The Awe That Faith Creates

The general matter here, then, is that by reason of spiritual preparedness those with less equipment will at times become far stronger, at least in their fervour, than the other side; and a smaller party can at times overcome a larger one for that reason. For by a spiritual cause Allah (swt) makes it easy for a man to desire shahādah. We have this great notion of shahādah in Islam, which is a most powerful idea.

Indeed it is so powerful that people misuse it. They want to attain shahādah in the streets of London by killing innocent people. That is how people abuse such things. But in a war, shahādah is very powerful indeed, for one is not losing a man for nothing; one is not losing oneself for nothing.

So what īmān does for an army that has good īmān, and for a force that has faith with it, is to create an awe. It is almost a halo about them, which the enemy sees: that these people are formidable, that they have a power the enemy cannot conceive of, which is in truth the power of īmān that they are seeing. And that in itself shakes the enemy, which is very powerful.

So, though Allah (swt) says plainly here that you must be prepared, the mufassirīn mention that this does not mean you must be prepared in order always to go to war upon the smallest pretexts. No: one must try to defuse matters, and to have treaties in place to do so. That is better than the other.