Arabic Grammar – The Forms or Measures

Is Arabic hard or easy, simple or complicated? You sometimes hear the argument that Arabic is easy because there are only two verb tenses and the verbs are formed according to patterns, from a three-letter root.
From what I’ve been told, native speakers of Arabic don’t learn the measures the way we do; some western linguist or grammarian or whatever invented it for our sake. Anyhow, my point is, if you’re trying to learn Arabic, it couldn’t hurt to read Keith Massey’s book, Intermediate Arabic for Dummies.
As an Arabic student acquaintance of mine said, “If Dr Massey wrote another book, I’d read it.”
You can find out more here at Keith’s site, Adventures in Language.

Another Quote From Devil’s Game

I’m still slowly making my way through Devil’s Game, How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, by Robert Dreyfuss. Some sections kind of drag, and it’s so chock full of information that you get overloaded.

This jumped out at me, though, given the various arguments I’ve heard made against Muslims in the last few years. Somehow the throwing of acid in girls’ faces always gets brought up. I don’t know which anti-Islam screecher pushes the acid-in-the-face angle, but I keep hearing it.

[US National Security Advisor 1977-1981] Brzezinski, and then [Director of Central Intelligence 1981-1987] Casey, embraced the Pakistan-Saudi axis. But both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had their favored clients in Afghanistan.

For Pakistan, it was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Islamist whose group was called the Islamic Party (Hizb-i Islami). Hekmatyar had a well-earned reputation for being a brutal fanatic:

Gulbuddin was the darling of Zia and the Pakistan intelligence service. Like other mujahideen leaders, he had been working with the ISI [Pakistan intel service] since the early 1970s, when Pakistan had begun secretly backing fundamentalist students at the University of Kabul who were rebelling against Soviet influence in the Afghan government. Back then Gulbuddin was very much a part of the emerging global wave of Islamic radicalism. By all accounts, he was responsible for the practice of throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who failed to cover themselves properly.

Hekmatyar’s specialty was skinning prisoners alive. Sigbhatullah Mujaddidi, an Islamist of somewhat less radical stripes, called Hekmatyar a “true monster.” But Representative Charles Wilson, a Texas Republican who was the leading congressional advocate for the Afghan jihad, approvingly noted that Zia was “totally committed to Hekmatyar, because Zia saw the world as a conflict between Muslims and Hindus, and he thought he could count on Hekmatyar to work for a pan-Islamic entity that could stand up to India.”

Preliminary Book Report

“What’s all this nonsense about isolating [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him, as you call it? I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered…And I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” –Anthony Eden, UK Prime Minister 1955-57

I’m only about a third of the way through Devil’s Game; How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, but I didn’t want to wait too long and forget how I felt at reading this.

We have a tendency to think that Arabs have Islamic governments because they just want it that way, that they’re simple people who need their religious trappings, and we don’t have the slightest clue at the concerted efforts that our governments have made to subvert every nationalist and secular government that was successful in the Middle East.

Nasser was a towering figure in the Arab world and was known as the “leader of the Arabs.”

His funeral procession through Cairo, on 1 October, was attended by at least five million mourners.

All Arab heads of state attended. King Hussein of Jordan and the PLO leader Yasser Arafat cried openly while Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya reportedly fainted twice. Although no major Western dignitaries were present, Soviet premier Alexey Kosygin showed up. Almost immediately after the procession began, mourners had engulfed Nasser’s coffin shouting “There is no God but Allah, and Nasser is God’s beloved… Each of us is Nasser.”

The general Arab reaction was one of mourning, with thousands of people pouring onto the streets of major cities throughout the Arab world. Over a dozen people were killed in Beirut as a result of the chaos and in Jerusalem, roughly 75,000 Arabs marched through the Old City chanting “Nasser will never die.”

Seems like the kind of guy the US and UK would want to ally with, a powerful figure who could accomplish a lot of good.

Along with Muhammad Naguib, the first President, he led the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 which overthrew the monarchy of Egypt and Sudan, and heralded a new period of modernization, and socialist reform in Egypt together with a profound advancement of pan-Arab nationalism, including a short-lived union with Syria.

Modernization and social reform? We’re all about that. So why were we working so hard to bring him down, even assassinate him?

Under his leadership, Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal, and came to play a central role in anti-imperialist efforts in the Arab World, and Africa.

Oohhhhhh.

I’ll have more on this book later. And you can buy it here.

