The Pattern We Refuse To Name
In March 2026, four Islamic terrorist attacks took place throughout the United States—more domestic Islamic attacks in a single month than Americans have seen in years: The March 1 Austin Bar Shooting, the March 7 New York City bombing attempt, the March 12 Old Dominion University ROTC shooting in Norfolk, and the March 12 Temple Israel Synagogue Attack in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.[1]
This raises the question: Are these attacks consistent with Islam, or are they antithetical to the core teachings of Muhammad? To answer this, we will address certain texts in the Quran (the Islamic holy book) that are used to incite violence, and especially the “sword verse” of Surah 9:5. Then we will examine how several Islamic groups interpret these doctrines, answer some arguments that Muslim apologists make to maintain Islam’s innocence, and reflect on what Christians ought to do.
The Quran’s Violent Commands: A Pattern, Not an Exception
The claim you will hear most often is that Islamic terrorism represents a fringe misreading of an otherwise peaceful religion, that violent extremists have wrenched a handful of verses out of context to justify what the Quran itself condemns. While it is a reassuring claim, it is historically false.
The commands to fight, kill, subjugate, and terrorize unbelievers are not buried in the obscure corners of the Quran. There are over one hundred verses across the text that address violent jihad—armed warfare waged in the name of Allah—against non-Muslims.[2] Surah 9 (a surah being a chapter of the Quran) contains the most direct and sweeping commands, and they are among the most commented-upon, most legally consequential passages in fourteen centuries of Islamic jurisprudence.[3]
But the argument goes deeper than volume. There is a trajectory.
The Quran was not revealed all at once; it came in pieces over approximately twenty-three years covering two distinct phases of Muhammad’s life: Mecca, and Medina. [4] We find that the character of the revelation changed dramatically between the two eras.
In Mecca, Muhammad was a minority. He had no army, no political authority, and no state. The early Meccan revelations reflect that position: they are largely devotional, focused on monotheism and the coming judgment, and relatively tolerant in their posture toward non-Muslims. These are the verses critics point to when they say Islam is a religion of peace. “There shall be no compulsion in [acceptance of] the religion” (Quran 2:256, hereafter “Q”).[5] “For you is your religion, and for me is my religion” (Q 109:6). However, the Quran did not end in Mecca.
In Medina, Muhammad became a military commander. He led armies, ordered raids, expelled and executed Jewish tribes, and consolidated political and territorial power across the Arabian Peninsula. And as his power grew, so did the character of the “divine” commands he received. The Medinan revelations contain the commands to fight polytheists wherever they are found, to battle Jews and Christians until they submit and pay tribute, and to muster all available weapons to terrorize the enemies of Allah.[6] These are Medinan words, delivered to a man who now had the power to carry them out.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence affirms the doctrine of abrogation, or naskh. This means that because the Medinan revelations came later, they carry greater legal authority.[7] Where a Meccan verse counsels patience and a Medinan verse commands warfare, the later Medinan verse wins. In other words, the peaceful Meccan verses do not cancel the violent Medinan ones. In the classical tradition, it is the other way around.[8] The scholars did not hide this, as we’ll see in a moment.
Ibn Kathir (c. 1300–1373), the most authoritative classical commentator in the Sunni tradition, approvingly recorded from Ad-Dahhak bin Muzahim that Surah 9:5—the Sword Verse, a Medinan revelation—“abrogated every agreement of peace” Muhammad had previously made with unbelievers.[9] Al-Hasan al-Basri (642–728), one of the most revered scholars of early Islam, declared this verse “valid and unabrogated until the Day of Judgment.”[10]
The man who produced the most legally binding commands in the Quran was not a persecuted preacher calling his followers to patient endurance. He was a head of state with an army, a settled theology of warfare, and expanding territorial ambitions. The commands he issued in that context—commands to fight until unbelievers submit, to strike at the necks of those who resist, to prepare forces to terrorize the enemies of God—are the commands that classical Islamic jurisprudence treated as operative law.
The attackers in Austin, Norfolk, West Bloomfield, and New York did not discover a hidden strand of their religion. They drew from its most authoritative sources, in its most legally binding form.
Not All the Same: Understanding Who Is Actually Fighting
Not every Muslim who commits violence does so for identical theological reasons, and not every Muslim interprets the texts we have just examined the same way. There are, broadly speaking, four categories of Islamic actors worth distinguishing.
