In political campaigns and the party’s platform, Texas Republicans condemn “sharia law” as a dangerous system of extremist Islamic rules and restrictions that threaten democracy, religious freedom and personal liberty — an affront to American values that must be stamped out.
But when Shaimaa Zayan considers what “sharia” means to her, the Austin resident doesn’t see a hot-button political issue or a legal code that undermines the U.S. Constitution. She sees a set of daily practices that gradually lead Muslims like her closer to Paradise.
Linguistically, she said, sharia means “a path to water.” Religiously, she added, the Arabic term describes “the path to success” or “how we should practice our faith.”
“It's for Muslims, so thinking that this is something that Muslims are bringing for everyone is just so far from the understanding of sharia,” she said.
As Texas Republicans escalate attacks on Islam based on opposition to what they call sharia law, Muslims are pushing back, saying the term has been distorted by ignorance, fear and political opportunism. It’s time, they say, to set the record straight on the meaning of sharia as a religious concept.
State Rep. Salman Bhojani, the first Muslim elected to the Texas Legislature, said sharia is an “ethical and moral framework that governs your personal conduct.” It involves “giving, charity, praying consistently to God, being honest with your neighbors, with your friends, with everybody.”
“It is a personal moral code, and not something that I can impose on anybody else,” said Bhojani, D-Euless.
Republicans see a far different meaning, denouncing sharia law as an oppressive legal code that is incompatible with state and federal laws.
“Personal religious expression, belief and worship are protected under the First Amendment,” state Rep. Brent Money said in a statement. “What is not protected is the imposition of a foreign legal system that conflicts with Texas law, the U.S. Constitution, or the equal rights of others.”
In March, Money created the Sharia Free Texas Caucus in the state Legislature, about three months after two fellow Republicans from Texas, U.S. Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy, started the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress.
The congressional caucus includes 68 Republicans from 25 states, Self said in June. “Christian values form the foundation of our nation and the constitutional system that governs our daily lives,” he said in introducing the caucus. “Sharia and its principles stand in direct opposition to those foundations.”
In mid-August, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold funding from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, saying washing stations used by Muslims before prayer were illegal because they offered special treatment based on religion.
In November, Abbott declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations — or CAIR, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States — a terrorist organization, saying its goals were “to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world.’”
In the March GOP primary, a ballot proposition asking if “Texas should prohibit Sharia law” was supported by 95% of voters.
A resolution titled “Don’t Sharia My Texas,” adopted this summer in the Republican Party of Texas platform, calls on state lawmakers to approve legislation and constitutional amendments to:
- Declare sharia law seditious, subversive and “a competing enemy” of the state and U.S. constitutions.
- Make advocating or implementing sharia law a crime that would disqualify someone from public service, the military or law enforcement.
- Formally ask the federal government to deport or denaturalize advocates of sharia law.
Some Republican and conservative leaders are pressing the Legislature, which convenes in January, to restrict hijabs and other types of Islamic dress, close Islamic charter schools and withhold professional licenses from Muslims.
“Sharia is Islamic law,” said Money, R-Greenville. “It is threatening because it explicitly claims supremacy over all man-made law, including the US Constitution, and because it violently oppresses women and non-Muslims.”
For scholars of Islam, such descriptions of sharia are nonsensical and Islamophobic.
“Sharia literally means the ‘water hole’ or the ‘path,’” said Khaled Abou el Fadl, a professor of law specializing in Shari’ah, Islamic law and Islam at the University of California Los Angeles. “Sharia in Arabic always implies a path of goodness, or the source of goodness, where the good comes from.”
Abou el Fadl — who was appointed by President George W. Bush to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom — has spent his “entire life studying sharia,” he said in an interview, and even so has “barely scratched the surface.”
When sharia is not treated with nuance, the result is disastrous, Abou el Fadl said.
“You cannot make any generalization about Muslims in this world,” he said. “They're just human beings like everyone else.”
“Everybody has a different way of interpreting”
Muslims make up roughly 2% of the Texas population, with estimates ranging from 300,000 to 500,000 in the state of about 32 million, according to the Pew Research Center.
For Texans like Zayan, there is a massive gulf between her Muslim faith and representations of Islam in the media and in politics, which often cast sharia as the faith’s defining characteristic.
“I can go to the mosque every day for three months without hearing the word sharia,” said Zayan, operations manager for the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
At a typical mosque service, imams — leaders of a Muslim congregation — discuss how to deal with parents, treat neighbors, be of good character and be steadfast in prayer and fasting, Zayan said.