The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov

1979 was a big year in the history of relations between the US and parts of the Islamic world. In early November Iranian radicals supporting the Iranian revolution took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 53 Americans hostage. On November 20th Salafist radicals in Saudi Arabia seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and held it for two weeks, and a few days later a mob in Pakistan attacked the US embassy in Islamabad.

In 1979 I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to US foreign policy, as I was more interested in drawing band logos on my blue, 3-ring binder and dreading dissecting a frog. I do remember the hostage crisis because it made a lot of headlines. If I knew about the other two incidents, they probably blurred into one.

This book explains the siege of the grand mosque, who did it, why, what the Saudis did about it, etc., with a peek into what happened in Iran and Pakistan. It’s very nice to have this puzzle piece.

Long story short, a Saudi cleric thought Saudi Arabia was too westernized and lax. Women appeared on television with their faces showing, if you can imagine. He was also upset about Shi’ites, Americans, and cigarettes. This cleric wasn’t getting the satisfaction he wanted from the other leading clerics in the kingdom, so took matters into his own hands and published tracts and assembled a gang of followers. Then he realized that a young friend of his had some traits in common with the mahdi, and convinced himself that he was him.

Anyhow, the book is well-written and readable, and I found it very helpful in driving home the importance of some characters whose names I’ve read and heard plenty of times without really absorbing their significance. It’s also kind of fun to remember how things were in 1979, when the US and the Soviet Union were locked in a death grip of paranoia and blind to any other interpretation of events.

When the Americans heard about the seizure of the Grand Mosque, they took for granted that it was the work of Shi’ites either working for or colluding with Iran. Whereas when the Iranians heard about the seizure, they assumed it was the work of the Americans, probably in concert with Israel. And this is where Trofimov made me angry. In his writing, it’s only natural that the Americans assume Shi’ites seized the mosque, whereas when Iran assumes it’s Americans, that’s the result of a history of “self-pitying propaganda” and “outlandish conspiracy theories.”

“Embassy is continuing to receive information–some of it conflicting–concerning occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. It is still not known for certain who is occupying the mosque, although it appears they are very well armed,” [Ambassador] West wrote, citing testimony by the American chopper pilot. “We have received reports indicating occupiers could be Iranian or Yemeni, although some reports from Saudi sources state occupiers are Saudi tribesmen supporting some as yet unidentified group of Islamic fundamentalists.”

The attack on the holiest place in Islam, the Pentagon’s spy service explained categorically, had been perpetrated by a group “believed to be Iranian.”

A separate telegram by Ralph Lindstrom, the American consul-general in Dhahran, in the predominantly Shiite Eastern Province, appeared to back up this suggestion of Khomeni’s involvement, citing the Aramco oil company. The news from Mecca, Lindstrom cabled, “may be related to information we have just obtained from reliable company sources re recent Iranian attempts to agitate Saudi Shiites.”

With the lives of American hostages in Tehran on the line and Khomeini looming large as Washington’s public enemy number one, it was only natural that the mayhem in Mecca that day was seen by participants at the White House meeting as yet another Iranian provocation. In line with the DIA explanation, the working assumption became that the zealots in the Grand Mosque were Iranians or Iranian-inspired Shiites.

See, perfectly natural for right-thinking white people. Not like those wrong-thinking other people who are just looking for reasons to blame the spotlessly innocent US for something bad happening in the Muslim world.

Iranian revolutionaries and, before them, the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have long inundated the Islamic world with self-pitying propaganda that held Westerners–and, in particular, Jews–responsible for all the evils that have befallen the Muslims. In this paranoid worldview, the Americans and the Jews were eternally plotting to undermind Muslim interests and to sully the shrines of Islam. The statement by the Saudi Ministry of the Interior that had aired on Pakistani radio Wednesday morning gave no clue about the identity of the mysterious “deviators” occupying the Kaaba. So, as Pakistanis learned that the House of God had been desecrated by gun-toting invaders, many instinctively blamed the usual suspects.

Even well-educated, seemingly reasonable Muslim intellectuals quickly succumbed to outlandish conspiracy theories…

tsk tsk How embarrassing for those Muslim “intellectuals” to jump to the wrong conclusion because they’re foolish, not like those American policy-makers who jumped to the wrong conclusion because for all the right reasons. *rolleyes*

To justify using military hardware in the confines of the mosque, the Saudi royal family needed the country’s prominent clerics to sign off on it. A deal was struck. And this is why Saudi Arabia today is a less fun place than it was prior to November 1979. This also led to the exportation of harsh, Salafist Islam by the Saudis around the world. Bummer.

the Grand Mosque in Mecca

You can buy the book at my Amazon a-store here.