ISIS and the Global Jihadist Network
ISIS is not a political movement that happens to use religious language. It is a theological project that happens to use political and military means. Their founding declarations and propaganda magazines, which also served as recruitment materials, are saturated with citations of the Quran, hadith, and classical Islamic jurisprudence.[11] Cole Bunzel, a leading scholar of Islamic radicalism, notes that ISIS’s theology is “deeply rooted in a premodern theological tradition.”[12]
ISIS’s distinctive contribution—and their departure from the classical tradition—is not in the doctrine of jihad itself, but in who is authorized to wage it. Classical Islam reserved offensive jihad for the caliph alone, the recognized head of the Muslim community. His mandate was to expand the territory of Dar al-Islam (the House of Submission—land where Islam rules) at the expense of Dar al-Harb (the House of War—land currently unconquered by Islamic rule). The United States, in this framework, has always been Dar al-Harb.[13]
ISIS collapsed that restriction. By declaring a caliphate in 2014, they effectively issued a standing order to every Muslim on earth: The obligation is now personal, immediate, and universal. You do not need a commander. You need a truck, a knife, or a bomb, and the will to use it.[14] This is why the self-radicalized lone actor and the organized ISIS operative are theologically related even when organizationally disconnected. The ideology is doing the work.
Hamas and Hezbollah
Hamas and Hezbollah share the conviction that armed violence against Jews and Western powers is religiously sanctioned, but they are distinct from ISIS in important ways.
Hamas fuses Islamic theology with Palestinian nationalism—they are fighting for a place as much as for a creed. Hezbollah operates within a distinctly Shi’a theological framework foreign to the Sunni jurisprudence that undergirds ISIS.
Ayman Ghazali, who attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, is the most theologically complex case among the four. He had connections to suspected Hezbollah members and had just learned that an Israeli airstrike killed his brothers and their children.
The FBI’s subsequent investigation, however, made clear that his radicalization was not simply a product of grief: He had been consuming Hezbollah propaganda for months before his brothers died, and had conducted targeted research into Jewish gathering sites before the attack. The personal loss accelerated a trajectory that the ideology had already set in motion. Both the theological and the personal were present: Grief was the accelerant; Hezbollah’s militant framework was the fuel.
The Self-Radicalized Lone Actor
Ndiaga Diagne, who carried out the Austin bar shooting, appears to have had no organizational affiliation. He was not ISIS. He was not Hamas. He was a man who dressed himself in a “Property of Allah” sweatshirt over an Iranian flag t-shirt, picked up a rifle, and opened fire on Americans the day after the United States killed Iran’s supreme leader.
The temptation is to explain men like Diagne away as mentally unstable, politically aggrieved, or simply enraged by geopolitics. Those factors may have contributed to the timing. They do not explain the content. A Christian who loses family members in a U.S. military strike does not drive a car into a crowd shouting “Christ is the greatest!” The theology shapes the response to the grievance. It determines what violence looks like, whom it targets, and what name it is carried out under.
The self-radicalized actor is, in one sense, the most significant figure for this argument. He requires no organization, no handler, and no formal instruction. He requires only a text and a tradition that tells him the text means what it says. The pipeline from the Medinan Quran to a lone man with a rifle runs through fourteen centuries of commentary that never seriously disputed the plain meaning of the commands. The Internet simply shortened the journey.
The Moderate Muslim
There are many Muslims worldwide who do not commit violence, do not endorse it, and are genuinely horrified by the violent acts of March 2026. The moderate Muslim is not a fiction. But the moderate Muslim is also not the textual baseline.
The Muslim who reads the Medinan surahs and concludes that armed jihad is not his personal obligation is making a theological judgment that requires a significant departure from the classical tradition. Some do this thoughtfully and sincerely, but it is revisionist work that swims against the main current of fourteen centuries of Islamic jurisprudence.
The moderate Muslim and the jihadist are reading the same book. The difference between them is not that one has found the real Islam and the other has distorted it. The difference is that one has chosen to follow the classical tradition to its conclusions, and the other has chosen not to. That choice is morally significant. It is not, however, textually obvious. The men who murdered in March 2026 were, in fact, being consistent with Muhammad’s teaching in the Quran. And they are not the last ones who will live out this consistency with bullets and blood.
The Objections, Answered
But is this prediction overblown and alarmist? No serious treatment of this subject can ignore the counterarguments. Three in particular come up reliably, and each deserves a direct response.
“These terrorists are a tiny minority of Muslims and not representative.”
