


Barbarossa, the original barbary pirate. Corbis

When Muhammad and his followers moved in the year 622 from the commercial center of Mecca to the more agricultural settlement of Medina, almost all of the emigrants found themselves out of work. They didn't own farming land in Medina, and because they had left behind suppliers and customers alike they couldn't trade as they had in Mecca. So Muhammad turned to the longstanding Arabian practice of the ghazu, or bounty raid. His men would capture camels and caravan drivers and hold them for ransom just as Somali pirates today are capturing and ransoming ships, supplies and sailors. Though many of the prophet's early bounty raids were unsuccessful, they did cause merchants to reroute their caravans, just as the Somali pirates are redrawing the shipping map in the Gulf of Aden.

Along with agriculture, herding and trade, the ghazu was a recognized part of the seventh-century Arabian economy, and those who indulged in it were often celebrated as Robin Hoods of a sort. But the bounty raid was also a national pastime&mdash;a sport for turning boys into men. As is the case with piracy today, these earlier raids almost always ended without bloodshed, since any death was sure to bring on a cycle of vendetta killings every tribesman was eager to avoid&mdash;a cycle that Somali pirates recently promised to set into motion in response to the killing of pirates by American and French special forces.

All this might be of purely antiquarian concern except for the fact that Muslims today regard Muhammad not only as God's final prophet but also as the human being par excellence. The Hadith, an Islamic scripture second in authority only to the Quran, records thousands of instances of Muhammad's beliefs and actions, so Muslims can follow his example on matters as detailed as the cut of his beard. If Christians ask, "What Would Jesus Do?" Muslims ask, "What Would Muhammad Do?"

There are of course ways to read the Islamic sources as antithetical to piracy, but Muhammad himself both organized and participated in the seventh-century overland equivalent of the high-seas buccaneering that now bedevils world trade. And at least some Somali pirates see their profiteering as consistent with submission to Allah. "We are Muslims," one pirate told a Reuters reporter earlier this month. "We are marines, coastguards&mdash;not pirates."

The point is not to see Muhammad as a criminal. Today piracy is a violation of international law, but the ghazu was not a crime during Muhammad's time, as long as it was conducted in accordance with the agreed-upon rules of the game (no raiding during the pilgrimage to Mecca, for example). In any case, there is little indication that Somali piracy is motivated by any god other than greed.

Nonetheless, as the international community attempts to draft solutions to Somali piracy, it needs to weigh religious causes alongside economic and political ones. Muslims should be involved in crafting those solutions, and Muslim leaders across the world should respond with denunciations of this practice as forceful and various as their condemnations of 9/11. There is not much good to say about Somalia's current government, but the country's current deputy prime minister, Abdurrahman Haji Adam, got it right on Sunday when he denounced piracy as a crime against Islam.


Mr. Prothero is the author of "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know&mdash;And Doesn't."