By Asma Uddin, Michigan State University
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Masjid Pogung Raya - UnsplashElected officials across Texas are increasingly treating ordinary Muslim religious practice – prayer, dress, marriage counseling, even mosques themselves – as evidence of a political threat and saying so openly.
“I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone,” Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, wrote on social media in June 2026. Since late 2025, Texas officials have investigated plans for a Muslim-friendly housing development outside Dallas, as well as a small Dallas organization that offers religious divorce counseling. Gov. Greg Abbott also designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights group, a foreign terrorist organization under Texas law.
In May 2026 Abbott threatened to pull US$530,000 in state funding from Grand Prairie unless the city canceled a private Eid celebration at a water park. He also threatened to withhold funding from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport unless it dropped plans for ablution stations, the washing facilities Muslims use before prayer.
State Rep. Alan Schoolcraft, a Republican helping lead the “Sharia Free Texas Caucus,” has framed the distinction explicitly. He told the Houston Chronicle that his concern “has nothing to do with faith, with religion,” but rather with “cultural differences, refusing to assimilate, and trying to establish a parallel culture.”
He has also said lawmakers intend to try to define what qualifies as a religion, arguing that Islam is “much more than a religion.” He has not explained where the line between Islam as religion and Islam as culture or politics would fall, or which Muslim practices would lose the protections ordinarily afforded to religious exercise.
That effort arrives as the country marks 25 years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Suspicion of Islam in American politics predates that day, but 9/11 hardened it into something durable: an assumption that Muslims themselves are dangerous.
I am a law professor who teaches constitutional law and the First Amendment, and my work focuses on religious liberty. My 2019 book, “When Islam Is Not a Religion,” examined this phenomenon years ago: Many American politicians recast ordinary Muslim religious practices as political or threatening.
Religious law as a rival legal system
One common target is sharia, which critics often describe as a competing legal system poised to displace American law. In reality, sharia is a broad set of religious and ethical principles, not a fixed legal code. As law professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes has explained, Muslims distinguish sharia itself, God’s way, from “fiqh,” the human interpretation of that way into specific rules. Observant Muslims can disagree about what sharia requires, the way Christians differ over what their faith requires day to day, or Orthodox Jews over what keeping kosher demands in a given kitchen.
Texas politicians, however, portray sharia as a threat to American law. That suspicion has now produced official action against the Islamic Tribunal, a Dallas-based organization that offers religious arbitration, a process where parties voluntarily agree to submit disputes to a religious panel, the way any two businesses might agree to skip court and use a private arbitrator instead. Much of the tribunal’s caseload is Muslim women seeking religious divorces, including from abusive marriages. American courts encounter this kind of religious arrangement constantly, and not only from Muslims.
The Beth Din of America, a rabbinical court in New York City, arbitrates disputes for observant Jews under Jewish law. The Montana-based Institute for Christian Conciliation provides a Christian counterpart, offering biblical mediation and arbitration in disputes ranging from church and employment conflicts to business contracts.
In each instance, once parties have agreed to arbitrate, a court may confirm and enforce the resulting arbitration award, subject to limited grounds for setting it aside. Texas law allows courts to reject an arbitration award when, for example, the process substantially prejudiced a party’s rights, involved fraud or arbitrator misconduct, or exceeded the arbitrator’s authority. None of these religious panels has the power to override American law.
In Texas, however, state officials have specifically targeted Islamic arbitration for scrutiny. In November 2025, Abbott called the tribunals “Shariah tribunals masquerading as legal courts,” and in April 2026 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation accusing the Islamic Tribunal of falsely claiming its rulings had “the approval of the Texas Judicial system.” Texas courts do not approve or oversee the tribunal itself; they can, however, enforce valid arbitration awards, just as they can awards resulting from other forms of private arbitration. The investigation has produced no public finding.
The impulse to single out Islamic practices for special legal scrutiny isn’t confined to arbitration. Beginning around 2010, lawmakers nationwide pushed measures barring state courts from applying sharia or “foreign law.” Oklahoma voters approved one, and a federal court blocked it: The state couldn’t identify a single case in which sharia had actually been applied.
‘Islam is not a religion’ claim
The same suspicion – that Islamic religious institutions are really political or legal institutions in disguise – has also shaped fights over mosques around the country.
The claim that Islam doesn’t really count as a religion surfaced early and explicitly in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. In 2010, opponents of the Islamic Center there argued it wasn’t entitled to First Amendment protection because Islam was a political ideology bent on “total world domination,” not a religion. The Justice Department filed a brief calling the claim “quite simply ridiculous.” The center opened in 2012; the Supreme Court declined to revisit the case in 2014.
When the East Plano Islamic Center proposed a 400-acre development north of Dallas anchored by a mosque, an Islamic school and homes marketed to Muslim families, the response wasn’t ordinary zoning review. Paxton began investigating the project in March 2025 and sued the developers in December, alleging violations of state securities law.
In February 2026 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development opened a fair housing investigation alleging discrimination against non-Muslim buyers; the Justice Department opened its own civil rights inquiry and closed it in June 2025, after the developers affirmed the project would comply with the Fair Housing Act.
In Bernards Township, New Jersey, officials rejected a mosque application in 2015 after 39 hearings, and a federal complaint documented flyers invoking Sept. 11 and a mailbox defaced to read “ISIS.”
A church fighting a zoning board may hear objections about traffic, parking or property values. The distinguishing feature of these mosque controversies was the accusation attached to the religion itself: that Muslim worshippers were dangerous, disloyal or likely to become radicalized.
In Bayonne, New Jersey, a resident told the zoning board the mosque should be denied because worshippers would “become radicalized and kill people.” In Sterling Heights, Michigan, a speaker at a City Council meeting about a local mosque project argued the First Amendment “doesn’t apply to political ideologies,” because Islam is “a religion of hatred.”
Prayer, dress and ‘foreign’ practices
The same dynamic extends beyond institutions to the ordinary practices of Muslim religious life: Prayer, religious dress and other expressions of faith can be treated as foreign, political or threatening.
Observant Muslims pray five times daily, so students and employees sometimes need a space to pray – an accommodation that can be as simple as being excused briefly from class or work. Federal guidance for public schools expressly recognizes that a teacher may excuse a student from class to relieve a significant burden on religious exercise, giving Muslim students who need to pray during Ramadan as one example.
At Liberty High School in Frisco, Texas, Muslim students had used a spare classroom to pray without incident from 2009 to 2017, when Paxton’s office sent the district a letter questioning whether other students were being excluded. They weren’t. A district spokesman said the classroom was available to “students of all walks of life.”
The accommodation itself had not changed. What changed was the way it was perceived: A space that had quietly allowed students to meet their religious obligations for years was suddenly scrutinized as potentially giving Muslims special treatment.
Religion scholar Rose Aslan, in a 2024 book drawing on a national survey of 350 Muslims, finds a similar pattern: Americans often treat a private religious obligation as something foreign when Muslims practice it in shared public spaces – despite the fact that other religious communities routinely receive accommodations for practices such as confession or fasting on Yom Kippur.
Religious dress can trigger the same suspicion. Law professor Sahar Aziz has documented how, in the post-9/11 era, visible Muslim identity increasingly came to be associated with foreignness and political disloyalty. The hijab, as one of the most visible markers of Muslim faith, could therefore be treated not simply as religious dress but as evidence that a Muslim woman was aligned with a foreign power.
The pattern across arbitration, land use and everyday practice is the same: Ordinary religious practices can become evidence of danger, in some Americans’ eyes, when Muslims engage in them.
Asma Uddin, Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.
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