Belated Book Report

I saw Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations sitting on the bookshelf and decided I’d take another shot at posting about it. Here’s my previous and not very informative post.

First off, this one line threw me for a loop, and I couldn’t help but hold it against the book. It is mind-bogglingly wrongheaded and hard to recover from. And it occurs in the preface.

She was not a feminist; she had no need or wish for special treatment.

I trust everyone can see what’s wrong with that.

And oh, she was not a feminist, just an independent woman educated way, way beyond what a woman could expect at that time, who hobnobbed with the entirely male rulers of the Arab tribes and also, by the way, climbed mountains, but whatever. And oh, she had no need for special treatment, but she was the granddaughter of a man the author describes as “the Bill Gates of his day.” Surely if she’d been born in an alley to a tubercular, illiterate prostitute who promptly died she’d have achieved all the exact same things she achieved, because she was just so smart and talented and her grandfather’s obscene wealth played no part in her success. Right.

Then we are treated to what seems like many hundreds of pages about mountain climbing. I have always thought that there was no such thing as a boring subject, and that an enthusiastic speaker could make any subject interesting. After having read (most of) this book as well as Three Cups of Tea, I now know that there is a boring subject: mountain climbing. And you’d expect it to be interesting, too.

I confess that I didn’t finish the book. But actually, now that a lot of time has passed, I think I’m ready to read the rest. After all, she was instrumental in the creation of the modern state of Iraq. And she was not a fan of Zionism.

Lord Arthur James Balfour, Lloyd George’s languid Foreign Secretary, had issued a Declaration in November 1917 that the British government aproved “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” As Gertrude, thinking of the Sykes-Picot treaty and all the trouble that had caused, wrote in a letter to Sir Gilbert Clayton, former head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo: “Mr. Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement I regard with the deepest mistrust–if only people at home would not make pronouncements how much easier it would be for those on the spot!”

When the first draft of the Declaration had been put to the Cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India…mounted a vehement opposition despite being Jewish himself, stating that Zionism was a “mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” Was his own loyalty, he demanded, to be to Palestine? And what would be the repercussions for the rights of Jews living in other countries? Many Jewish leaders in the West believed that to offer Palestine to the Jews would be a disservice to Jewry, moreover, the Jews already settled in Palestine anticipated, and dreaded, the trouble that Zionism was about to cause. In support of his argument, Montagu had read out to the Cabinet a strongly argued letter from Gertrude, whose persuasive words had resulted in the rephrasing of the document. She was angered by the tendency of the Zionists and the statesmen at the Conference to talk as if Palestine was empty of people; and she could see that Arabs and Jews could not live peaceably side by side.

Well, of course they can, and they have many times in places throughout history, but the ethnic cleansing aspect is probably what she was thinking of when she wrote this.

In Jan 1918 she wrote:

Palestine for the Jews has always seemed to us to be an impossible proposition. I don’t believe it can be carried out–personally I don’t want it to be carried out, and I’ve said so on every possible occasion…to gratify Jewish sentiment you would have to override every conceivable political consideration, including the wishes of the large majority of the population.

Okay, I’ve convinced myself to read the rest of the book. I guess when I left off it was just about to get interesting.

Qur’an Authors

Found this over on The Arabist’s site.

Amazon.com lists the authors of the Holy Qur’an as Muhammad and Gabriel.

The angel Gabriel, that is

The History of Islam by Robert Payne

Usually I don’t buy a book and then let it sit around, unread, but somehow I don’t remember where I acquired this book, and I just got around to reading it. It was originally published in 1959 under the name, “The Holy Sword,” which says a lot. Although they gussied up the titled for the reprint, the author used “Muhamadanism,” throughout the text instead of “Islam.” Even three hundred pages later, that’s still jarring.

I hope it’s no longer in fashion to write tomes analysing an entire group of millions of people as if they were a single entity. Robert Payne does a lot of comparing of “Muhamadans” to “us.” It’s weird and uncomfortable no matter which side you’re on.

There are so many quotes to choose from. I’ll post a few here, and then I think I may revisit this book again in a future post.