This is the most common objection and the least relevant to the argument being made. The question this article is asking is not demographic—it is not asking what percentage of Muslims commit violence. It is asking what the Quran teaches. The existence of millions of peaceful Muslims no more settles that question than the existence of nominal Christians settles what the Bible teaches. We do not evaluate a text by the behavior of its least committed adherents. We evaluate it by what it actually says and by what its most authoritative interpreters have consistently concluded it means.
Again, the violent commands in the Medinan surahs are not the invention of extremists. They are the consensus of centuries of classical scholarship.[15] The extremists did not put them there. They simply decided to take them seriously.
“The Bible has violent passages too.”
This objection sounds compelling until you examine it. Yes, the Old Testament contains accounts of warfare, divine judgment, and commanded violence. But there is a fundamental difference in the nature of that violence and what it demands of readers today.
The violence in the Old Testament is historically particular and narratively bounded. God commands Israel to drive out the Canaanites in a specific redemptive-historical moment, for specific covenant reasons, against specific peoples who no longer exist. These commands are not issued to believers in all times and places, and in the new covenant warfare language is spiritualized because Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world (cf. 2 Cor. 10:3–5; Eph. 6:10–20). “If it were,” Jesus explains to Pilate, “my servants would fight” (John 18:36). But it’s not, so they don’t.[16]
However, the Quranic commands are structurally different. The classical Muslim legal tradition did not treat these verses as historical narrative. It treated them as binding law. Surah 9:5 does not describe what Muhammad’s followers did in a specific battle. It issues a command declared operative until the Day of Judgment. Again, Surah 9:5 says, “…kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush…”
“These attacks are caused by U.S. foreign policy.”
Geopolitical grievance is real, and it is not irrelevant. Several of the March 2026 attackers were stirred by America’s war with Iran. Ayman Ghazali had just lost his brothers in an Israeli airstrike. These facts belong in the picture.
But their grievance explains the timing. It does not explain their actions. People respond to injustice in different ways, and the way they respond is shaped by what they believe. Again, a Christian who loses family members in a military strike does not drive a car into a synagogue full of children. A Buddhist does not open fire on an ROTC class. The theology determines what violence looks like, who it targets, and what name it is carried out in. When the grievance is filtered through a tradition that has taught for fourteen centuries that armed warfare against unbelievers is a divine obligation, grievance becomes fuel for something the text was already prepared to ignite.
Foreign policy did not write the Sword Verse. It merely provided an occasion for men who had already absorbed it.
What We Owe the Moment
The refusal to name an ideology is not neutrality. It is a choice—and it has consequences. Every time a politician calls an Islamic terrorist attack “senseless,” every time a news anchor reminds viewers that the attacker “does not represent Islam,” every time a Christian parrots the idea that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace, the space between a false perception and truth grows a little wider. Christians, of all people, should be the ones willing to close that space, even if it is uncomfortable to do so.
Jesus was willing to speak the truth. He rightly called Herod a “fox” (Luke 13:32) and he called the religious leaders of his day “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27). He cared more about reality than whom he offended (Luke 11:45–52). And Christians must follow Jesus’s example. We must be confident and comfortable saying, “Muslims who commit terrorism are acting consistently with their worldview and theological framework.” This is not hatred or fear, but it is historical and theological clarity.
The Quran, read on its own terms, in its most authoritative classical interpretation, commands armed warfare against unbelievers. That command does not come from the margins of the text. It comes from its legal and theological core—from the Medinan Muhammad, at the height of his power, issuing rulings that fourteen centuries of scholarship treated as binding. The men who acted on those rulings in Austin, New York, Norfolk, and West Bloomfield were not distorting their religion. They were, by the lights of the tradition they inherited, obeying it.
