261026 – Islam’s Doctrine of World Domination

by | Oct 31, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts | 0 comments

The House of War and the Long Patience

Thomas Lee Abshier, ND ·

A Lebanese Witness on the Rogan Show

In a July 2026 conversation with Joe Rogan, the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad made a claim most Americans have been trained not to say aloud. The primary canonical requirement of Islam, he said, is to render the entire world Islamic. He was careful to add that this does not mean every Muslim believes it, or every Muslim leader. His claim was about the canon — what the religion’s own authoritative law teaches — not about the man next door.

Saad is not a distant commentator. He was born in Lebanon to a Jewish family, in a country that was then majority Christian, and he watched it become majority Muslim within his own lifetime. His family fled. He knows what he is describing from the inside of its consequences.

He built his case in four steps. First, classical Islam divides the world into two houses: the House of Islam, where Islamic law rules, and the House of War, which is every land not yet under it. Second, land once ruled by Islam belongs to Islam forever, which is why jihadists still speak of reclaiming Spain and why the canon cannot accept a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Third, every one of the 57 nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation once had no Muslims at all; Islam arrived, and in time it ruled. Fourth, the process has no deadline. It may take five years or five hundred. Applied to America, the question is not whether Sharia arrives tomorrow morning, but whether, if Dearborn were repeated in fifty or a hundred cities over two or three centuries, we would still be living in the same country — and whether that would be good.

I stand with Saad’s central thesis. Islam, as its classical law defines it and as its history has enacted it, is a religion with a political program, and the program is universal sovereignty. That program is not the private faith of a Muslim neighbor, and I will say plainly below what follows for him. But the program is real, it is patient, and a nation that will not name it cannot weigh it. There are places where Saad’s wording outruns the evidence, and I will mark them. None of them, when examined, overturns what he said.

The Two Houses: What the Canon Teaches

Saad used the terms dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, and dar al-harb, the abode of war. They mean what he said they mean. Under the classical doctrine, Muslim rulers had a duty to bring the abode of war under Islamic sovereignty, and a state of war was presumed between the two, though not every moment of it required open fighting (Wikipedia summary of Khadduri and the Oxford Dictionary of Islam). Trade and travel crossed the line under grants of temporary safe-conduct. The war was a legal status, not a constant battle.

Here is the first place to be precise. The two-houses vocabulary does not appear in the Quran or the hadith. Early jurists devised it roughly a century after Muhammad, to give legal form to ongoing conquests; the first use is traced to Abu Hanifa and his students in Iraq. Later jurists added a third category, dar al-‘ahd or dar al-sulh, the abode of treaty, for non-Muslim lands at peace with Muslim rulers. Many contemporary Muslim jurists now treat the binary as inapplicable, and some count the West as part of the abode of Islam, because Muslims there may practice and spread their faith freely. Reformers such as the Indian scholar Wahiduddin Khan have argued that the whole scheme is a jurists’ invention foreign to the Quran’s view of mankind (CPS Global).

So when Saad says “that’s literally the words,” he is right about the words and imprecise about their pedigree. They are canon in the sense of classical law, not scripture.

Now the qualification must itself be qualified, and this is where the reassuring version of the story usually stops too soon.

  1. Classical law is the canon for most of the Muslim world. The four Sunni schools of law are not marginal opinions. They are the received jurisprudence that shaped Islamic governance for a thousand years, and they are still taught. A doctrine need not be in the Quran to be authoritative, any more than the Nicene Creed must be in the Gospels to bind most of Christendom.
  2. The scripture under the doctrine is real. The verses most cited for a standing program are Surah 9:5 and 9:29, the second commanding Muslims to fight the People of the Book until they pay the jizya, the tax levied on Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule, and are humbled. Muslim scholars divide over whether these verses are bound to Muhammad’s own campaigns or are standing commands. Both readings live inside Islam. The jurists built the two houses on the second.
  3. The modern reclassification changes the circumstance, not the goal. The scholars who now call the West the abode of treaty or of Islam do so because Muslims are free here and treaties bind. That is a change in what is permitted now. It is not, in most cases, a repudiation of the conviction that Islamic law is the rightful law for all mankind. The goal is deferred, not renounced — and deferral is exactly what Saad said: they have all the time in the world.

