Politics of Islam in the West Series — Part II
Every fight in Western politics — the mayor of London, the mayor of New York, a Black US president, immigration, criminal gangs, violence in the streets — summons the same stream of pundits, politicians, preachers, influencers and YouTubers to defame one thing: Islam. In a political climate this charged, moving at the speed of a meme, thick with people claiming to be in the know — some styling themselves ‘scholars’ — this series talks about what no one else will: the sleight of hand, the propagandist’s hand in your pocket while the other points at a horizon that isn’t there. It is not apologetics. You do not have to believe a word of Islam to see you are being lied to about it. That is where Fireline Press lives and works: between what is true and what is scorching the political landscape of the West.
A woman in Kansas walked into an American courtroom to collect a debt her husband owed her. She walked out with nothing. Not because her claim was weak. Because of a law her own state had passed to protect her.
Her husband had signed a marriage contract. In it he promised her a dower — in Islam, the mahr, the wife’s own property, hers by right the moment it is agreed, not a gift he can claw back later. Hers was 1,354 gold coins. Around $677,000. When the marriage ended she asked the court to make him pay what he had put his name to. The court refused to enforce the contract.¹
Weeks earlier, Kansas had forbidden its judges to give any effect to “foreign” religious law. The politicians who passed it called it a shield for women. Read that again. A law sold as protection for Muslim women — and weeks later, a Kansas court stripped a Muslim woman of $677,000 that was hers.
Now cross the country. In New York, another woman brought her religious marriage contract to another court. Hers was a ketubah, signed under Jewish law. The court enforced it without blinking.² No statute stood in her way. Nobody had written one.
Two women. Two religious contracts. Two American courts. One walked out whole. One walked out robbed. The only difference between them was the faith on the paper — and a law written to make that difference the whole point.
So ask the question they are counting on you never to ask. What is this “Shariah” they passed a law to ban — the thing not one of them could define if you stopped and made them try?
The thing they couldn’t define
Start with the man who wrote the ban, because he let the point slip once. David Yerushalmi drafted the model bill that statehouses across the country copied, and he told the New York Times what it was really for. Its value, he said, was “heuristic” — his word.³ Not legal. Heuristic. No American court had ever forced Shariah on anyone; there was no danger to guard against, and his laws changed nothing on the ground. Their purpose was to plant the word in the public mind as a menace and keep it there. The point was never to stop Shariah. The point was to keep you afraid of it.
And the fear runs on one trick: the word only frightens you while you cannot define it. A thing with no shape can be made any shape you dread. So they keep it shapeless. Shariah is the blank, and they fill it with whatever nightmare sells.
And fill it they did. More than forty states have seen these bills. Roughly a dozen passed them. In 2025 it reached Congress: Representative Randy Fine of Florida introduced the “No Sharia Act,” to bar any US court or public body from enforcing a judgment or contract rooted in Sharia.⁴ A nationwide war on a word — and not one of the ones waging it can tell you what it means.
I can. Here it is.
There is no book called Shariah. You cannot buy it, ban it, or hold it up at a podium. The word is Arabic for the path to water — the road across the desert to the spring that keeps you alive.⁵ It is not a code of law. It is a direction: the belief that a life should be lived toward God.
And here is the thing they need you never to hear. Shariah — the divine path — is one thing. What human beings made of it is another, and it carries a different name: fiqh. Fiqh is the human work — fourteen centuries of scholars reading scripture and reasoning their way out to the questions of ordinary life. Shariah is held to be perfect, because it is God’s. Fiqh is human, and Muslims have said so from the beginning: fallible, partial, argued over without end. When a congressman vows to ban “Shariah law,” he is aiming at fiqh — at a library of human opinion that Muslims themselves have never stopped fighting about.
Because fight about it they do. There is no pope in Islam. No head office. No single volume anyone could seize off a shelf. There are schools — five that survive, four Sunni and one Shia, each named for the scholar who founded it — and they contradict one another.⁶ On how to stand in prayer. On the terms of a divorce. On how an estate is divided, what a contract may hold, what may be sold. Put one question to Shariah and you do not get an answer. You get four, sometimes five, each with a thousand years of argument behind it, each certain the others are wrong.
It does not even hold still. Fiqh was built to move — to meet the new century, the new machine, the question the founders never dreamed of, and to reason it through again from the source. That is what a politician swears to abolish with a single vote: a fourteen-hundred-year argument, with no book, no central authority, and no last word, that Muslims have run among themselves since before England had a parliament.
And the part they scream about — the amputations, the stonings — is the smallest corner of the whole. The rest is prayer and fasting, charity, marriage, inheritance, trade, how a man washes before he prays. The penal code they wave in your face is the practice of a few dictatorships, not the faith of nearly two billion people. And even that, as you are about to see, they took from an older book.