Endnotes
For the corroborating news reports, see for Austin (March 1, 2026): “FBI Provides Investigative Update on March 1 Austin Shooting,” Press Release, Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed June 8, 2026, https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/sanantonio/news/fbi-provides-investigative-update-on-march-1-austin-shooting; on iconography and timing, Elizabeth Wolfe, “Austin Shooting Suspect Is Being Investigated for Possible Terror Motive. Who Was He?,” CNN, March 3, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/03/us/ndiaga-diagne-austin-shooter-texas; see for New York City (March 7, 2026): Brian Mann, “Two Suspects Charged with Aiding ISIS in Attempted Explosives Attack in New York City,” National, NPR, March 9, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5742434/explosives-new-york-zohran-mamdani-isis; see for Norfolk, VA / Old Dominion University (March 12, 2026): Alaa Elassar, “What We Know about the Old Dominion University Gunman, a Veteran and Convicted ISIS Supporter,” CNN, March 15, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/15/us/mohamed-bailor-jalloh-old-dominion; see for West Bloomfield, MI (March 12, 2026): Cindy Von Quednow and Holmes Lybrand, “Michigan Synagogue Attack Was Hezbollah-Inspired Act of Terrorism, FBI Says,” CNN, March 30, 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/us/michigan-synagogue-attack-west-bloomfield-fbi-update. ↑
The warfare verses are Surah 2:178–179, 190–191, 193, 216–218, 244; 3:121–125, 140, 155, 165–167, 169, 173, 195; 4:71–72, 74–77, 84, 89, 91, 94–95, 100, 102, 104; 5:33, 35, 38; 8:5, 7, 9, 12, 15–17, 39, 42, 45, 59, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74–75; 9:5, 12–14, 16, 19–20, 24–26, 29, 36, 38–39, 41, 44, 52, 73, 81, 83, 86, 88, 92, 111, 120, 122–123; 16:110; 22:39, 78; 29:6, 69; 33:7, 18, 20, 25–26; 47:20; 48:16, 22; 59:2, 5–8, 14; 60:9; 61:4; 63:4; 64:14; 66:9; 73:20. See Don Richardson, Secrets of the Koran: Revealing Insights into Islam’s Holy Book (Ventura: Regal Books, 2003), 254 (appendix B, “The Koran’s 109 War Verses”). ↑
Surah 9, al-Tawbah (also Barā’ah, “Repentance” / “Disavowal”) is traditionally held to be among the last surahs revealed and is read as Medinan; this late dating is central to the abrogation argument that follows. According to Islamic hermeneutics, the latter revelations overrule previous ones when contradictions take place. David Cook places its revelation in 631—late in Muhammad’s life—and notes that it is the only chapter not opened by the formula bismillāh, a feature he reads as indicative of its martial character. David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 8–10. ↑
The eighty-six Meccan surahs are generally found in chapters 1, 6-7, 10-12, 14-21, 23, 25-32, 34-46, 50-54, 56, 67-75, 77-97, 100-109, 111-114, and the twenty-eight Medinan surahs are found in chapters 2-5, 8-9, 13, 22, 24, 33, 47-49, 55, 57-66, 76, 98-99, 110. This twofold division is agreed upon by all major translations of the Quran, and is found in the Al-Qurʾān al-Karīm, standard Cairo edition (Cairo: Amīrī Press [Būlāq], 10 July 1924). That said, the Meccan/Medinan classification is a traditional categorization of whole surahs, not a tidy chronological seam. Individual verses are sometimes assigned to the other period, and the canonical order of the text is not its order of revelation. The broadly accepted pattern is nonetheless real: the earlier Meccan material is largely devotional and forbearing, the later Medinan material is legislative and martial. Cook frames the trajectory candidly: “Islam did not begin with violence. Rather, it began as the peaceful proclamation of the absolute unity of God…”; it was in Medina that jihad arose, and “the revelations that constitute the Quran coincide with military activity.” David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 5–7; Reuven Firestone, Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47–98. ↑
Quran quotations follow the Sahih International translation throughout. Sahih International, trans., The Qur’an (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Abul-Qasim Publishing House, 1997). ↑
Both Surah 2:256 and 109:6 are among the verses the abrogationist tradition held to be superseded by Surah 9:5. See David Bukay, “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam,” Middle East Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Fall 2007). Surah 9:5 says, “. . . kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. . .” This verse addresses the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, but the Quran does not leave Jews and Christians untouched. Surah 9:29 commands Muslims to “Fight those who do not believe in God or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what God and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth [i.e., Islam] from those who were given the Scripture—[fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” The jizyah is a submission tax levied on non-Muslims living under Islamic rule. ↑
Bukay, “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam.” ↑
