John Cornyn’s bigoted anti-Islam legislation is about as useful as a belt buckle on a rattlesnake.

By Omar Afra / Testset

Bismillāh al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm.

Senator Cornyn, your new Sharia bill is the height of legislative stupidity. All hat, no Constitution. You have introduced the Ban Outsiders Openly Touting Sharia Law Act — yes, the “BOOT Sharia Law Act,” because apparently anti-Muslim panic now needs a novelty belt buckle — aimed at barring noncitizens from immigration benefits if they “endorse or advocate for the imposition of Sharia Law.” Your own office says the bill would target asylum, green cards, good moral character findings, and lawful permanent resident status for people accused of supporting Sharia. It also drags in protests against the United States, terrorism, terrorist groups, and opposition to “our form of government,” creating the usual rhetorical casserole where Muslims, immigrants, political dissent, and national-security panic all get baked into one horribly inedible cobbler. It is a shame on the Great State of Texas.

You are doing this now because you are trapped in a Republican primary fight where ordinary conservatism no longer buys much oxygen. Ken Paxton is coming at you from the MAGA flank, Trump has endorsed him, and your long Senate résumé does not scare a base that increasingly treats seniority, committee power, and institutional Republican credentials like suspicious evidence of adulthood. So you and Paxton have both leaned into the North Texas Muslim development panic around EPIC City, turning a local land-use controversy into a statewide loyalty test. The BOOT Sharia Act reads less like serious lawmaking than a late-primary distress flare: you trying to prove you can still sing in the key of MAGA, even if the resulting legislation is about as constitutional as a hound-dog in a hubcap factory.

The problem, Senator, is that Sharia is not one law, one penal code, one country, one sect, one court system, one statute book, or one political project. It is a vast religious-legal tradition interpreted differently across schools, nations, families, mosques, courts, scholars, and ordinary private life. For millions of Muslims, Sharia is not a beheading scene in a Michael Bay terrorism flick. It is how to pray, how to fast, how to divide inheritance, how to structure a marriage contract, how to avoid predatory lending, how to give charity, how to bury the dead, how not to cheat people in business, and how to live decently under God while obeying the civil law of the country they live in.

Most of the world sees Shariah for what it is: Islamic law as governing interpersonal conduct and regulating ritual practices, while noting that different countries apply it in very different ways — sometimes as governing law, sometimes only in areas like personal status or finance. The Council on Foreign Relations makes the basic distinction your bill bulldozes: Sharia, in Muslim theology, refers to divine values and guidance, while actual Islamic laws are human interpretations of those principles. That distinction matters. A lot. Treating “support for Sharia” as a deportable ideological marker is like treating “support for Biblical values” as support for stoning Sabbath-breakers, banning shellfish, forcing women into Levitical purity rules, and executing blasphemers. Nobody serious would write immigration law that way, unless the point was not seriousness but a panic button dressed up as legislation. Texans can see right through that mess.

You said Sharia Law is “the antithesis of what our country stands for: freedom of conscience, religion, and speech.” That sentence is so confused it should have to sit quietly in the hallway until it can explain itself. If America stands for freedom of conscience, religion, and speech, then a Muslim privately organizing his family life, prayer life, charitable obligations, dietary practice, marriage contract, inheritance planning, or business ethics around Islamic principles is not violating America. He is exercising exactly the rights America claims to protect. What you appear to be doing is much more dangerous: taking a religious term, defining it through the most lurid possible political imagination, and then attaching immigration consequences to it. That is not constitutional conservatism; that is a limitless invitation for the expansion of the federal government to meddle in religious freedom. Not exactly ‘conservatism.’

The First Amendment is not coy about this. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That is the text and it ain’t one bit abstract. The actual constitutional command says Congress does not get to pick a disfavored religion and start attaching civil penalties to its vocabulary. Gentle reminder: this is the constitution you swore an oath to defend. You have no personal choice in it.

You know what makes this even more ridiculous? Texas itself is not some sealed Anglo-Protestant hyperbaric chamber. Texas law is layered, borrowed, adapted, conquered, translated, inherited, revised, and hybridized. The Texas legal tradition carries deep Spanish and Mexican civil-law influence which itself carries deep Muslim influence from nearly 1000 years of Spain being Muslim, y’all. The Texas Bar has published historical work noting Spanish and Mexican influence on early Texas family law, including community property, as well as Spanish influence on Texas water law. The same community property concept is deeply embedded in Islam. Even the Texas State Law Library still points Texans to resources on community property and its history because this is not some obscure academic parlor trick; it is hitched to the way Texans organize marital property.

To be precise, community property in Texas does not mean “Texas law is Sharia.” That would be the same kind of sloppy historical cartoon your bill depends on. But it does mean Texas law is not pure. No law is. Texas inherited legal forms through Spain and Mexico, and Spain itself emerged from centuries of legal, cultural, agricultural, commercial, linguistic, architectural, mathematical, and administrative contact with Muslim Iberia. The law on the books in Austin did not descend from heaven. It came through from some very messy and mixed up history. The kind of history that makes simple-minded civilizational panic look even dumber than it already is.