The structural point stands. Islam, unlike Christianity, came into the world as both a faith and a state. Muhammad was prophet, lawgiver, judge, and commander. The religion’s founding pattern includes the conquest and governance of territory, and its law was written for a ruling community. A faith built that way carries a political program in its bones, whether a given believer carries it in his heart or not.

Once Islamic, Always Islamic: Spain and the Holy Land

Saad’s second claim is that land once under Islamic rule must, by the canon, return to it. The clearest evidence is that the men who take the canon most seriously say so, repeatedly, by name.

Muslim rulers held much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 until the fall of Granada in 1492. Five centuries later, al-Andalus remains a live grievance in jihadist literature. Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden, taught that the obligation to recover lost Islamic territory applies to al-Andalus (JCPA). Bin Laden himself, in a 1994 letter to the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, prayed that the flag of Allah would rise again over all stolen Islamic land from Palestine to Andalus. Ayman al-Zawahiri described jihad as liberating every territory that was once Muslim, from al-Andalus to Iraq (Real Instituto Elcano). After the 2017 Barcelona attacks, the Islamic State announced that Andalusia would again become a land of Islam (Il Foglio).

The same logic governs the land of Israel. The Jewish people’s tie to that land runs back three thousand years, through Abraham, David, and the prophets. Yet in the classical framework, the fact that Muslims conquered it in the seventh century makes it Islamic land. Jews may live there as a protected and taxed minority; a sovereign Jewish state on that soil is, in this reading, an occupation of the abode of Islam by definition, whatever its borders. This is why the conflict has resisted every land-for-peace formula. A dispute over borders can be negotiated. A dispute over whether the other party may exist as a state at all cannot.

Here too the claim needs one honest mark. The “once ours, always ours” principle is articulated most loudly by jihadist movements, and ordinary Spanish Muslims are not planning a reconquest. But the qualifier must be weighed against what it concedes. The jihadists did not invent the principle. They inherited it from the classical law of land and sovereignty, and they cite it because it carries authority with their audience. A movement on the fringe that appeals to the center’s own law is not proof that the center agrees. It is proof that the center’s law has not been repudiated.

The Record: Every Muslim Land Was Once Something Else

Saad’s third claim is arithmetic. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has 57 members; 56 are United Nations states and the 57th is Palestine, and 48 or 49 of them are Muslim-majority (Wikipedia). He is right that none of them began Muslim. Islam is fourteen centuries old, and every land it now holds was once pagan, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian.

The Christian cases are the ones that should stop a Christian reader. North Africa was the home of Augustine and Tertullian. Syria was where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). Egypt was the church of Athanasius, evangelized, by its own tradition, by Mark.

Egypt. The Arab armies arrived in 641. Muslims did not become a majority for roughly three centuries, and the change came mostly through the conversion of the Coptic population rather than its replacement (Minority Rights Group). Scholars date the tipping point anywhere from the ninth century to the fourteenth. The mechanism was not chiefly the sword. It was the status of the dhimmi, the protected non-Muslim: a heavy poll tax, rules on dress, and restrictions on building or repairing churches. By the time the British arrived in 1882, Copts were about a tenth of the country.

Lebanon. Saad’s own country is the case he knows firsthand, and it needs the most care with numbers. Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, because the count itself would upset the sectarian distribution of political offices. The country was once majority Christian; estimates today run from about 28 percent (Pew, 2020) to about 35 percent, with the U.S. State Department near 31 (International Christian Concern; L’Orient Today). Every estimate agrees that Christians are now a minority. But the causes in Lebanon were not conversion. They were civil war, emigration — roughly a third of the Christian population is said to have left after 1975 — the Palestinian influx, and differences in birth rate.

Indonesia. Saad named Indonesia too, and here the honest record runs against the word “violent.” Islam reached the archipelago mostly through traders and Sufi teachers over several centuries, not through conquest.

So Saad’s examples do not all show the same mechanism. Some lands were conquered, some taxed, some converted by trade and marriage, and some changed by war, flight, and the cradle. The qualification matters, because a reader who hears only “violent” will dismiss the whole argument the first time he meets Indonesia.

