America Needs No Sharia Law but American Muslims Deserve Liberty

Concern over “Sharia” has become part of a feverish political narrative in parts of the United States, especially in Texas and Florida. Some Republican politicians warn of an imminent “Islamic takeover” and claim that “Sharia law” could eradicate American freedoms. Hence they have proposed legislation aimed at countering this perceived threat, with titles such as the “Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act,” “No Sharia Act,” and “Defeat Sharia Law in America Act.”

Recently, President Donald Trump also amplified this narrative during an appearance on The Glenn Beck Program, saying he would “absolutely prohibit the Sharia Law thing,” and adding: “Where we see it, we take it out.”

But is there really such a threat to liberty in America? Or might this fear itself, and its likely consequences, pose a greater threat to liberty?

First, one should grant that the fear of Sharia is not entirely groundless. This ancient legal tradition, in its classical interpretations, includes many prescriptions that threaten modern liberties: Apostasy and blasphemy laws, for example, target people who leave Islam or speak out against it. A hierarchical system of rights favors men over women, and Muslims over non-Muslims. Terrible things like child marriage or stoning can be, and have been, justified through it.

Moreover, in certain countries—such as Afghanistan, Iran, or northern Nigeria—Islamist movements have made these archaic rulings the law of the land, with grave consequences for women, minorities, and dissidents. That is why Muslim reformists, including myself, argue that a reform of Sharia, to bring it into line with modern human rights, is long overdue.

Yet for the vast majority of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims—who are not Islamists with authoritarian ambitions, but ordinary believers concerned with their own salvation—Sharia is about much more modest things: how they pray, dress, or eat; how they raise their kids and honor their parents; how they trade honestly, avoid usury, or marry and divorce. None of this, so long as it is followed voluntarily, threatens freedom. Its very practice, in fact, is an exercise of freedom.

That is why calls to “ban Sharia” often end up in a dialogue of the deaf. Advocates of such bans probably mean to target corporal punishments and enforced burqas, which, of course, should not be permitted. But Muslims worry that their mosques, halal kitchens, or voluntarily worn headscarves will be swept up as well.

Which is what seems to be happening in Texas, as Asma Uddin, an American scholar of law who has long defended religious freedom for all, has recently warned: “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.”

The good news is that the United States already has a brilliant solution to this tension. It is called the First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, so long as it is not imposed on anyone. So, Islam, too, should be freely practiced, as long as it is not imposed on anyone.

The bad news, however, is that there are voices on the American right today who explicitly argue that while their own religion is, of course, protected by the First Amendment, Islam is not—because, they say, it is not merely a religion but a “political system” that will always seek to subvert, conquer, and subjugate everything else.

Against this argument, one needs a sense of history: The exact same case was once made by American and European Protestants against other religious groups. Catholics were long suspected of being subversive “Papists” with theocratic ambitions. In the United States, this suspicion gave rise to a whole political movement, the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, whose platform was built substantially around barring Catholics from public office. Its members saw new Irish immigrants as a force of “foreign invasion,” as they believed the “new Catholic immigrants would help subjugate America under the authority of the Pope.”

Earlier, in 18^th century Europe, Jews were accused of following a strangely legalistic religion—with a religious law, Halakha, resembling Sharia—that could never fit into the modern liberal West. Even the Enlightenment’s towering figure, Immanuel Kant, made this argument against Judaism. In his view, Christianity was the perfect religion to match Enlightenment values, thanks to its “idealized, spiritualized ethical teachings based on pure love.” Judaism, by contrast, failed to produce ethical human beings because it demanded “only external obedience to statutes and laws.” The core problem, Kant argued, was that Judaism had been “originally established … [as] a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state.” Kant went so far as to call it a “political organization which is only masquerading as religion.”

However, despite these essentialist suspicions toward Catholicism and Judaism, both Catholics and Jews adapted to Western liberalism, which in turn inspired reformist trends within their own traditions—such as the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and the liberalizing direction the Catholic Church took at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Today, there are the beginnings of similar liberal currents within Western—especially American—Islam. Some firebrands in this community may capture the attention of Islamoskeptics, but larger trends point to growing integration if not assimilation. A recent poll found that most American Muslims embrace their national identity: 95 percent say they’re proud to be American, 85 percent believe in the American dream, 76 percent call the U.S. one of the greatest countries in the world, and 67 percent say Muslims enjoy more freedom here than anywhere else.

No wonder average American Muslims receive sweeping criticism from Islamists and conservatives who think they’ve gone way too liberal. “Almost every American Muslim I interact with, including some Imams and shuyukh [elders], have subconsciously adapted the American worldview and allowed it to affect their understanding of Islam,” a South African Islamic scholar recently complained on X. He then noted what this “American worldview” entails: “feminism, hyperindividualism, hustle culture.” “American Islam killed the masjid [mosque] as a sacred space,” another conservative lamented. “It’s now a relic of the past … a ‘bus stop’ for World Cup watch parties, cafe, basketball tournament and matchmaking space for the bourgeois.”

While some concerns about spirituality may be valid, such conservative complaints about “American Islam” only point to something good: In the United States, the land of freedom, Muslims are discovering how to be Muslims as they personally think, feel, and believe, while also adapting to modern life and broader secular society. It is a promising experiment that should be welcomed not only by those who want to keep America free, but also by those, like myself, who hope to advance freedom in modern-day Islam.

Meanwhile, even the Islamosceptics should at least consider that crushing this experiment with a sweeping anti-Islam campaign would only help the radical Islamists they fear most, who have long portrayed the United States as a hypocritical empire whose professed values are nothing but a façade. (The same is true for Europe, as The Economist rightly warns: “The European populist right’s promises of mass deportation, segregation and dress bans all terrify Muslims, inhibiting integration and driving them into the arms of extremists.”)

Finally, on whether the broader American experiment should include Islam, probably no one should be more authoritative than America’s Founding Fathers—some of whom explicitly said, “yes.” One was Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned religious freedom for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” Another was Benjamin Franklin, who wrote: “Even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

So let us cherish that noble vision today. This means, of course, that there should be no enforcement of “Sharia law” in America, and we should oppose anyone who seeks it, if they are really out there. But it also means ensuring that America’s liberty and justice is truly for all—for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Muslim, and for people of every other persuasion.