And this is where your bill becomes especially gnarly. You are not merely objecting to an actual foreign government replacing American civil law. Nobody is proposing that. What, is this Kentucky?! There is no meaningful movement of American Muslims trying to abolish the Constitution and replace it with a fiqh council. I am a Texas Muslim and in my 46 years years in the Lone Star State have I ever heard a fellow co-religionsit say
” It sure would be dandy if we could bring the caliphate here to Katy! ” There are Muslims going to work, raising families, paying taxes, dealing with HOA nonsense, eating halal Briskety at Pinkerton’s, getting stuck on I-45 and prying for Allah’s patience, and trying to keep their kids from turning into screen goblins. Don’t get your spurs tangled over it.

Millions of Muslims in America live under self-imposed religious discipline every day in ways completely congruent with local, state, and federal law. A Muslim may avoid interest because of Islamic finance principles or they may write a will with inheritance preferences informed by religious guidance. A Muslim family may resolve a private dispute through religious mediation as long as no one is violating civil law. This is normal religious life. Jews do versions of this with halakha. Catholics do versions of this through canon law. Evangelicals do versions of this through arbitration clauses buried in Christian institutional paperwork. Ask the folks at Houston’s Second Baptist. But somehow when Muslims do it, Senator Cornyn reaches for immigration law.

That is the trick, y’all. “Sharia” gets turned into a scare word broad enough to include terrorism when useful, but vague enough to smear ordinary Muslim religious practice when politically convenient. It lets a politician gesture at the Taliban while aiming suspicion at a planned Muslim community in Texas. Cornyn’s own office tied this legislative push to the East Plano Islamic Center’s planned EPIC Ranches City in Josephine, Texas, a Muslim-centered development he had already asked the Department of Justice to investigate. So let’s say what this is plainly: this is not about stopping a foreign legal system from taking over Texas. This is about making Muslim civic life sound subversive before it has done anything illegal.

If there is actual housing discrimination, investigate it. If there is fraud, investigate it. If there are land-use violations, investigate them. If someone is materially supporting terrorism, prosecute them under the mountain of existing federal law that already covers terrorism. But if Muslims buy land, build homes, organize around a mosque, and say they want to live according to Islamic values while obeying American law, that is not a national emergency. That is called religious freedom. It may sound familiar as some in your party used to pretend to care.

The deeper danger is not that your bill will survive serious constitutional scrutiny. The deeper danger is that it helps normalize the premise that Muslim religious language is inherently suspect; that once a Muslim says “Sharia,” the state may treat him as a constitutional pathogen; that a faith tradition practiced by nearly two billion people can be reduced to one paranoid paragraph in an immigration bill. This is not a small thing. The government has enormous power over noncitizens. It can deny asylum. It can revoke status. It can separate families. It can turn paperwork into exile. When senators start writing religious suspicion into that machinery, they are not playing talk radio anymore. They are building tools that future governments can use against whoever becomes unfashionable next. That should worry even the people cheering you now. Maybe one day we will run out of marginalized groups and we simply start the sequence over against varying European descendants?

Think on this one long and hard bubba. Because one day Donald Trump will be gone. The current panic economy will not look so invincible. The press releases will remain as will the embarrassing bill text. When you retire soon, your record of opportunistic bigotry will remain. And the question for men like John Cornyn will be plain enough: when the Constitution was being used as a prop by people trying to punish a minority religion, did you defend it, or did you help write the paperwork? You can dislike Islamist authoritarianism and reject theocratic government. Most Muslims do. Duh. You can defend secular courts, equal citizenship, women’s rights, religious pluralism, and constitutional law and you will find allies in the Muslim community. We are here. Get off the couch and come find us.

To be crystal clear, Texas is not frightened of foreign influence. This state is a composite of native peoples, various Europeans settlers, Africans, and now a beautiful cacophony of Vietnamese, Arabs, peoples from the Indian Subcontinent, and there are even a few Mexicans around these parts. But let Muslims organize a community around a mosque and suddenly everyone starts dreading the caliphate is coming to take over Whataburger. ( Too late, Chicago already did. )

The Constitution is not supposed to work that way. Religious liberty is not supposed to mean Christians get public power, Jews get conditional tolerance, and Muslims get surveillance. The government does not get to define one religion by its worst actors and another religion by lobby dollars. So here is the simple version, Senator Cornyn: Sharia is not a monolith. Muslims are not a conspiracy. Private religious practice is not sedition, far from it. And your BOOT Sharia Law Act is not a serious defense of American values. It is a cynical and reckless attack on Muslims and clearly an attack on the Constitution. You still have time to make this right.

Omar Afra is a writer, cultural producer, and founder of Testset. His work focuses on culture, technology, power, war, and the infrastructure beneath public life. He also builds cedar pergolas. More at  testset.media/authors/omar-afra.