But look at what all these cases share. Whatever the route in, the direction is one way. Once Islam governs, the non-Muslim minority shrinks, slowly or quickly, and it almost never recovers. Spain is the great exception, and it took nearly eight centuries of war to make it one. The thesis does not depend on the sword. It depends on the ratchet.

America: The Honest Numbers and the Real Question

Saad did not predict Sharia in America tomorrow. He asked a question about two or three hundred years. That question deserves both the honest numbers and an honest reading of them.

The national numbers are small. Pew estimated about 3.45 million Muslims in the United States in 2017, about 1.1 percent of the population, and projects about 8.1 million, or 2.1 percent, by 2050 (Pew Research Center). Growth comes mainly from immigration and a younger, higher-fertility population. Pew also found that about as many Americans leave Islam as convert to it. Anyone who says America is about to be outnumbered is lying by proportion.

The local numbers are different. Dearborn, Michigan, became majority Arab American in the 2020 census, and elected its first Arab American mayor in 2021 (Detroit Free Press). Whether it is majority Muslim is not known, because the census does not ask about religion and some of Dearborn’s Arab families are Christian, but the paper reporting the census thought it likely. Neighboring Hamtramck elected a Muslim-majority city council in 2015 and an entirely Muslim council in 2021. Paterson, New Jersey, and Minneapolis, which Saad also named, have large and concentrated Muslim communities.

Two further qualifications are fair. Dearborn’s Muslims are citizens, and electing their neighbors to office is how a republic is supposed to work. And a straight-line projection over three centuries is not a forecast; it is a thought experiment. Assimilation, intermarriage, secularization, and conversion to Christ could each bend the line.

Now the qualification of the qualification. The national percentage is the wrong measure, because governance is local before it is national. A movement does not need 51 percent of a nation; it needs 51 percent of a city council, a school board, a county commission, and then of a congressional district. The relevant question is not how many Muslims there are, but how concentrated they are and which law they bring into the public square. Saad’s thought experiment is honest precisely because it is framed as a question: if the pattern of Dearborn repeated in fifty or a hundred cities, would we still be living in the same country? That depends entirely on whether those communities carry the classical program or have laid it down. And the record of the last fourteen centuries does not let us assume the answer.

Why the Concern Remains Plausible

After every qualification has been made, the concern does not dissolve. It stands on five supports, and each is a link between doctrine and behavior, not a guess about anyone’s heart.

The doctrine is built into the institutions. The OIC’s own charter commits it to preserving Islamic values. Its member states adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990, which makes every right it lists subject to Islamic law and names Sharia the sole reference for interpreting it. That is not a terrorist pamphlet. It is the considered statement of most of the Muslim world’s governments that their law sits above any universal standard of rights.

The practical test is the dissenter. Ask what happens to the man who leaves. In a number of Muslim-majority states, apostasy is a crime, and in several it can carry death; blasphemy laws, as in Pakistan, are used against Christians. Where the classical law governs, the freedom to change one’s faith ends. That is the clearest measure of what a political program would mean if it came to govern here.

Fear does the work of law. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the attack that cost him an eye in 2022, and the Charlie Hebdo murders in 2015 have taught the West to self-censor. A program need not win a vote if it can make its critics silent. Most Americans who read this essay will feel a flicker of hesitation about sharing it. That flicker is the evidence.

Money follows the program. Gulf states with official Islamist establishments have spent heavily abroad on mosques, schools, and university programs. Qatar has for years been among the largest foreign donors to American universities. Funding does not prove an agenda, but money spent across borders by governments that enforce Sharia at home is not spent without purpose.

The patience is the design. The dhimmi system was never a quick conquest. It was a slow one: a tax, a ceiling on churches, a social cost to remaining Christian, applied across generations until the minority thinned to a remnant. That is what Saad meant by the line he attributed to the Taliban — you have the watches; we have the time. A civilization that thinks in election cycles is poorly built to notice a program that thinks in centuries.