From the very beginning there were differences so vast that no human mind has been able to reconcile them. It is not only that Muhamadans are incapable of understanding a God who is expressed in terms of the Trinity and cannot bring themselves to believe He was crucified in the flesh, but their normal habits of mind, their aims and preoccupations, are at variance with ours.

Here we are already with the us-and-them mentality and we haven’t even hit the body of the book yet; this is from the introduction.

Anyway, I’m not sure I know anybody who is comfortable with the concept of the Trinity. And let’s not even start on the cannibalistic aspect of the eucharist ceremony.

Muhamadanism has no priesthood, no rounded tradition of scholarship, none of those elements of sensuous ceremonial which go with western worship.

I included that one because it’s true, Islam has no priesthood, although we persist in calling their scholars “clerics.”

Their strength lies in their humanness. They are ruthless and at ease in a world where we are increasingly restless and incapable of decision. Hamlet still walks our fortress walls, but an Arab Hamlet is unthinkable.

So I have written this book in the hope that men will look closer at Arab origins, and I have called it after the strange two-pointed sword which Muhammad won as a trophy at the battle of Badr, because the sword became the symbol of his imperial pretensions.

I find this a little weird, because I hadn’t yet come across any reference to that sword in any of the Muslim literature I’ve read.

To this day the Arabs worship stones, an so do all the followers of Muhammad.

No one knows why Muhammad changed so abruptly from a benevolent despot, the devoted servant of the Merciful and Compassionate God, into a ruthless conqueror. Perhaps power corrupted him; perhaps he knew the faith would never survive without unsheathing the sword.

For the Muhamadan the jihad, or “holy war,” has become an essential element of the faith; all of Islam would have to be turned upside down if the doctrine were eliminated.

This paragraph left me gaping:

Though [the caliph] Muawiya shows an astonishing modern temper in his mingling of indolent ease and efficient ruthlessness, he remained a man of his own time. Beneath the silks and damasks he remained essentially an Arab at war with the incomprehensible civilized world, hating Byzantium with an inextinguishable passion, employing Christians in his service only because he needed them as scribes and teachers and government officials, and because he himself could learn from the. His aim, like Muhammad’s, was to conquer the whole world.

Here’s one that transcends religion, race, national identity, and so on:

Sulayman, the fat voluptuary, belongs to the great tradition of Umayyad monarchs: he possessed, like many enormously fat people, a steady, driving intelligence.

I think that’s enough for one post. More later.

Killing and Mayhem in Holy Books

I was reading the comments to a blog post on Pharyngula and a couple of commenters included some really interesting links.
Here’s one that lists a whole lot of exhortations to violence from the Bible, and here’s a Boston Globe newspaper article comparing and contrasting violent passages in the Bible and Qur’an.

From the latter:

The Bible also alleges divine approval of racism and segregation. If you had to choose the single biblical story that most conspicuously outrages modern sentiment, it might well be the tale of Phinehas, a story that remains unknown to most Christian readers today (Numbers 25: 1-15). The story begins when the children of Israel are threatened by a plague. Phinehas, however, shrewdly identifies the cause of God’s anger: God is outraged at the fact that a Hebrew man has found a wife among the people of Midian, and through her has imported an alien religion. Phinehas slaughters the offending couple – and, mollified, God ends the plague and blesses Phinehas and his descendants. Modern American racists love this passage. In 1990, Richard Kelly Hoskins used the story as the basis for his manifesto “Vigilantes of Christendom.” Hoskins advocated the creation of a new order of militant white supremacists, the Phineas Priesthood, and since then a number of groups have assumed this title, claiming Phinehas as the justification for terrorist attacks on mixed-race couples and abortion clinics.

Modern Christians who believe the Bible offers only a message of love and forgiveness are usually thinking only of the New Testament. Certainly, the New Testament contains far fewer injunctions to kill or segregate. Yet it has its own troublesome passages, especially when the Gospel of John expresses such hostility to the Ioudaioi, a Greek word that usually translates as “Jews.” Ioudaioi plan to stone Jesus, they plot to kill him; in turn, Jesus calls them liars, children of the Devil.

Various authorities approach the word differently: I might prefer, for instance, to interpret it as “followers of the oppressive Judean religious elite,” Or perhaps “Judeans.” But in practice, any reputable translation has to use the simple and familiar word, “Jew,” so that we read about the disciples hiding out after the Crucifixion, huddled in a room that is locked “for fear of the Jews.” So harsh do these words sound to post-Holocaust ears that some churches exclude them from public reading.