So when the next candidate promises to ban Shariah, hear the trap in his other favourite question — do you reject it? For a Muslim, the heart of Shariah is not a punishment. It is the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, the fast of Ramadan. It is being Muslim at all. To reject it is to stop being Muslim. To demand a Muslim reject Shariah and call that moderation is to demand a Christian spit on the Nicene Creed and call it reform.
The Bible says it too
Here is what the fearmongers never mention, because it detonates their whole case. The punishments they hold up as proof of Islam’s savagery — the stoning, the amputation, the death for apostasy — did not begin with Islam. They begin in the Bible.
Open Deuteronomy. It commands death for the Israelite who turns to other gods — death for apostasy, by name. Open Leviticus. It lists the capital crimes and assigns death to each.⁷ These are not buried verses. They are scripture, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike — the same God, the same page. The death sentences they brand as uniquely Muslim sit, in black ink, in the book on the pulpit of every church in the country.
So what became of them? Every faith did the same thing with them. It stopped.
Judaism prescribed those deaths and then, two thousand years ago, buried them under procedure. No execution without two eyewitnesses to the act itself. No conviction without a warning delivered in the seconds before, and proof the accused had heard it and gone ahead anyway. Courts ordered to seize on any excuse to acquit. The Mishnah passes sentence on any tribunal that still managed to kill: one that executed so much as once in seventy years, it says, was a court of butchers.⁸ The verses stayed on the page. The killing stopped. And when the Temple fell, the court that alone could have ordered it was gone.
Christianity took the long road, over a mountain of corpses. For more than a thousand years, Christian authorities burned apostates and heretics on precisely the scripture their heirs now brandish at Muslims. Aquinas taught that heresy earned death. The Inquisition carried it out. Calvin’s Geneva burned a man alive over a point of theology.⁹ The stake worked its way across Europe until the wars of religion had bled the continent white and the Enlightenment shamed it into stopping. Today the Catholic Church’s punishment for leaving the faith is a letter of excommunication. Not a blade.¹⁰
Most of the Muslim world has done the same. The great majority of Muslim-majority countries run civil or mixed law and reach for nothing like the old punishments; those cling on in a handful of regimes and in the sermons of their clerics.¹¹ Where the state still swings the sword, it is a state that has seized religion to control its own people — the oldest trick there is, wearing a holy book. It is not the faith of the grandmother in Jakarta, the schoolteacher in Dakar, the shopkeeper in Sarajevo. It is the whip of the ones who rule them.
Which leaves the people crusading against Shariah holding a live grenade. The savagery they parade as Islam’s is sitting untouched in the Old Testament on their own nightstands. The charge against the Qur’an is a charge against the Bible, word for word. The only difference is that no one is drafting a bill to ban Leviticus.
The Jewish court down the street
No one is writing laws against the Bible. They are writing them against Shariah courts. So let me tell you what a Shariah court in America actually is, because it is nothing like the thing they put in your head.
It is not a courthouse. It is an arbitration panel — a room where two people who both agreed to walk in bring a private quarrel and accept a ruling on it. A divorce. An inheritance. A soured contract. It does not replace the law of the land. It cannot. Its rulings run exactly as far as American law allows and not an inch further. It has no power over crime. It has no power over anyone who did not choose to be there — not one non-Muslim, and not a Muslim who declined to come. Whatever it decides, an ordinary judge reviews on the same terms as any private deal: freely made, fair, lawful. Nobody is sentenced. Nobody is bound who did not choose to be — and those who chose are held to it exactly as you are held to any contract you sign. That is the whole of its power. The force of a promise, and nothing past it.
If that sounds familiar, it should, because the Jews have been doing it in this country for over a century. The Beth Din.¹² Jewish couples take their divorces and their disputes to it, and American courts enforce its rulings like any other arbitration, under the same law that governs a builder’s contract or a union grievance.¹³ In New York, in London, in a dozen cities, a rabbinical court sits every week of the year. No legislature has ever lifted a finger to ban it.
And it is not only the Jews. Christians do it too. Evangelical and Catholic bodies run their own conciliation panels, settling disputes between believers by scripture, their rulings enforced by the same secular courts under the same arbitration law.¹⁴ American judges uphold Christian arbitration exactly as they uphold the Beth Din. Three faiths. One arrangement. Identical standing in law.
The Muslim tribunals were often built on the Jewish model on purpose, because it worked.¹⁵ And they are the only one of the three anybody has ever moved to outlaw. Strike the word “Muslim” from the bills and they would shut the Beth Din and the church panels in the very same sentence. Which is exactly why they are written to name Islam, and only Islam. These laws do not target a practice. Every faith shares the practice. They target a people.