The interpretation of Surah 9, and of 9:5 in particular, has not been monolithic, and two dissenting lines deserve acknowledgment. First, a minority of classical exegetes and jurists read 9:5 as tied to its occasion – the Arab polytheists who had broken their treaties – rather than as open-ended command; more restrictive readings of war verses are associated especially with the Hanafi School. Second, even among scholars who applied abrogation (naskh), its scope was disputed: the number of verses said to be abrogated grew over time – from roughly 138 in al-Nahhās to as many as 238 in Ibn Salāma, a large share attributed to the Sword Verse alone – and some denied that the conciliatory verses were abrogated at all. These are genuine positions within classical scholarship, not extremist innovations; but they were the minority report. The reading of jihad as essentially defensive, by contrast, is largely a modern development advanced by nineteenth and twentieth-century reformers rather than recovered from the classical jurists. The Sudanese Muslim scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im is instructive: He argues for a peaceful, egalitarian Islam precisely by calling for the reform of a historical Sharia that, he concedes, taught aggressive jihad and the subordination of non-Muslims. On the classical doctrine and its modern reinterpretation, see Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1996), esp. 1-8; Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 161-181; and, on the abrogation counts, David Bukay “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam.” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2007. ↑
Ad-Dahhak bin Muzahim, quoted in Isma‘il ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-‘Azim, commentary on Surah 9:5, “Tafsir Ibn Kathir,” Quran.com, accessed May 28, 2026, https://quran.com/en/9:5/tafsirs/en-tafisr-ibn-kathir. See also “Tafsir-Ibn Kathir – Quran Interpretations for Surah 9. Al-Tawba | Alim.Org,” accessed June 1, 2026, https://www.alim.org/quran/tafsir/ibn-kathir/surah/9/5/. ↑
Al-Hasan al-Basri, quoted in Hud ibn Muhakkam al-Hawwari, Tafsir Kitab Allah al-‘Aziz, ed. Belhajj Said Sharifi (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1990), 2:97, on Surah 9:5. ↑
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, This Is the Promise of Allah, speech, June 29, 2014, accessed June 1, 2026; Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, “Indeed Your Lord Is Ever Watchful,” statement released September 22, 2014, 11–12; “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” Dabiq, no. 4 (Dhul-Hijjah 1435 / October 2014): 14-17; and “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You,” Dabiq, no. 15 (Shawwal 1437 / July 2016): 30-33. ↑
Cole Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State, Analysis Paper 19 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2015), 7-11. ↑
On the caliphal monopoly over offensive jihad and the Dār al-Islām / Dār al-Ḥarb division, see Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 71–90; David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 49–72. ↑
On the doctrinal shift, see Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate. ↑
The clearest statement of the doctrine is the law itself. ‘Umdat al-Salik – the classical Shafi’i manual translated as Reliance of the Traveller, and the first translation of a standard Islamic reference into a European language to be certified by Cairo’s al-Azhar, the Sunni world’s foremost seat of learning – defines jihad as “war against non-Muslims” and rules that the Muslim ruler wars against Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians until they accept Islam or pay the poll tax (jizya) in a state of submission. Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller (ʿUmdat al-Salik), trans. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, rev. ed. (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1994), 599–609. Western historians of the doctrine agree that offensive jihad – the armed expansion of the abode of Islam – was the dominant juristic position throughout the classical era: Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1996), 1-8; Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 84-117; David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), chaps. 1–3, who further shows the spiritual “greater jihad” tradition to be comparatively late and weakly attested. The point is conceded even by Muslim reformers: An-Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation, chap. 7, grants that historical Sharia sanctioned aggressive jihad and the subjugation of non-Muslims, and argues on precisely that ground that it must be reformed. This is not to assert unanimity; for some minority sources that paint Islam fundamentally as a religion of peace, see the discussion in H. Morgan Nix, “Is Islam a Religion of Peace and Tolerance? It Depends on What Sources Are Cited,” Christ Over All, June 5, 2026, https://christoverall.com/article/concise/is-islam-a-religion-of-peace-and-tolerance-it-depends-on-what-sources-are-cited/. ↑
The obvious rejoinder here is the medieval Crusades, but medieval Christian holy war only sharpens the contrast. When Christians acted as antagonists, their ways were antithetical to Jesus’s teaching and the New Testament canon. Rather, so much of Crusade theology was assembled from papal authority and a selective appeal to Old Testament precedent, and later Christianity has largely repudiated it precisely because it cut against the unified message of the canon. To wage jihad is to follow Muhammad’s own example and the consensus of the classical legal tradition; to wage an antagonistic crusade was to depart from Christ. Christian holy war is an aberration from its founder; Islamic jihad is fidelity to its own. See Nabeel Qureshi, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016); Raymond Ibrahim, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (New York: Da Capo Press, 2018). ↑