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions . . . all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Koran.

see http://www.thebricktestament.com

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

Another nonfiction book translated from the French that is actually a good read. Really helped solidify my understanding of the Crusades. It covers a two-hundred-year period, so it’s hard to keep all the characters straight. I’m going to have to go back in and write down all the names, what religion and nationality they were, who their parents were (if known), what kingdom or fiefdom or sultanate or stronghold they’re associated with, etc., and then make notes on one of the big maps of Asia Minor and the States of the Crusades that I recently acquired. Then I’ll have a nice aid to memory.

The “holy land” in 1096, when the first Crusade was launched, was a bit of a mess. There is supposed to be one caliph just as there is supposed to be one pope, but at this time there was a Sunni (Abassid) caliph in Baghdad and a Shi’a (Fatimid) caliph in Cairo. The caliph in Baghdad was under the thumb of a Turkish sultan, and the caliph in Cairo was a puppet to his own vizier. There were kings and princes and emirs and sultans and atabegs all over the place.

Suprisingly to me, it was less than fifteen years after the initial invasion before an army of Muslims allied with Crusaders faced off against another army of Muslims allied with Crusaders. You almost get the idea that the religion wasn’t the driving force at all, but took a far back seat to struggles for power and territory.

I was especially surprised to learn that the assassins sect was willing to convert to Christianity for the sake of a favorable alliance with the Crusaders against the Sunnis in the region. There were a few instances of whole kingdoms or armies offering to convert to one religion or the other. Strange stuff.

Here’s a passage that made me giggle:

Crossing the Sinai peninsula along its Mediterranean coast, Amalric laid siege to the town of Bilbays, situated on a branch of the Nile that would run dry in centuries to come. The defenders of the city were both dumbfounded and amused when the Franj began erecting siege machinery around the walls, for it was September, and the river was beginning to swell. The authorities had only to breach a few dikes, and the warriors of the Occident soon found themselves surrounded by water. They barely had time to flee back to Palestine.

That was around 1162. They were not quick to learn the ways of water, because in 1221, this happened:

In July the Frankish army left Damietta, heading resolutely for Cairo [...] As for al-Kamil himself, he was anxiously watching, with barely concealed joy, the gradual swelling of the waters of the Nile, for the level of the river had begun rising without the Occidentals’ taking any notice. In mid-August the land became so muddy and slippery that the knights had first to halt their advance and then to withdraw their entire army.
Barely had the retreat begun when a group of Egyptian soldiers moved to demolish the dikes. It was the twenty-sixth of August 1221. Within a few hours, as the Muslim troops cut off the exit routes, the entire Frankish army found itself mired in a sea of mud.

The Muslims were better off than the crusaders in several ways: they had hospitals and trained doctors, courts of law where evidence was viewed and testimony was heard, and an efficient system for conveying news quickly.

Fulk had just enough time to send a message to Jerusalem appealing for reinforcements when, as Ibn al-Athir relates, Zangi cut off all communications, allowing no news to filter through; the besieged no longer knew what was happening in their country, so strict was the control of the routes.
Such a blockade would have had no effect whatever on the Arabs. For centuries they had used carrier-pigeons to convey messages from town to town. Every army on the march carried pigeons that had been raised in various Muslim cities and strongholds. They had been trained always to return to their nests of origin.

There was a lot of plunder and beheading all around, of course. But Saladin was famous for sparing conquered people:

So it was that on Friday 2 October 1187, or 27 Rajab 583 by the Muslim calendar, the very day on which Muslims celebrate the Prophet’s nocturnal journey to Jerusalem, Saladin solemnly entered the holy city. His emirs and soldiers had strict orders: no Christian, whether Frankish or Oriental, was to be touched. And indeed, there was neither massacre nor plunder. Some fanatics demanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre be destroyed in retaliation for the excesses committed by the Franj, but Saladin silenced them.

Richard III, the Lionhearted, on the other hand:

Determined to take advantage of his success to launch a sweeping offensive, he had no intention of bothering about captives, any more than had the sultan four years earlier, when the Frankish cities were falling into his hands one after another. The only difference was that when Saladin wanted to avoid being burdened with prisoners, he released them, whereas Richard preferred to have them killed. Two thousand and seven hundred soldiers of the Acre garrison were assembled before the city walls, along with nearly three hundred women and children of their families. Roped together so they formed one enormous mass of flesh, they were delivered to the Frankish fighters, who fell upon them viciously with their sabers, their lances, and even with stones, until all the wails had been stilled.