There is also the plain intuition every reader has, and it should not be talked out of him. A religion whose founder was a head of state, whose law covers commerce, marriage, crime, and war, and whose classical jurists divided the world by who rules it, is not a private faith that happens to have political adherents. It is a political order that has a faith at its center. When such a system grows inside a constitutional republic, the question of which law will govern the public square is not paranoia. It is the obvious question.

Two Ways of Filling the World

A thoughtful Muslim will answer all of this with a fair objection, and he deserves to hear it in its strongest form: Christianity also means to fill the world. Your Lord commanded you to make disciples of all nations. And Christendom conquered too — the Crusades, the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the colonial missions. You condemn in us what you excuse in yourselves.

The objection is right that both faiths are universal. It fails on the architecture. Compare the two systems not by their lists of doctrines but by what each is built to do.

Christianity’s expansion aims at the heart, and its standard forbids the sword. “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). “Put up again thy sword into his place” (Matthew 26:52). “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). When Christians coerced faith, they broke their own standard, and the standard itself gave later Christians the ground to condemn them and reform. A forced conversion is no conversion at all, because faith that is compelled is not faith. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve” (Joshua 24:15) assumes a man free to choose otherwise.

Classical Islam’s expansion aims at sovereignty, and its standard commands the subjugation. The heart may follow over generations, under the tax and the ceiling on churches, but the law comes first. A Muslim who wants to condemn the jizya and the abode of war must argue against his own classical jurisprudence. Many brave Muslims do exactly that, and I honor them. But they are arguing uphill against their canon, while a Christian who condemns the Inquisition is arguing downhill, with the words of Christ behind him.

That is the distinction Saad’s critics refuse to see. It is not that Muslims are worse men than Christians. It is that the two systems point their adherents in different directions, and over centuries, direction becomes destiny.

What This Means for the Muslim Next Door

The center of everything this ministry teaches is that God is not watching our lives from outside. He is living them from within. Every person’s experience — his fear, his devotion, his love for his children — is God’s own experience of the world. “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) is a description, not a metaphor. We keep God’s law not to earn His favor but because He feels every choice we make, and love does not wound the one it loves. (I have set out the argument in one page in the Premise Change handout.)

That teaching settles how a Christian must stand toward a Muslim. The devout Muslim who prays five times a day is not my enemy. God is living his life, feeling his sincerity, and feeling the weight of the system that holds him. He is a captive to rescue, not an adversary to defeat. To hate him would be to hate what God is experiencing. But to stay silent about the program that binds him and seeks to bind my country would be a failure of the same love. A neighbor who will not tell you the truth about the road you are on does not love you.

So I oppose the program and I love the man, and I do not find these in tension. They are one act.

What We Should Do

Understanding is not the end of the matter. A Christian who sees the times must also know what ought to be done (1 Chronicles 12:32).

  1. Name the program plainly, and name it as a program. Every sentence that criticizes the classical political doctrine should be able to stand beside a sentence of love for the Muslim neighbor. Speak both, every time. Do not let the label “Islamophobia” silence the first, and do not let anger crowd out the second.
  2. Distinguish politics from religion in law. The Constitution forbids any religious test for office (Article VI), and it should. But federal law already bars naturalization to anyone advocating the overthrow of the government or belonging to a totalitarian party (8 U.S.C. §1424). That is the right precedent: a program to replace the Constitution with Sharia is a political program, and it may be treated as one, without asking anyone what he believes about God.
  3. Tell your Muslim neighbors about Christ. Not by argument first, but by friendship, hospitality, and the story of a Father who came to pay the debt Himself. Muslims are coming to Christ in numbers unseen in fourteen centuries, and they come most often through a Christian who loved them.
  4. Recover the faith that built the West. Lebanon’s Christians were not mostly converted away. They were lost to war, to flight, and to the cradle. A church that no longer believes, no longer marries, and no longer raises children cannot hold ground against anyone. The answer to a patient program is a patient, faithful people.

I believe Gad Saad told the truth on the Rogan show, with a few words sharper than the record allows and a central claim the record bears out. I am not afraid of Islam’s patience. I am afraid of our forgetfulness. The God who lives our lives from within has not abandoned the world to any program of men, and He does not need the sword to win it.

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.” — Zechariah 4:6

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