Sharia patrols do colossal harm to legal Muslim immigrants in the West

Late last year, the phenomenon of some Texan Muslims patrolling Houston neighbourhoods demanding that shops stop selling pork, alcohol, and lottery tickets, given that they are haram, or forbidden, in Islam, came to public attention. These demonstrators have recorded videos of Muslim store owners being given a 30-day notice to remove anything that’s ‘against Islam’ or face an America-wide sharia campaign.

While the demonstrators claim to use their constitutional right to protest, their hounding of individuals, including bullying them inside their properties, and creation of virtual hit-lists of people to be boycotted over lack of religious compliance are a blatant breach of the independence and rights enshrined in the US Constitution. Not only do such parochial protestors seek to quash the individual liberty of the residents and target hard-working persons earning a living by legal means, but they also hurt incoming documented immigrants, whose fate is at the heart of politics in the West today. Any attempt to impose regressive codes, and few are more totalitarian than Islamic sharia, causes colossal harm to the prospects of integration and harmony in any society.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has responded to videos of the protests on X, posting that he ‘signed laws that ban sharia’ and urging Texans to report anyone who seeks to impose Islamic law. While Governor Abbott describes the demonstrators as ‘fools’ who should not be feared, this Islamist thuggery should not be taken lightly.

Such sharia patrols have been seen all across the West. In the UK, similar groups have created ‘Muslim areas’, where they empty alcohol drinks, harass women not dressed a particular way, and force individuals to adhere to Islamic codes. In Germany, a group wearing ‘Sharia Police’ jackets created ‘Sharia Controlled Zones’ and imposed similar restrictions in Wuppertal town in 2014. While a German court ruled that these ‘Sharia Police’ did not violate local laws that forbid similar street activity, because they were not ‘suggestively militant or intimidating’, the ruling was overturned in 2020 after it was found that organised mobs policing compliance of religious mandates did indeed constitute intimidation. Across Europe, from the UK and Germany to Sweden and Russia, Muslim groups have successfully established sharia bubbles. They begin by targeting the non-practising adherents of Islam, before effectively creating no-go areas for anything deemed ‘un-Islamic’.

Sharia policing, which has been institutionalised in many Muslim-majority countries from Iran and Saudi Arabia to Nigeria and Malaysia, is founded on the Islamic doctrine of hisbah,which translates into ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’. Quranic verses urge such policing as part of daʿwah, or inviting people to the ‘righteous’ path, with Muhammad mandating a ‘muhtasib’ to hold people accountable to sharia in an Islamic caliphate. In other words, efforts to recreate a caliphate have been publicly visible in the West in recent years.

‘As a Muslim I have a right to educate the people… and give the daʿwah’, Imam Qasim Ali Khan, leading a demonstration in Texas, can be heard telling a Houston shopkeeper in one of the videos. Imam Khan represents one of Texas’s most prominent mosques, Masjid At-Tawhid, and has chaired Muslim organisations in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio since the 1970s, even being invited by the US Department of State to address an international conference in Vienna in 1992. Born in Pennsylvania, Imam Khan became a Muslim in the 1970s thanks to the Nation of Islam’s evangelism campaign (this organisation envisions the conversion of the US population to Islam, especially the African American community). Khan describes Muslims who sell anything forbidden in Islam as ‘haram merchants’, suggesting that they aren’t true Muslims, in effect excommunicating them from the community. This practically puts a bullseye on such individuals, given that apostasy and blasphemy are crimes mandating violence under sharia, as implemented in numerous Muslim-majority countries.

Islamist violence linked to blasphemy has become all too common in Europe over the past few decades, from jihadist attacks targeting publications such as Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten to the killings of Samuel Paty and Salwan Momika. Similar attacks have occurred recently in the US as well. In Albuquerque in 2022, three Shia Muslims were killed by a Sunni Muslim, alarming the American Shia community (Shia Muslims already face persecution in various countries over accusations of divergence from majority Sunni Islam). Salman Rushdie, who has had a fatwa calling for his head for almost four decades, was stabbed that year in New York. Sharia can even dictate matters in American academia, as shown when a professor at Minnesota’s Hamline University was fired in 2022 for showing a painting drawn in tribute to Muhammad.

‘Texas isn’t Minnesota’ was a declaration among the social media responses to the idea of banning pork and alcohol. Some saw the irony in starting a campaign targeting barbecue and beer in Texas of all places. Predictably, there were also calls to send the protestors ‘back to their own country’ in response to the demonstrations.

Sharia patrols, such as the one spearheaded by Imam Khan, inadvertently fuel an anti-immigrant backlash that primarily impacts those ordinary Muslims who simply seek to live their lives as law-abiding citizens with no ambitions to Islamise Western society. These patrols are a manifestation of the idea—upheld by Islamists and anti-Muslim bigots alike—that Muslim immigrants are invaders who seek to convert non-Muslim populations, including by coercion.

Such policing is also designed to bully into submission those within the Muslim community who diverge from Islamist mandates, whether that be via a refusal to partake in Islamic rituals or by not aligning with Islamist political narratives. Muslims and people of Muslim background are not only held hostage to Islamic law in Muslim-majority countries that codify it, but are also pressured into compliance in Western countries that claim to stand for freedom and equality. Therefore, the resistance to such campaigns should primarily come from within Muslim communities themselves. The antagonism against Muslims is also fueled when liberals, who otherwise take a strong stand against similar bigotry, kowtow to its Islamist renditions.

Some individuals express their animosity in unsavoury ways. For example, Texas’s 31st Congressional District candidate, Valentina Gomez, an immigrant herself, burned a copy of the Quran last August and wants to ‘end Islam in Texas’. It is one thing to target any scripture as a protest against the harmful ideas therein, especially when done as dissent against violent codes that emanate from them; it is quite another to single a particular holy text out to cheerlead the marginalisation of an entire group of people. It is imperative, however, for Muslims to first denounce the oppressive and discriminatory Islamist politics within their own communities before any condemnation of anti-Muslim rhetoric can be considered as coming from an egalitarian position.

All Western states, especially the Muslim citizens therein, need to take a firm stand against sharia patrols and any manifestations of Islamism and call out any organised efforts to curtail communal integration and religious liberty. Any Islamist bids to threaten or blackmail individuals into sharia compliance should be firmly countered to safeguard the fundamental freedoms of one and all, not least of the Muslim population itself.

Related reading

Salwan Momika and the right to burn books, by Noel Yaxley

Islam and free speech, 20 years on from Jyllands-Posten: interview with Jacob Mchangama, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: 20 years since the Jyllands-Posten cartoons controversy, by Daniel James Sharp

Blasphemy Laws 2.0: The conviction of Hamit Coskun, by Noel Yaxley

Image of the week: Hamit Coskun, victim of a new form of blasphemy law? by Daniel James Sharp

Convicted for blasphemy in modern Britain: an interview with Hamit Coskun, by Daniel James Sharp

Coskun’s conviction is a surrender to Islamic blasphemy codes, by Stephen Evans

Kant vs Tahir Ali: why desecration should not be outlawed, by Daniel Herbert

Storm over a tea-cup? The ‘Mug-Gate’ teacher speaks out, by Matt Lovell

‘Words are the only victors’ – Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attack: a message from the Freethinker, by Daniel James Sharp

Charlie Hebdo: An open letter to the free world from a freethinker, by Khadija Khan

Mubarak Bala speaks out on his imprisonment and release: ‘Things shall be set straight’, by Mubarak Bala

Feminism and religion are incompatible, by Maryam Namazie