Sharia Über Alles in America? – Congressional hearing discloses Republican realism vs. Democratic denial on Sharia

A landmark House Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing was held on 2/10/26 with the eponymous title, “Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam and Sharia Law Are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.”

Sharia, Islam’s “divine law,” is derived from its most important foundational texts –the Qur’an and hadith (the canonical collections of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s deeds and pronouncements) – and their interpretation and codification by Islam’s greatest classical and contemporary legists. Intellectually honest discussion of Sharia must begin with recognition that it is an inherently political system. “Doubly totalitarian” in the apt description of the great French scholar of Islamic law Bousquet, Sharia is not confined to religious rituals, regulating everything from the governance of a Muslim minority community or an Islamic state, bloc of states, or global Islamic order.

Sharia’s liberty-crushing and dehumanizing political dimensions feature open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties – including freedom of conscience and speech—enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and of even Muslim women, to subservient chattel; and barbaric, mandatory “hadd” punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.

Subcommittee Chairman (R-TX) Chip Roy’s opening and follow-up remarks, and the testimony of Republican witnesses lawyer Stephen Gelé, Islam scholar Robert Spencer, and Texan anti-Sharia advocate Krista Schild, acknowledged this Sharia without camouflage reality. In illuminating, evidence-based comments amplifying the testimonies of the Republican witnesses, Roy shared his long-term and immediate concerns, including specific examples from Texas, “ground zero” for baleful Sharia encroachment:

–Attempted expansion of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) Muslim enclave under Sharia governance, spearheaded by Sharia supremacist and virulent pro-Hamas Jew-hater, Yasir Qadhi. (EPIC exists now as a smaller, exclusively Muslim community whose behaviors are already alarming.)

–Current EPIC mosque imam is Sheikh Ustad Muhammad Baajour who has praised Hamas and other jihad terror groups, and preached that jihad against non-Muslims and murderous jihad “martyrdom” is the highest cause and reward in Islam (while also preaching conspiratorial Jew-hatred).

–The proliferation of shadow Islamic courts, including a Dallas tribunal that, by 2024, “was deciding roughly 300 cases annually in mosque back rooms and law offices. The panel of three or four male scholars, trained at institutions such as Al-Azhar and Omdurman, openly follows rules in which a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s in financial and inheritance matters. Women report being pressured to accept religious divorces that strip them of their mahr (dowry) and leave them financially devastated.”

The responses by the Subcommittee’s Democrats and their expert witness, George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin uniformly ignored Sharia’s intrinsic discriminatory, violent, totalitarian political nature, characterizing it as benign, entirely private religious injunctions protected by the first amendment’s “establishment clause.” This deliberate, cynical obfuscation was melded to ludicrous, non-sequitur caterwauling about chimerical “white Christian nationalism,” and the Trump administration’s alleged offenses in attempting to enforce immigration law.

Two key hearing exchanges are pathognomonic of the Democrats’ (and their witness’s) unserious mindset of Sharia denial, counterbalanced by the Republicans’ (and their witnesses’) Sharia realism.

Chip Roy opened his Q & A with Robert Spencer by observing the paradox of the vehement opposition of his Democratic colleagues to proposals (like his own) to vet and potentially ban U.S. entry to Muslim immigrants adherent to the Sharia. Mr. Roy queried,

“In doing so, my colleagues acknowledged and said that that would mean that Muslims generally would be in fear of deportation or inability to be brought into the country. Does that not suggest that there’s a recognition that Sharia law is central to most of the Muslim population throughout the world and those that come to the United States?”

Mr. Spencer replied by noting Sharia’s divinity for Muslims so that it supersedes “all other legal systems,” and where not implemented in total, imparts “tremendous cultural influence such that elements of it are often enforced by individuals or groups where the government doesn’t do so.”

Follow-up questions and responses revealed that 50+ Muslim predominant countries apply the Sharia in whole or part, and this implementation often covers civil and criminal matters in addition to purely religious concerns.

Indeed, since 1990, the Organization of the Islamic Conference/ Cooperation—the largest voting bloc in the United Nations—has been pushing a Sharia-based framework for “human rights”—the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam—which would abrogate existing instruments much more protective of human freedom and dignity such as the best instrument, the U.S. Bill of Rights.

The Roy-Spencer exchanges also brought to light massive foreign Muslim funding—particularly Saudi and Qatari—advancing a Sharia agenda, often in concert with Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Mr. Spencer referred to comments by CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmed stating the Qur’an should be the only law of the (American) land, and CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper expressing his desire to see the U.S. government morph into an Islamic government. Asked further about the ultimate goals of the influential American Islamic organizations like CAIR—and by extension the Muslim Brotherhood itself—Mr. Spencer observed it was

“…very clear from the (1991) explanatory memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood saying that the goal is that Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions. And they’re working toward eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within. And all the non-Muslim apologists for Sharia that we see are indications of how successful that effort has been.”

Rep. Brandon Gill (R, TX) asked Law Professor Ilya Somin a series of simple questions based on publicized hard survey data of U.S. Muslims collected in September 2024 by the respected polling firm J.L. Partners for The Heritage Foundation. Mr. Somin was ignorant of all these data critical to a true evidence-based understanding of U.S. Muslim longing for Sharia, and related bigoted attitudes towards Jews and Israel. Specifically, he did not know that among this nationally representative sample of U.S. Muslims 50% favored Sharia blasphemy law, i.e., “making it illegal to show a picture or cartoon of Muhmmad,” 33 % wanted Islam declared as the U.S. national religion, 39% supported broad application of the Sharia, 46% desired the creation of a Muslim political party, while only 33% affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland, and 58% believed Jews have too much power over the media, and 57% agreed Jews have too much power over federal policy.

Mr. Somin’s completely uninformed responses to these basic queries were sadly consistent with the glaring lacunes in both his brief opening statement and much more detailed full written testimony: neither contained any polling data on U.S. Muslim attitudes towards Sharia or Sharia mores (concordant 2012 data from U.S. Muslims are available here), and the words “hadd” (Sharia’s draconian mandatory punishments), “blasphemy,” and “apostasy” were absent.

Muslim societies that embrace Sharia overall, or regarding enforcement of Islamic blasphemy law, have the worst global Christian persecution indices, and harbor populations with the highest prevalence—by far—of extreme antisemitism. The latter, disproportionate (i.e., 2-6-fold greater) extreme antisemitism exhibited by Muslims, is now manifest in Muslim diaspora populations in both Western Europe, and the United States.

I agree with Rep. Roy’s concluding comment in his opening remarks, that Sharia, “has no place in American government, not now or ever.”