Editor’s note: Today Scott Lively begins a new column series he describes as “legal analyses at the intersection of Church and State.” Look for it each weekend at WND.com.
Islam’s essential purpose in America is conquest, driven by Sharia law. This is the plain reading of classical Islamic jurisprudence, which divides the world into the house of Islam and the house of war and treats the expansion of the former as a religious duty. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were not an aberration or a distortion of Islam – they were the system operating as designed.
Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was in Washington, D.C., at a pro-family conference hosted by Concerned Women for America. I had spent the previous days combing through captured Nazi records from WWII at the National Archives for the 4th edition of my book, “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” – in part to document Hitler’s Muslim SS Battalion. On the morning of 9/11, I left my car outside the Beltway and took the subway in. Unbeknownst to me, the Pentagon was struck as I passed beneath it.
I arrived at the meeting on the 12th floor to find everyone clustered around a television watching the second tower burn. We looked out the window, saw the black column of smoke rising from the Pentagon and knew that jihad had come to America.
Eleven years later, on Sept. 11, 2012, I was again in D.C. I planned to film an anti-Obama commentary on the 12th at the White House with Pastor Terry Jones, who held an “International Judge Mohamed Day” at his church. He canceled our event when Hillary Clinton scapegoated him for triggering the Benghazi attack.
Unfathomably, NYC has just elected a jihadist as mayor. Mamdani’s rise to power showcases Islamo-Marxism as a new form of jihad, better suited to conquering America. While we might think of this as a culture war, it’s actually a legal matter.
The real target of 9/11 was our law. The very first law on the books of the United States is the Declaration of Independence – the foundational legal instrument that establishes the authority of everything that follows – the Constitution, the statutes, the courts. Most critically, it grounds that authority in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
That phrase reflects a shared Jewish-Christian understanding that emerged after the Reformation. Before it, Western law flowed from Rome – papal authority, scholasticism and the divine right of kings. The Reformation cracked that monopoly. Christian Hebraists such as Hugo Grotius, John Selden and John Locke went further and rebuilt natural law on the Hebrew Bible. Jews and Christians could cooperate on a common biblical legal foundation sufficient for a working rules-based international order while agreeing to disagree on the deity of Jesus Christ and diverse sectarian doctrines.
That foundation became constitutionalism: government by consent, rights endowed by the Creator, not granted by the state or an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Declaration made the U.S. Constitution possible.
On 9/11, that legal order was attacked by men operating under Sharia, not a body of statutes like the U.S. Code, but a comprehensive legal-theological framework claiming divine sovereignty over every domain of human life – worship, family, commerce, crime and governance. Its primary sources are the Quran, treated as the literal, uncreated word of God, and the Sunnah, the recorded words and deeds of Muhammad. Classical jurists then built upon those sources through consensus and analogical reasoning, producing schools of law that still govern much of the Muslim world today.
The most consequential feature of classical Sharia for this analysis is its division of the world into dar al-Islam, the house of Islam, and dar al-Harb, the house of war. This is a legal classification with operational consequences. The duty of jihad – armed struggle to expand the house of Islam and subdue the house of war – is treated in classical jurisprudence as a communal obligation. The Quran itself commands it: Surah 9, verse 29 instructs Muslims to fight the People of the Book – Jews and Christians – until they pay the jizya, the poll tax of submission, “while they are humbled.”
Osama Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa made this framework explicit, naming the “Judeo-Christian alliance” as the occupying enemy and framed the attacks as a religious-legal duty, not a political grievance. The hijackers were not common criminals acting from personal malice. They were executing a judgment rendered under an alternative legal system that regards the American constitutional order as illegitimate by definition because it refuses to subordinate itself to Sharia.
But the collision runs deeper. It is a dispute over biblical law. Islam’s claim to authority rests on the doctrine of tahrif – the claim that the earlier scriptures were corrupted. And the essence of that corruption, in the Islamic reading, is genealogical. The Bible identifies Isaac, not Ishmael, as the heir of God’s covenant with Abraham – the line through which the land, the kingship and the messianic throne are delegated. Islam reverses that. It holds that Ishmael was the true heir, that he helped Abraham build the Kaaba in Mecca, and that Muhammad, descending from Ishmael through Kedar, is the legitimate restorer of Abraham’s authority rather than a rival claimant.
That is why the sacrifice narrative is rewritten too. The son bound on the altar must be Ishmael, not Isaac, or the inheritance story collapses. Strip Isaac out of the covenant line and the entire structure of biblical law – the promise, the land grant, the throne – passes through the Arab line instead. The Quran’s self-authentication as God’s final revelation depends on this prior claim: that the Bible got the genealogy wrong, and that the correction restores the true delegation of governmental power on earth.
So September 11 attack was most essentially an assault on the legal foundation of America – a foundation that traces directly to the biblical covenant line Islam denies. America’s first law, the Declaration of Independence, grounds authority in the Creator who endowed rights. Sharia grounds authority in a divine command that requires the Bible to be wrong about who inherited that authority.
That is the collision – a matter of law.
