News & Analysis

Who’s Afraid of “Shari‘ah Law”?

Kevin Barrett

Rabi' al-Thani 19, 14482026-10-01

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Texas is America’s second-biggest state. It’s a home of outsized history—and, sometimes, braggadocio. “Everything’s bigger in Texas,” swaggering cowboys love to boast. They’ve got big steaks, big barbecues, big pickup trucks, big oil rigs, big cowboy boots, and hats with great big brims. And one more thing: gargantuan, humongous, colossally overblown fear of shari’ah law.

At the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas last month, Texas governor Greg Abbot pledged to “fully ban shari‘ah law in Texas.” But Abbot isn’t the only Lone Star State shari‘ah-noiac. Politico’s article “Republicans go all-in on ‘Sharia law’ attacks ahead of Texas primary” cited a long list of Texas politicians using “inflammatory anti-Islamic rhetoric” centered on demonizing shari‘ah and presenting it as a threat to ordinary Texans: “A POLITICO review identified ads in half a dozen races since the start of 2025 that highlighted ‘Sharia law’.”

What exactly are they afraid of? Congressional candidate Valentina Gomez claims: “Your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all.” Apparently she thinks Texas will replace its current legal system with her demented idea of an Islamic one, causing Texas to send its state troopers to systematically pull over cars, behead male occupants, and rape female ones: “Good afternoon, sir or madam. Do you know why I pulled you over? No, it’s not because you were speeding. Under the new legal statutes I am required to rape and behead you. Please step outside the car...”

Gomez is delusional. Texas is not going to replace its current legal system, and Islamic law obviously does not condone, much less demand, random rapes and beheadings. (The United States and Israel created the captagon-crazed pseudo-Muslim militia Daesh to give Americans the impression that Islamic law is responsible for atrocities, and apparently the propaganda worked on Gomez.)

Shari‘ah is not even law in the American sense of the word. It means “the broad, well-trodden path to the well or stream,” a metaphor for right action. Shari‘ah is Allah’s law, or God’s law in English, and is ultimately enforced by God, not by the police and the courts. Believers comply because they want to do the right thing and please God, not because they fear the authorities.

As for Christians and other religious communities in Muslim jurisdictions, they are free to make and enforce their own laws. They are not required to observe most Islamic ones, including prayer, fasting, charity, avoiding alcohol and pork, and so on.

Shari‘ah urges believers not to murder, steal, lie, swindle, rape, fornicate, gamble, mistreat their families, accept interest on loans, or indulge in intoxicants. If Greg Abbot bans Shari‘ah in Texas, will he force Muslims to become murderers, thieves, liars, swindlers, rapists, fornicators, gamblers, domestic abusers, usurers, and drunks?

But it’s actually a bit more complicated. Shari‘ah itself, “God’s law,” is an ideal, not a system of specific rulings about specific actions and situations. The word for applied Shari‘ah, meaning specific legal rulings and actions, is fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. Fiqh rulings are sometimes, though not always, human-enforceable.

So if Greg Abbot and Valentina Gomez are worried about Islamic law that humans might try to enforce, the correct word is fiqh, not shari‘ah. Unfortunately, they are probably incapable of pronouncing the word fiqh, let alone understanding it.

Traditional American jurisprudence may be threatened, but not by Islamic law. Nobody is contemplating replacing the American legal system, which is based on English common law, with Islamic jurisprudence. Nobody is trying to replace Texas’s American-educated judges, prosecutors, and lawyers with faqihs trained in one or more of the five major Islamic schools of legal thought.

Even Muslims who think “Islamic law in America” might not be such a bad idea are not actively pushing for any such change.

The real threat to the American legal system is extremists like Abbot and Gomez. By seeking to legally ban shari‘ah, a religious code of behavior like the Ten Commandments or Halakha or the Five Buddhist Precepts or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, they are seeking to overthrow the Constitution of the United States by revoking the First Amendment, which bans “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.

Would Abbot’s proposed “complete ban on shari‘ah law” criminalize Muslims who loan money to family and friends at zero interest? Would it prevent people from doing their five daily prayers? Would it lead to prosecutions of people for giving charity? Would people who refuse to commit fornication, and then marry and remain faithful to their spouse, be charged with a crime? Would refusing to eat pork earn you prison time?

Those are all examples of people following shari‘ah law. It’s odd that Abbot would find such behavior problematic.

Since nobody is forcing Islamic law on Texans, where did all of the shari‘ah-noia come from? Quite obviously, it’s just a grossly irrational manifestation of Islamophobia. “‘The Texas GOP has declared war on Islam in Texas, claiming that Islamic leaders in the state are implementing Sharia law and using it in court,’ says Joel Montfort, a north Texas-based Democratic strategist. ‘None of it is true, it is just fearmongering and racism to stir up the GOP base and get them to vote.’”

