa are also generally not as likely to be sexist as the Arab men, which is why some of the mostly Christian and animist black African nations have very high percentages of female politicians like in Scandinavian countries, as this "Women in national parliaments" global league table on the worldwide Inter Parliamentary Union website shows.
Since people living in fertile environments are not inclined to harsh laws and violent behaviour, that is probably why black African Muslims are now converting to Christianity in droves, because many black African Muslims, women in particular, may be increasingly alienated by the extreme sexism of Islamists as regularly highlighted in major media reports as well as by reports of terrorist atrocities, honour killings, or other horrible acts of violence by Muslims. According to the Religion of Peace website that attempts to document all of the Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks reported in the media, there have been more than 18,000 of such attacks since 9/11.
So, it is not surprising that in this transcript of an Al-Jazeera interview, Libyan Muslim cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Katani lamented the fact that 6 million black African Muslims are converting from Islam to Christianity every year. This is a huge total that even dwarfs the large number of Muslims, who are converting from Islam to Christianity every year in Iran, Central Asia, Russia, Indonesia, Europe, etc., which you can see by Googling "Muslims converting to Christianity".
If this trend continues, Islam may well disappear from black Africa before the next century. It may even disappear from non-Arab Islamic countries of the world in future centuries, before finally imploding in its Arab heartland.
So, greening the world’s deserts may come handy in fighting Islamic violence and the ills of male-dominance of Islamic societies. The Israelis have succeeded in greening the desert using the cloudseeding technique. The Chinese use tree planting to stop the growth of desert areas. Late Austrian natural scientist Wilhelm Reich successfully tested cloudbusting in Arizona in a US Government funded project. Reich's ideas inspired "Saharasia" author James DeMeo, and his small group in Oregon, and similar groups in Germany, who use cloudbusting technology to green small areas of deserts whenever they can.
Islam has been a 14-century disaster for the world, whose increasingly Saudi-influenced harsh, dogmatic, and violent beliefs are increasingly out of step with ideas of the world's increasingly pro-democracy and pro-human rights (for example pro-women's rights) people. The popularity of the totalitarian and, thus, anti-human rights Islamist parties in recent local or national elections in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, etc. portends a grave future for the humankind. And one effective way to remedy this danger may be achieved by greening all of the world's deserts, thereby helping harsh, dogmatic, violent beliefs disappear from the world in the future. And this is certainly achievable, since just 8000 years ago, there were hardly any desert areas on the planet except in a small part of Asia.
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