The Call That Does Not Stop at the Minaret

From the desk of D.E. Isaacson

Understanding the conflict over Israel requires understanding the theology that shapes it. This essay examines what that theology actually says.

I.   The Sound Itself

There is a moment, if you have ever been in a Muslim city at dawn, when the first call to prayer rises from a minaret before the sky has fully decided to be light. The voice carries across rooftops and courtyards, unhurried, certain of itself, older than any building it echoes off. Even a non-Muslim, hearing it for the first time, tends to go still. Something in the human ear recognizes it as significant before the mind has formed an opinion about what it means.

The adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, has been described by musicians, travelers, and writers across centuries as one of the most haunting sounds the human voice can produce. That judgment stands. It is not the product of sentiment or cultural deference; it is an acoustic fact. The melodic mode, the open vowels, the way a skilled muezzin bends the phrases around silence: these things work on the nervous system before ideology gets a word in.

And yet. The adhan is not merely a beautiful noise. It is a text, and the text has a meaning, and the meaning does not end at the edge of the mosque courtyard. To listen to it only as music is to mishear it. To refuse to listen to it at all, out of suspicion, is to understand it no better. The honest position is to hear both things at once: the beauty and the claim.

II.   What the Words Actually Say

The standard adhan contains the following declarations, repeated in sequence: God is great (Allahu Akbar, four times). I testify that there is no god but God. I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. Come to prayer. Come to success. God is great. There is no god but God.

That final phrase, “come to success” (hayya ‘ala al-falah), is worth pausing on. The Arabic word falah does not mean merely personal salvation or private spiritual flourishing. In classical Islamic usage it carries a social and civilizational dimension: the success of the community of believers, the Ummah, in ordering the world rightly. The call is not only an invitation to individuals. It is a summons to a collective project.

This is not a tendentious reading. It is the reading that classical Islamic scholarship has always given, and that mosque sermons across the Muslim world continue to give. The prayer is the visible tip of a theology that makes no sharp distinction between the spiritual and the political, between the personal submission of the believer and the ordering of society under divine law.

III.   The Qur’an’s Own Framing

The Qur’an is not a uniform document. It was revealed, according to Islamic belief, over approximately twenty-three years, and its tone changes markedly between its earlier and later portions. The earlier suras, revealed in Mecca when Muhammad and his followers were a minority community, tend toward the spiritual, the contemplative, the universally human. The later suras, revealed in Medina after Muhammad had become a political and military leader, tend toward the legislative, the martial, the explicitly political.

Classical Islamic jurisprudence developed the doctrine of naskh, abrogation, to handle apparent contradictions between these two phases. The principle is that later revelation supersedes earlier revelation where they conflict. This matters enormously, because it is the later, Medinan suras that contain the most explicit statements about the relationship between Islam and non-Muslim societies.

Surah 9, At-Tawbah (The Repentance), is widely held by traditional scholars to be among the last major suras revealed, and it contains some of the most unambiguous language in the entire text. Verse 5, known in the tradition as the “sword verse,” reads:

When the sacred months have passed, kill the polytheists wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.— Qur’an 9:5

Verse 29 of the same sura extends this to People of the Book, Jews and Christians, with a specific political arrangement: they may live under Islamic rule on payment of the jizya, the poll tax, “while they are subdued.” The Arabic word used, saghirun, means in a state of humiliation or smallness. This is not incidental phrasing.

Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day, and who do not consider forbidden what Allah and His Messenger have made forbidden, and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture, until they give the jizya willingly while they are subdued.— Qur’an 9:29

Surah 8:39 states the ambition plainly:

Fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion is entirely for Allah.— Qur’an 8:39

The word fitnah here means discord, strife, or the presence of competing religious and social orders. The goal described is not coexistence. It is the resolution of fitnah through the universal dominance of Islam. These verses are not obscure. They are central to the tradition. Every classically trained Muslim scholar knows them. The question has never been whether they exist; the question has always been how to apply them, and in what circumstances.

IV.   The Hadith: The Prophet’s Own Words

The Hadith literature, the collected sayings and actions of Muhammad, carries near-scriptural authority in Sunni Islam. The two most authoritative collections, Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, are called sahih, meaning sound or authentic, and they are treated as the most reliable guides to prophetic intent after the Qur’an itself.

On the question of Islam’s relationship to the rest of the world, the Hadith are not ambiguous.

I have been ordered to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, establish prayer, and pay the zakat. If they do this, they have protected their blood and wealth from me, except for the right of Islam over them, and their reckoning will be with Allah.— Sahih Bukhari, Book 2, Hadith 25

This is not the statement of a man describing a private spiritual path. It is the statement of a political and military leader describing a program. The phrase “their blood and wealth” is protected only by acceptance of Islam, or by the subordinate status of dhimmitude. The universalist intention is stated, not implied.

Sahih Muslim contains the famous hadith describing the letters Muhammad sent to the rulers of neighboring powers, including the Byzantine Emperor and the Persian Sassanid Emperor, inviting them to embrace Islam. The implication, consistent across the tradition, is that the invitation precedes but does not replace the military option. The sequence is: invitation, then, if refused, the sword. This sequence became the formal doctrine of classical jurisprudence.

V.   Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb

Classical Islamic jurisprudence, building on these scriptural foundations, divided the world into two domains. Dar al-Islam, the Abode of Islam, encompasses territories under Muslim rule where Islamic law governs. Dar al-Harb, the Abode of War, encompasses everything else. The name is not metaphorical. It describes the juridical status of non-Muslim territories: they are, in principle, in a state of ongoing, if sometimes suspended, conflict with the Islamic world until they are incorporated into Dar al-Islam.