“They talk about specifics, they don’t really mention the word sharia,” she said. “But of course, every time I turn the TV on, it’s ‘sharia, sharia, sharia,’ right?”
David Cook, a professor of religion at Rice University who specializes on Islam, said sharia is “not one single thing.”
“It is, in its broadest sense, a combination of traditions that stem from the Prophet Muhammad, the legal formulations that were derived from those traditions, and then the continual discussion and update of those legal formulations that goes on to this very day,” Cook said.
Abou el Fadl generally agrees — Islam has been around for roughly 1,400 years, he said, and there has always been a wide range of interpretations of what Muslim leaders like the Prophet Muhammad said or did.
“When you talk about sharia, you're talking about not a few texts — you are really talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of juristic texts,” Abou el Fadl said.
Many of the examples of appalling sharia law that Republicans protest — such as child marriage or bans on women working — are not practiced by the majority of the world’s Muslims, or even exclusive to adherents of Islam.
While there is no single definition of sharia, some Muslim-majority countries have instituted oppressive laws under the name, Cook said.
“As it's manifested in Muslim majority countries — and this is where the fear that you're encountering is coming from — it is quite coercive, and it does dominate the public space in a way that is difficult for Americans to understand,” he said.
Some sects of Islam, Cook said, cast their understanding of sharia as “THE Sharia, with a capital ‘THE’ in front of it.”
Those groups “try and pretend that it’s a unified document or system of belief that is roughly comparable to, let's say, the U.S. Constitution,” he said. “That’s the sharia that probably the right fears the most, but it doesn't really exist, because the fact is that sharia — and here I’m deliberately saying it as undefined — does have a multiplicity of interpretations.”
Zayan does not deny that a “very small minority of Muslims overseas” abuse the concept “to control and oppress their people,” but she said this can happen in any religious tradition.
“It’s not something specific to Islam that some group — some radical group — abuse their faith, because faith is powerful,” she said.
Fear of mandatory Islamic dress is frequently cited when Republicans talk about what sharia law would entail in the United States.
Zayan finds this fear absurd.
Of six Muslim women working at CAIR Texas, Zayan said, only three wear a hijab — a head covering commonly worn by Muslim women.
“No one is imposing it,” she said. “You cannot force people to worship. You just teach people. You guide people. You spread the knowledge.”
According to a 2017 Pew Research survey, 64% Muslims in the United States said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of Islam, while 31% said “there is only one true way to interpret the teachings of the faith.”
American Christians answered the question similarly: 60% said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of Christianity, while 34% believed there is just one true way.
How far does sharia go?
A consistent Republican criticism of Islam is that sharia law is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution because it creates a code of law for Muslims — one that supersedes state and national laws.
When asked to define sharia, state Rep. Carrie Isaac — a founding member of the Sharia Free Texas Caucus — said it “is the comprehensive Islamic legal, social, and political system that governs every aspect of life, not merely personal religious belief or private worship.”
“As members of the Sharia Free Texas Caucus emphasize, Islam functions as a civilization with its own legal code (sharia), distinct cultural norms, and religion. The issue is not theology or the right to pray; it is the attempt to import and apply those legal rules inside Texas courts, communities, or parallel systems,” Isaac, R-Dripping Springs, said in a statement.
As a member of the state Legislature, Bhojani said he has not seen sharia represented well — it’s been “taken as a sort of legal system,” he said, one that it is “inconsistent with our Constitution and our legal framework because sharia is trying to take over our court system, which it is absolutely not.”
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, an incoming professor of Islamic studies and American religious history at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, said the idea that Muslim beliefs create an alternate authority that supplants the Constitution is a “fear-mongering tactic,” one often used on “minority religious institutions.”
“We saw this before with Catholics in the 19th century,” GhaneaBassiri said in an interview. “Like, oh, Catholics are going to abide by whatever the pope says, and they’re not going to follow the Constitution, right?”
Even if a separate legal structure was wanted, there is no practical way of doing so, Abou el Fadl said.
“Those who actually know something about the legal system know that we have a well-established, long doctrine in the United States — that foreign law that is against public policy cannot be implemented by American courts,” he said.
For Shakeel Rashed, a Muslim from Austin and president of the board of directors at Interfaith Action of Central Texas, Muslims want the same things as most other Americans.
“We are also looking to practice our faith as it is required of us, as long as it's not going against the Constitution, as long as it is not creating anything of a complete disturbance, right?” Rashed said. “What's wrong with it?”
This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. Rice University has been a financial supporter within the past five years. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
