(RNS) — A new congressional group is targeting what it claims is a growing threat of Shariah, or Islamic religious law, in the U.S., a move that harks back to anti-Islam movements that flourished during the post-9/11 era and the early 2010s.
Leaders of the Sharia Free America Caucus say the growing number of mosques in the country is a cause for alarm, while critics say the group is an attempt to shore up votes for Republicans in places such as Oklahoma and Texas during campaign season.
Led by Republican U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Keith Self of Texas, the caucus heard testimony about how some believe Shariah violates the U.S. Constitution at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday (Feb. 10). The caucus, which formed in December and is made of 36 Republican representatives from 18 states, aims to push legislation that counters what it calls “the alarming rise of Shariah Law in the United States.”
“Some of you might think of Shariah as a 2010s buzzword. That is wrong,” Roy, the subcommittee chair, said in his opening statement. “Over the last few years, efforts to impose Shariah on American communities have taken off, and nowhere more than in my home state of Texas.”
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat who is not a member of the caucus, said the hearing was meant to stoke suspicion of American Muslims and “a cynical political ploy driven by the Texas Republican primary.”
Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council advocacy group, said the caucus is made of “bigoted members” who are promoting a “hoax to drive people to the polls and scare them.”
“They’re taking the playbook of the 2010s and just enhancing it with more fear and more racism, more xenophobia and more Islamophobia,” Tarin told RNS, adding that an interfaith coalition is prepared to challenge the caucus.
Caucus members have introduced seven related House bills in recent months, including the No Shari’a Act, which would prohibit American courts from enforcing judgments based on Islamic law or other foreign legal systems that violate the Constitution.
During Tuesday’s hearing, some Democratic lawmakers said the Constitution inherently prevents theocratic rule or following foreign laws.
“The establishment clause, the free exercise clause and the clause guaranteeing no religious tests for public office, if you take time to study them, they will dispel all the anxieties stirred up by legislation and agitation like this,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
For Muslims, Shariah is sacred law that guides their personal lives. It includes rules for charity, prayer, pilgrimage, inheritance and marriage. Arabic for “the path to water,” Shariah also includes criminal law, though mainstream Muslim American scholars have consistently said that those laws can only be applied in Muslim countries with Shariah courts.
During the hearing, anti-Islam activists argued the religion practiced by millions of Americans is a political threat. Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, suggested that freedom of speech should not apply to adherents of Shariah.
“The whole hearing here is turning on the idea that it would be terrible to restrict religious practice and in violation of the First Amendment,” he said. “But the difficulty here is that Shariah, in all of its forms and wherever it has been implemented, has been political and not just religious.”
Attempts to ban Shariah are also trickling into state legislatures. Last month, Gabe Woolley, a Republican state legislator who represents Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where activists have sought to block a new mosque, filed a bill aimed at amending the Oklahoma Constitution to ban Shariah or any other foreign legal codes from being used in the state’s courts. In announcing it, Woolley rejected criticism that the bill violated the religious freedom of Muslims. And during an “Islam Unveiled” event at a Tulsa church on Tuesday, he claimed Islam was “not a religion.”
“It’s a political ideology that comes in under the Trojan horse of a religion,” he told attendees.
Woolley said that the bill was meant to prevent any spread of Islam in the state and that Christian opponents of Islam needed to be “proactive, not just reactive.”
A similar state constitutional amendment was approved by Oklahoma voters in November 2010, but a federal court blocked it from taking effect, saying the law violated Oklahoma’s Religious Freedom Act. The same court later ruled the amendment was unconstitutional and an appeals court affirmed the ruling. In announcing his bill, Woolley said that with a new administration in the state, it was time to pass a Shariah ban again.
The Rev. Shannon Fleck. (Photo by Brandon Clemoens)
The Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of the progressive Christian group Faithful America, said that fighting Islam has become an issue in the race to succeed Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, whose term expires in January. State Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced plans last month to investigate the proposed mosque in Broken Arrow, just outside Tulsa, before the project was rejected by the City Council. And a recent ad for Charles McCall, former speaker of the Oklahoma House and another Republican candidate for governor, warned that radical Islamists who want to impose Shariah are a threat to America.
“They are coming to Oklahoma next,” the ad warns. “Charles McCall will stop them.”
Trey Orndorff, a political science professor at Oklahoma Christian University, said the Oklahoma anti-Shariah bill allows politicians to show that they are aligned with President Donald Trump on the issue of immigration. The professor pointed to recent immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, which targeted Somali immigrants and refugees whom Trump described as wrongdoers who need to be kicked out of the country. Trump also restricted travel from some Muslim-majority countries in his first administration and did so again after returning to office last year.
“Right now, being anti-Islam, being anti-Muslim, is a litmus test for being right on the issue of immigration,” Orndorff said.
The 2010 Oklahoma amendment was part of a nationwide anti-Islam movement led by activists including Spencer, Glenn Beck, Pamela Geller and Brigitte Gabriel, who led nonprofits with names such as Stop Islamization of America. The movement accused American Muslims of being part of a conspiracy to undermine the country and tried to convince church members and conservatives to distrust their Muslim neighbors and to stop mosques from being built.
The movement made national headlines for opposing a planned mosque not far from the former site of the World Trade Center in New York City, which critics called the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and one in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, not far from Nashville. The movement also promoted model legislation aimed at banning Shariah and argued that Islam is not a real religion and therefore religious freedom did not apply to Muslims.
Courts consistently rejected that argument. In Tennessee, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in a 2010 lawsuit aimed at blocking the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, saying that Islam is a major world religion and Muslims are protected by religious freedom.
“A mosque is quite plainly a place of worship, and the county rightly recognized that it had an obligation to treat mosques the same as churches, synagogue, or any other religious assemblies,” Thomas E. Perez, then U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at the time. “This is not only common sense; it is required by federal law.”
While opposition to mosques has continued since the Obama era, the anti-Islam movement waned for a period. But a planned housing development by a Muslim group in Texas and the proposed mosque in Broken Arrow – along with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric — seem to have given the movement new life.
The Rev. Jackson Lahmeyer of Sheridan.Church in Tulsa, which hosted the “Islam Unveiled” event featuring Woolley, said the proposed mosque in Broken Arrow was a tipping point for concerns about Islam. “I think that’s what probably rallied the masses,” Lahmeyer told RNS in a phone interview.
During the event, he said the nondenominational church will host future trainings for pastors and politicians about the dangers of Islam with John Bennett, a former Republican state representative and pastor, and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Tulsa, which Lahmeyer referred to as “Tulsa-rusalem” in the interview, has an overtly Christian culture, he said. He wants to keep it that way. “I’ve made the commitment that we’re going to do everything we can to make sure Tulsa doesn’t become the next Dearborn, Michigan,” he said, referring to a city with one of the largest Arab American populations in the U.S.
Lahmeyer, who runs a group called Pastors for Trump and has hosted Trump’s adult children, Kash Patel, Rudy Giuliani and other MAGA figures at the church, rejected the idea that mosques are protected by the First Amendment. He said that even if the state Shariah bill fails, he still supports it. And he wants mosque organizers to go elsewhere.
“There are 57 or 56 Islamic countries,” he said. “They can build all the mosques that they want over in those countries.”