So the book covered two hundred years of history inless than three hundred pages. It moves fast. I recommend it. I’m sure I’ll be referring back to it again and again as I read and learn more.

Allah’s Fire by Chuck Holton and Gayle Roper

This is not a review, just a series of observations.

I expected this book to be full of misinformation about Arabs and Islam. Well, it had a good deal of that, but I did not anticipate how much Christian glurge there would be. As for the romance novel aspect, by the end of the book all the romantic protagonists have done is exchange “a kiss that kept her warm all night.”

There’s weird inconsistency in the few Arabic phrases the authors include. They get some short and basic Lebanese phrases right, but they write “Allah Ak’bar” with a totally gratuitous apostrophe and, as mentioned in a previous post, were amusingly wrong about how one would say, “The followers of God’s will.” (Ansar Inshallah is not it).

Inshallah is a complete sentence. It means “If God wills,” but someone probably told the authors it meant “God’s will.” If there really were an Arab terrorist group with “inshallah” as part of its name, imagine how that would play into the hands of zealous FBI and CIA agents. Everyone who said “Inshallah” would be a terror suspect. What am I saying? That’s how it is already.

The Arabs in this book are mostly residents of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Each and every male character among them would rather kill his daughter with his bare hands (or the scimitar he assuredly must carry everywhere–he’s Muslim, right?) than see her get an education.

The female protagonist, Liz, who is surprisingly, offensively ignorant of Islam despite having spent half her life in Beirut, laughably compares women’s role in Islam unfavorably to women’s role in Christianity. She offers no cites for her misapprehensions.

Liz herself is a grown woman who refers to herself a girl in her email address and likes her mom best when her mom is doing traditional womanly things like making tea and serving baklava.

Liz believes that God and Allah are two completely different things, and that Allah is bloodthirsty and full of hate. It puts me in mind of the paradigm in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels, where the dark-skinned, scimitar-wielding, crescent-afficionado Calormen worship the evil god Tash, and the virtuous, light-skinned Narnians worship the noble Aslan; but if there should be such a thing as a Calorman who isn’t evil and violent, he’s really worshipping Aslan, while if a Narnian is a bad boy, he’s really worshipping Tash–even though they don’t know it.

Except to Liz, even if you’re a sweet and virtuous young person, if you worship Allah, you’re wrong wrong wrong.

I had to resort to Wikipedia to refresh my memory on the Narnia books, and in doing so I found this page, Medieval Christian View of Muhammad. Lots of good stuff here.

Facts such as the Muslim belief that [Muhammad] was unlettered, that he married a wealthy widow, that in his later life he had several wives, that he ruled over a human community and was therefore involved in several wars, and that he died like an ordinary person in contrast to the Christian belief in the supernatural end of Christ’s earthly life were all interpreted in the worst possible light.[1]

Medieval scholars and churchmen held that Islam was the work of Muhammad who in turn was inspired by Satan. Muhammad was frequently calumnized and made a subject of legends taught by preachers as fact.[9] For example, in order to show that Muhammad was the anti-Christ, it was asserted that Muhammad died not in the year 632 but in the year 666 – the number of the beast – in another variation on the theme the number “666″ was also used to represent the period of time Muslims would hold sway of the land.[8] A verbal expression of Christian contempt for Islam was expressed in turning his name from Muhammad to Mahound, the “devil incarnate”.[10] Others usually confirmed to pious Christians that Muhammad had come to a bad end.[9] According to one version after falling into a drunken stupor he had been eaten by a herd of swine, and this was ascribed to the reason why Muslims proscribed consumption of liquor and pork.[9]

Ha! Muslims ruled Spain alone longer than that (781 years). Take that, medieval Christians.

Speaking of 666, there is someone currently trying to convince credulous audiences that it was never the number of the beast at all, but a vision of the written word “God” in Arabic that was revealed to John of Patmos. None other than fake person Walid Shoebat. I won’t link to anything that could possibly benefit him, but here’s a blog with more info. There are people who take this seriously.

And now I’ve found a whole bunch of blogs to peruse. What a lot of different points of view there are out there.

What some Christians think "Allah" looks like