Irene of Athens: the Christian Byzantine Empress who gouged her own son's eyes.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think that big mo misunderstood his source material so much as he understood his audience very well, as did his successors.  Neither he nor they were judaizers or christianizers..and, obviously, none of them wished to grant or cede authority (let alone territory) to either tradition.

Respectfully disagree. I don’t think Mo was clever enough to grasp the subtlety of ‘an eye for an eye’. 

And Winter certainly isn’t.

Boru

We had a thread a bit back where I took the time to show the differences and similarities between legal and moral codes arising from judaism and it's contemporaries in the region (specifically ur) - and what I was referring to up there pertains to that.  Short and sweet, whether a legal code focuses on people or property to the detriment of the other - and the audience mo was speaking to was firmly in the latter camp.  Adding to that was the fact that islams code is the code of a rapidly expanding totalitarian slave state.  

In that context, it's actually surprising that it didn't end up as shitty as it could have, and it's only in that context that any reform that we might today consider an improvement can genuinely be recognized.  A brutal people in a brutal environment with a brutal moral sense were being marshalled by a warlord to expand their wealth, territory, and influence. It fit their sensibilities and it was convenient to the suppression of internal discord which could derail their imperial and colonizing dreams. OFC, all of this only really applied to the little people at any rate. The idea of a warlord and his henchmen cutting off hands for theft of property immediately runs into it's own dark hilarity.