But where did that Islamophobia come from? The answer is surprisingly simple. On September 10, 2001, almost nobody in America was especially worried about Islam, and only a handful of specialists, alongside a few million American Muslims, had even heard of shari‘ah and fiqh. What happened the next day “changed everything.” It injected an overpowering dose of Islamophobia deep into the American subconscious—as it was designed to.

The authors of the 9/11 false flag operation wanted Americans to hate Muslims. That hatred paved the way to an ongoing series of American wars against Muslim-majority countries—almost all of them countries that posed problems for Israel, but not for the United States. The last of those 9/11-wars-for-Israel is the current war on Iran.

9/11 was engineered to closely link the concepts Islam and terrorism in the American psyche. That linkage prevailed throughout most of the 25 years of the so-called “War on Terror,” which was really a disguised war on Islam in general, and the Muslim-majority countries that posed problems for Israel in particular.

But by 2026, the “Islam = terrorism” equation has lost much of its power. Today, the American people don’t seem to mind that the US rules Syria through America’s al-Qaeda asset Hay‘at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani). In other words, the United States government has installed al-Qaeda, the organization officially blamed for 9/11, as the rulers of Syria, and continues to support Syria’s al-Qaeda rulers diplomatically, financially, and militarily—and nobody cares. So much for the “War on Terror.”

Since “Islamic terrorism” isn’t what it once was, the Islamophobes have returned to the drawing board to find a new slanderous label to fuel their “hate Islam for Israel” public relations campaign. “Shari‘ah law” apparently fits the bill.

Why are ordinary Americans susceptible to zionist-designed-and-funded multi-billion-dollar anti-Islam propaganda campaigns in general, and to the shari‘ah law scare in particular? One reason is the rapid erosion of America’s traditional white European culture. Non-hispanic whites were 90% of America’s population in 1970, 70% in 2000, and are projected to dwindle to around 50% by 2040.

That rapid demographic erosion—caused primarily by low birth rates tied to the decline of traditional procreational marriage and rise of sterile, recreational extramarital sexuality—has made many white Americans insecure, as they quickly find themselves becoming a dispossessed minority in their own country.

The decline of Christianity in American life has also contributed to the insecurity afflicting Texas Republicans. Long central to American communities, churches no longer attract the throngs of worshippers they once did, while more and more nominally Christian Americans live materialistic, secular lifestyles. With no answers to the ultimate questions about life’s meaning and purpose, post-Christians naturally resent those who are happier because they do have answers—such as devout, practicing Muslims. And as yesterday’s vibrant, energized Christian congregations disappear, more and more of those that remain are Christian zionists conditioned by racist, genocidal interpretations of the Old Testament. Those congregations are attracted to Islamophobia like flies to manure.

But why is “shari‘ah law” such a bogeyman? Could anyone imagine hating Jews for the Ten Commandments or Halakha, Buddhists for the Five Buddhist Precepts, or Catholics for the Catechism of the Catholic Church?

The anti-shari‘ah campaign presumably gets traction because certain aspects of Islamic law (or “divinely sanctioned rules of behavior” if you will) conflict with majoritarian American norms. Muslims largely agree that alcohol is haram, while most non-Muslim Americans indulge in that vice. Likewise, Muslims avoid pork, while most non-Muslims don’t. And Muslims generally agree on the impermissibility of sexual vices including fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and indeed all sex outside of marriage. That is one reason why Muslim birth rates remain slightly higher than non-Muslim ones.

By invoking “shari‘ah law,” fear-mongering politicians play on those differences to demonize the mysterious “foreign” other. The higher birth rate associated with Islamic religiosity in general, and obedience to the strictures of Islamic family law in particular, is vaguely understood as one of the causes of the “replacement” of white Christian America.

So in answer to the question “who’s afraid of shari‘ah law,” the answer is: ordinary Americans who listen to fearmongering zionist-funded politicians and media. Those Americans sense that their white Christian culture is weakening and disappearing, and the demagogues convince them Islam is the culprit.

Those Americans could save their culture if they reconnected with great religions such as Islam, the tradition based on the last and best-preserved divine revelation of the Axial Age, and its answers to ultimate questions about life’s purpose and meaning. They could stop the “Great Replacement” in its tracks by embracing Islam’s family values, and restricting sexuality to family-building and procreation, thereby restoring the white birth rate.

What’s more, they could save their economy by accepting Islam’s ban on usury and transitioning to public banking rather than the current system of private currency creation by banking cartels that create fiat currency by lending it into existence at interest.

In other words, the Americans who have been brainwashed to fear Islam have everything to gain by embracing it.

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