When on November 19 Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for an official investigation into so-called “Sharia courts”, it was not based on evidence, complaints, or any legal irregularity. It was a political performance. There are no Sharia courts in Texas — only voluntary Muslim mediation panels operating under the same framework used by Jewish beth din courts and Christian arbitration services.

Yet in a letter sent to district attorneys and sheriffs demanding an investigation, Abbott wrote that “The Constitution’s religious protections provide no authority for religious courts to skirt state and federal laws simply by donning robes and pronouncing positions inconsistent with western civilization,” implying that Muslims were secretly building an alternative legal system.

This is not law enforcement. It is political theatre designed to stoke fear.

A day earlier, on November 18, Abbott issued an executive order designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — the largest Muslim civil rights organisation in the country — as a “foreign terrorist organisation” (FTO).

The order cited no crimes, no violence, no plot, no prosecutorial record. It was simply a sweeping claim that an American civil rights group constituted a national security threat.

Lawyers immediately noted that Abbott does not have the authority to designate FTOs; only the US federal government does. But again, the point was not legal accuracy.

This ineffectual order was more about political messaging than anything else. It was aimed to portray Muslim Americans and their institutions as suspect and their civic engagement as a security risk.

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Abbott’s actions are the latest product of a long-running American panic machine that transforms ordinary Muslim life into a threat narrative. This panic machine has been in operation for decades and has repeatedly weaponised Sharia for political gain.

For example, in the late 2000s, a coordinated national campaign—spearheaded by activists like David Yerushalmi and organisations such as ACT for America—pushed legislators across the country to introduce “anti-Sharia” bills. In the early 2010s, more than 40 states considered laws barring courts from applying “foreign law”, a euphemism universally understood to mean Islamic law.

The most extreme example occurred in the US state of Oklahoma, where voters approved a constitutional amendment explicitly banning Sharia and the application of international law. When the law was challenged in court, a federal judge blocked it.

This and other legal challenges exposed these measures for what they were: political stunts, not responses to real legal problems. Yet the broader campaign succeeded in normalising the idea that Muslim religious practice itself is a national security threat, paving the way for later escalations, including Abbott’s actions in Texas today.

Months before the call to investigate “Sharia courts”, again in Texas, a Muslim-led real estate project was targeted with a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation and branded online as a “Sharia colony”. Local residents were told that Islamic law would govern the neighbourhood, that non-Muslims would be excluded, and that the development was part of a creeping Islamic takeover. None of the rumours were true: the project was open to everyone and sought only to address the region’s housing crisis.

The DOJ ended its investigation after finding no illegality in June, but in September, Governor Abbott signed a law  banning “Sharia compounds” in Texas.

This dynamic has played out far beyond Texas. In the state of Tennessee, opponents of a mosque in Murfreesboro argued that Islam was not a religion and that Muslims were therefore undeserving of First Amendment protection. The argument defied centuries of constitutional doctrine, but that didn’t matter; the point was to make Muslim religious life appear legally illegitimate.

In Dearborn, Michigan, a city with one of the country’s oldest Arab and Muslim communities, viral hoaxes have repeatedly claimed the city has been “taken over by Sharia law”. Fabricated videos, manipulated headlines, and images from other countries have been circulated to create the illusion of Islamic governance on American soil. Fact-checks have debunked these narratives, yet the rumours have persisted.

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Muslim public figures have also been targeted. During his campaign, New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faced racist memes and conspiracy theories claiming he was plotting to usher in “Sharia rule” if elected. None of Mamdani’s policy proposals have any religious content whatsoever. His agenda focuses on mass transit, housing, and police accountability. But to those invested in Sharia panic, a Muslim in public office is always presumed to be a Trojan horse.

And it is not just Republicans who have fanned these flames. Major newspapers, liberal politicians, and even civil liberties institutions have repeatedly adopted the underlying framing that Islamic law is inherently foreign, inherently political, or inherently at odds with American values. By accepting the premise that Sharia is a threat, they effectively validate the narrative architecture of Islamophobia even when they claim to oppose it.

These incidents reveal a consistent pattern: the panic surrounding Sharia is not about law, safety, or constitutional principle. It is about boundary maintenance in a country struggling with demographic change. It is about who gets to be seen as American and who remains permanently suspect. The panic keeps reemerging not because it reflects valid concerns, but because it is useful — an instrument for mobilising voters, policing civic belonging, and justifying state surveillance.

What makes this all the more ironic is that Sharia, as understood by Islamic scholars across centuries, bears little resemblance to the caricatures that animate US politics. In Arabic, Sharia means “a path to the water”, a metaphor for moral and spiritual nourishment.

It is a broad ethical framework concerned with justice, welfare, and accountability. Its foundational aims — the maqāṣid al-sharīʿa — revolve around protecting life, intellect, faith, property, and human dignity. The tradition contains sophisticated doctrines of equity (istiḥsān), public interest (maṣlaḥa), and custom (ʿurf), which operate much like the equitable and contextual tools of modern common law systems.

Far from being an alien code, Sharia shares deep structural resonances with Western legal traditions. As Professor John Makdisi demonstrated in a landmark North Carolina Law Review article, several foundational features of English common law bear striking parallels to Islamic legal institutions, likely transmitted through Norman Sicily. This history matters not because it collapses distinctions between legal systems, but because it exposes the absurdity of the idea that Islamic law is inherently incompatible with Western governance.

The United States once understood that legacy. When the Supreme Court chamber was unveiled in 1935, it featured a marble frieze depicting humanity’s greatest lawgivers, including Prophet Muhammad, shown holding a Quran as a symbol of justice and moral authority. Today, acknowledging that simple historical fact would itself trigger outrage.

The renewed Sharia panic is not about Islam entering American courts; it is about Islam entering American civic life. It is about Muslim political participation, Muslim community development, Muslim institutions, and Muslim representation — all recast as existential threats. As the country enters another election cycle animated by anti-diversity rhetoric, anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and attacks on Middle East studies programmes, Sharia becomes a flexible container for a much older anxiety: the fear of a pluralistic America.

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The danger is not Sharia. The danger is the political machinery that turns ordinary Muslim Americans into objects of suspicion, targets of state power, and props in a culture war they did not choose. If there is anything Americans should fear, it is not Islamic law, but the weaponisation of fear.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.