Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” Osama bin Laden said at the beginning of his talk taking credit for the 9/11 attacks.
The line launched a thousand geopolitical analyses, was quoted by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times and was pored over endlessly by experts who completely missed the point.
Osama bin Laden was not talking about great powers or nations, he was talking about Islam.
“There is only one goaL,” Bin Laden continued, the supremacy of Islam. He followed that up with a quote from a Hadith that is known to virtually every Muslim, but to all too few non-Muslims. “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.”
The 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden went on to explain, brought many non-Muslims to convert to Islam. “Some of them said that in Holland, at one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations were more than the people who accepted Islam in the last eleven years. I heard someone on Islamic radio who owns a school in America say: ‘We don’t have time to keep up with the demands of those who are asking about Islamic books to learn about Islam.’” Looking at conversion rates, there’s no doubt that he was right.
Conversions to Islam rise sharply after major Islamic terrorist attacks from 9/11 to Oct 7. This runs counter to everything we would like to believe about religion and morality, but it’s reality.
Bin Laden’s ‘Strong Horse’ wasn’t about who would win a military campaign between America and Al Qaeda, as some foreign policy experts insisted on arguing in major publications, it was about who would win the religious and cultural war between Islam and the West. Terrorist attacks were battles for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the rest of the world. 9/11 and other attacks would show the world the religious superiority of Islam by showing it was the ‘Strong Horse’.
America and its allies wasted decades trying to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Muslims from Afghanistan to Iraq to Gaza with billions in aid and democratic elections. The West welcomed mass Muslim migration to show how generous and tolerant we were. And no matter what we did, Muslim terrorist attacks became a regular feature of our lives because we insisted that being the liberal ‘Weak Horse’ made us morally superior to the men relentlessly killing us.
A generation later, more Americans are converting to Islam and joining the ‘Strong Horse’ than Muslims are converting to the democracy and liberalism of the ‘Weak Horse’. Secularism is on the decline in the Muslim world while Hamas and Hezbollah banners are waved on Ivy League campuses. Osama bin Laden had said that the “deeds” of the 9/11 hijackers had “overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world.” Terrorism is how Islam speaks and its message is that its followers believe so strongly that Islam is the only acceptable way or life that they are willing to die and kill to force everyone else to believe it too.
Our political and religious leaders can protest up and down that killing people is not how a religion wins the battle of ideas. “When people kill in the name of religion, they are not killing in the name of their god. They are killing for their own beliefs,” an op-ed after the Chanukah massacre in Australia argued. Islam has over 1,000 years of history that says otherwise.
Osama bin Laden did not originate the concept of the weak and strong horse. Islam did not expand around the world by winning a war of ideas, but by winning wars. Being the ‘Strong Horse’ is Islam’s only real compelling contribution to international theology. Judaism and Christianity may have abandoned holy wars as backwards, but Islam has gone on fighting them.
The Islamic civilizational mission, as in the Hadith that Bin Laden quoted, is simple and straightforward. “Fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.” The ‘Strong Horse’ is not the religion with the vital moral message, but the one that has the most power. When Muslim terrorists shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ before terrorist attacks, as their prophet did before battles, they use the attack to show the supremacy of their deity.
Popes, archbishops, and rabbis may argue that it doesn’t work that way, but in a world where the presence of the Creator is hidden in His works, where believers grapple over the mysteries of theodicy, and the inner journey of the human soul is the defining paradigm, Islam cuts viciously through the Gordian Knot of faith to claim that all that matters is earthly power.
Why believe in something you can’t see, when you can see the works of Islam in every bomb blast, beheading and totalitarian state brandishing rockets and marching terror forces? There is nothing intangible about Islam. Even its 72 virgins are merely the supernatural substitutes offered to dead Jihadis for the infidel women and girls they enslaved and raped on earth.
Martyrs in Christianity and Judaism die for their faith, while martyrs in Islam kill for theirs.
Judaism and Christianity believe in the sanctity of life, while Islam believes just as devoutly in the sanctity of taking life. To kill is to assert the power of Allah on earth and to bring the Caliphate, the Islamic kingdom of heaven on earth closer by an act almost anyone can do. Even the weakest Muslim is at least capable of being a suicide bomber to kill a few infidels.
Rather than confront this theology for what it is, most religions evade it, insisting that this is not real Islam, but the fringe beliefs of a tiny aberrant group, who are not truly acting in the name of their religion or “killing in the name of their god” but “are killing for their own beliefs.” The idea that such abstractions make any kind of difference is the ultimate ‘Weak Horse’ behavior.
Traditional Christian and Jewish martyrs who fell to Islam did not deny what it was. Their strength lay in their willingness to sacrifice their lives for their faith despite knowing what their oppressors were capable of. There are still men and women of such a caliber of faith in the rural churches of Nigeria and the Judean settlements of Israel, but much of the political and religious leadership of Christianity and Judaism make themselves the ‘Weak Horse’ not just physically, but spiritually, by denying why their own people are dying and what it is that’s killing them.
There is dignity in being a martyr, but none in attending an interfaith memorial service to our modern martyrs at which none dare name what killed the men, women and children being mourned except diffuse postmodern pathologies like ‘divisiveness’, ‘extremism’ and ‘hatred’ and the imam who groomed the killers rises to caution about the dangers of ‘Islamophobia’.
Islam’s ‘Strong Horse’ theology views the world as a battlefield, the ‘Dar al-Harb’ its religion has been sent to pacify, our ‘Weak Horse’ worldview lacks even the ability to process what it is the enemy believes, let alone to lay out an opposing doctrine that appeals to anyone except diplomats and the heads of NGOs prattling about ‘multilateralism’ and ‘international law’.
What the ‘Strong Horse’ approach lacks in morality, spirituality and humanity, it more than makes up for in operational ruthlessness. Islam isn’t winning the religious and culture war because it has good points to make, but because it’s fighting it as an actual war.
Islam intends to subjugate or destroy every major religion on earth as it has been doing for over 1,000 years. The world’s religions will need a better comeback than a ‘COEXIST’ sticker.
