Elected 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........

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