The Alcoran or the Sword

The Alcoran or the Sword is the name given to Joseph Smith’s comparison between his own position and an ultimatum he associated with Muhammad: leave the Mormons free to preach, or face the force by which they would defend and establish their religion. The expression compresses a conditional threat into a claim of religious self-protection, making the prospect of violence part of the language of peace.

The ultimatum and its logic

Joseph Smith’s statement sets out two sharply opposed outcomes. If others left the Mormons alone, they would preach peacefully; if others interfered, he said, they would use the sword and defeat their enemies. He invoked the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean to give the threat a sweeping geographic scale, then named the choice as Joseph Smith or the sword. The movement from conditional defense to expansive bloodshed is central to the expression’s force: it frames violence as something opponents would bring upon themselves, even as it announces the speaker’s willingness to wield it.

The appeal to Muhammad’s supposed peace-or-sword ultimatum lends the statement a precedent and a rhetorical identity. Joseph Smith casts himself as a comparable religious leader, not merely as someone reacting to a local dispute. The expression therefore works on two levels: it warns outsiders against interference and declares that religious authority may be defended by force. Its conditional structure makes the threat sound responsive, but the threatened scale gives it an independent, confrontational force.

Words, claims, and contested accounts

The book places this forceful declaration within a wider history of statements whose authority and reliability remain disputed. In its account of the deaths of William Dunn and the Howland brothers, Jack Sumner and the Colorado River guide Otis “Dock” Marston challenged the prevailing attribution of the killings to the Shivwit tribe. Most historians and scholars, including Wallace Stegner, dismissed the skeptics. In 1980, Wesley P. Larsen found a letter dated February 17, 1883, that had remained in an old trunk in Toquerville for ninety-seven years and suggested that the men had been killed in the LDS ward house there. Larsen’s hypothesis was also disparaged; the prevailing account rested largely on Jacob Hamblin’s and Major John Wesley Powell’s descriptions of the Shivwits’ alleged confessions, accounts the book cautions readers to treat skeptically. These later controversies do not verify Joseph Smith’s declaration; they show how the book distinguishes a powerful assertion from the evidence needed to establish what happened.

A different conflict over testimony appears in the account of the Lafferty murders. During the drive from Salt Lake toward Nevada, Ricky Knapp asked Ron and Dan Lafferty what had happened in Allen and Brenda Lafferty’s apartment. Dan later said he had described the killings and made clear that he, not Ron, had wielded the knife. Chip Carnes gave a conflicting account at trial, saying Ron had told them about the murders and disputing the allocation of responsibility. Dan accepted the essential facts in part of Carnes’s testimony but called the rest false; the book also notes that Carnes faced the threat of a capital charge and was offered a substantial deal for evidence that helped convict the brothers. The disagreement makes speech consequential but not self-authenticating: who spoke, what was said, and under what pressure all shape the meaning assigned to a statement.

Rhetorical and narrative significance

The expression’s stark either-or construction leaves little room for negotiation: peaceful preaching is paired with armed religious defense, and opposition is made the hinge between them. That structure helps expose the tension between a claim of persecution and a readiness to impose religious aims by force. In the book’s broader treatment of violence and testimony, the phrase also stands as a reminder that declarations can authorize action and frame its justification, while later accounts of what people said may remain contested. Its significance is therefore both rhetorical and evidentiary: it presents a threat as a defense, but does not by itself settle the history or truth of the events that surrounding claims describe.