A third category, Dar al-Ahd or Dar al-Sulh (the Abode of Covenant or Treaty), was developed by some jurists to describe territories with which the Islamic world had formal peace agreements. But this was always understood as a temporary or conditional state, not a permanent resolution. The direction of history, in this framework, runs one way: toward the expansion of Dar al-Islam.

The mechanism of that expansion is da’wa, the call or invitation, which gives its name to the adhan itself. Da’wa is the obligation of every Muslim to invite others to Islam. It is a missionary imperative built into the religion at the structural level, not as a secondary feature but as a core obligation, parallel to prayer and zakat. The adhan, sounding five times a day, is the da’wa made audible. It is the invitation, ringing out over Dar al-Harb, calling it toward Dar al-Islam.

VI.   What Is Preached: From Gaza to Birmingham

It is tempting to locate these doctrines safely in the medieval past, as artifacts of a jurisprudence that modern Muslims have quietly set aside. The evidence does not support this comfort.

In Gaza, the sermons of Hamas-affiliated imams are recorded and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute and others. They are explicit. A 2023 sermon at the Al-Abrar mosque in Rafah stated that the struggle was not merely territorial but civilizational: “We are not fighting for a piece of land. We are fighting for the victory of Islam over the entire world.” This is not the fringe. Hamas’s founding charter, even in its revised 2017 version, frames the conflict in terms drawn directly from the tradition described above.

In Iran, the doctrine is not merely preached from mosques; it is constitutional. The Khomeinist principle of Wilayat al-Faqih, the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, is explicitly designed to be the germ of a universal Islamic order. Ayatollah Khomeini wrote in his foundational texts that an Islamic government is not merely for Iran: “Islam’s government is not limited to a particular place or time.” The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force exists to operationalize this across borders.

In Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi and Salafi institutions that have exported their theology across the Muslim world since the 1970s, funded by petrodollars and distributed through madrassas from Pakistan to West Africa to Southeast Asia, teach a version of Islam in which the universalist mission is not softened. The doctrine of al-wala’ wa al-bara’, loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of non-Muslims, is a standard element of the curriculum.

In Afghanistan under the Taliban, Islamic law is not an aspiration but an administered reality. The Taliban’s statements about their intentions for the world beyond Afghanistan’s borders are consistent with classical doctrine: da’wa first, then whatever follows.

And in Birmingham, England: the Birmingham Central Mosque, the Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith UK, and numerous smaller institutions have at various times hosted speakers whose recorded sermons describe Britain as part of Dar al-Harb, describe the goal of making Britain part of Dar al-Islam, and describe this not as violence but as da’wa, as invitation, as the proper and obligatory activity of every Muslim living in a non-Muslim country. A 2016 Channel 4 documentary, “Islam’s Non-Believers,” documented preachers in Birmingham explicitly condemning apostasy from Islam. A 2017 report by the Henry Jackson Society identified multiple mosques in the UK distributing literature calling for the subordination of non-Muslims.

The argument made by Western Muslim advocacy organizations, and dutifully repeated in much mainstream commentary, is that these are minority views, unrepresentative of British Muslims as a whole. This is partly true at the individual level. Most Muslims in Birmingham are not consciously working toward the Islamization of Britain. But the doctrine is not a minority position within the tradition. It is the mainstream position of classical Islamic jurisprudence, and it is what is taught in the institutions that train imams and religious teachers. Individual Muslims may be moderate; the institutional theology frequently is not.

VII.   Beauty and Claim, Together

One thing must be stated plainly before anything else: this essay is not a judgment against Islam, and it is not an argument against Muslims. If someone reads everything written here, considers the tradition honestly, and concludes that Islam is the truth and wishes to join the Ummah, there is nothing to object to in that. Conversion is a personal matter. A world that becomes more Islamic through genuine conviction is a world in which the tradition has made its case and people have freely accepted it. That is a legitimate outcome. The argument here is not about Islam. It is about whether the West is capable of seeing clearly what is in front of it.

There was a time when I heard the adhan as pure sound: a voice rising over rooftops at dawn, something ancient and unhurried, belonging to a world I was passing through as a visitor. I still find it beautiful. That has not changed. What has changed is what I hear inside the beauty.

A civilization is being called, loudly and explicitly, toward a total transformation of its social and legal order, and it is responding by congratulating itself on its commitment to cultural diversity and its refusal to judge any culture by any standard other than its own.

The call is not subtle. The tradition states its intentions in its foundational texts, repeats them in its Friday sermons, encodes them in its constitutions, and broadcasts them five times a day from minarets that now stand in every major Western city. And the prevailing response is to celebrate this as enrichment while designating anyone who reads the texts aloud as a racist or a bigot.

Most people in the West do not want to join the Ummah. They do not want to live under Islamic law. They do not want their daughters to navigate a social order structured around female subordination, or their apostates to live in fear, or their blasphemers to require police protection. If you asked them directly, the overwhelming majority would say so without hesitation. But they have been carefully trained not to connect that preference to any examination of what Islamic doctrine actually teaches, because such examination has been designated as Islamophobia, which is to say, as racism, which is to say, as something a decent person does not do.

The result is a civilization sleepwalking toward a confrontation it has refused to think about. The tradition is not sleepwalking. It has been awake for fourteen centuries, and it knows exactly where it is going. It says so every morning, before the sky has decided to be light, in a voice of extraordinary beauty, over cities it intends, in time, to call its own.

You do not have to hate that voice to understand what it is saying. You do not have to fear Muslims, most of whom are living ordinary lives with no conscious program of civilizational conquest, to take seriously the institutions and doctrines that shape the world they inhabit. You only have to listen. Actually listen. To the words, not just the melody.

The call does not stop at the minaret. It never did. And it is not stopping now.