So go back to the two women. The Jewish woman’s contract was honoured because that is what courts do — they treat a religious marriage contract as the binding agreement it is. The Muslim woman’s was torn up for one reason and one reason only: a law written to make her faith the exception. Her contract was sound. Before Kansas passed its ban, American courts enforced Muslim marriage agreements the same way they enforce Jewish and Christian ones.¹⁶ The ban shielded her from nothing. It reached into a protection every other believer in America keeps, and pulled hers out by name.
The country they told you to defend
So America carves one faith out of a protection every other faith enjoys. Ugly enough. But the ugliest version of this is not in Kansas or Tennessee. It is in the one country these same crusaders hold up as the last wall of Western civilisation.
Israel runs Shariah courts.
Not tolerates them. Runs them. They are organs of the state — paid for by it, staffed by judges it appoints, topped by a Sharia Court of Appeal, the whole apparatus sitting under the Ministry of Justice.¹⁷ The qadis who preside swear their oath to the State of Israel. Over Israel’s Muslim citizens these courts hold sole authority on marriage and divorce, and share the rest of family law with the civil bench.¹⁸ This is not some tolerated tribunal on the Beth Din model. This is Islamic law, run by the Jewish state as a working arm of its own government.
And it is no accident of the moment. Israel took the system from the Ottomans, who let every religious community judge its own marriages, and kept it through the British Mandate and into statehood. The state runs a full set of official religious courts to this day — rabbinical for Jews, Shariah for Muslims, others for the Druze and the recognised Christian churches — each with authority over its own community’s family life.¹⁹ The Shariah court is no grudging concession. It is a load-bearing pillar of the state, there from the first day.
And it goes further than anything in America. Israel has no civil marriage at all. There is no way to marry lawfully inside the country except through a religious court — the rabbinate if you are a Jew, the Shariah court if you are a Muslim.²⁰ The nation sold to you as the bulwark against creeping religious law is bound to religious law, in the most private corner of its citizens’ lives, more tightly than any American state now writing bills to ban it.
Then think again about the man who wrote it. Yerushalmi — the lawyer whose model bill the states copied — is, by the account of those who have tracked his work for years, a veteran of the Israeli settler movement.²¹ A devoted partisan of the one state on earth that runs the very courts his law was built to destroy in our nation. That is not an accident. It is not a secret. It is only something the people parroting his talking points would rather you never found out.
Britain swallowed it whole
The fever did not stay in America. It crossed the Atlantic, and Britain drank it down without reading the label.
Turn on a British broadcast or open a British paper and you will meet the same warning that runs in Oklahoma: sharia courts, spreading through the country, a shadow legal system taking root. There is one problem with the British version. It is not even true on the surface. What Britain calls “sharia courts” are not courts. They are councils — and a council has no legal power whatsoever. It cannot marry you or divorce you in law. It cannot fine you, jail you, seize a penny, or bind a soul who walks out the door. Its ruling carries the legal weight of a priest’s blessing, which is to say none. The 2018 government review stated plainly that “sharia councils have no legal jurisdiction in England and Wales.”²²
So what do these councils actually do, if they can do none of the things the panic promises? In the main, one thing. They help Muslim women get divorced.
Here is the part the alarmists will never tell you, because it turns their story inside out. Many British Muslim couples marry in a religious ceremony the state never registers as a civil marriage. In the eyes of British law those women were never married — so British law will not divorce them either. To get out, a woman needs the religious authority that married her to release her. That is who walks into these councils: not conquerors imposing a caliphate, but women asking for the way out of a marriage. When the British government finally sat down and studied the councils, in a formal review, that is exactly what it found — that the great majority of the people using them are women seeking a religious divorce. The shadow empire of the headlines turned out to be a queue of women trying to get free.
And the review did not call for a ban. It called for the opposite: more protection, not less. Its central recommendation was to change the marriage law so that a Muslim religious wedding carries a civil registration with it — the way British law has long handled a Jewish or a Quaker one. Register the marriage and the woman gets a civil divorce, and the councils lose the only real hold they have over her. The government stared at the thing everyone was frightened of and concluded the cure was to pull Muslim women further inside the protection of British law, not to slam the door on them.
None of it stopped the politicians. In 2025 Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary — a man who has read, or could read in an afternoon, his own government’s report — stood up and demanded that “sharia courts” be banned.²³ Courts, he called them. Bodies with no legal power, that mostly help women leave, that his own party in government had studied and moved to reform rather than abolish. He wants them gone, and he wants you to cheer while they go.
And all the while, in the same country, under the same law, the London Beth Din hears its cases week after week — the identical arrangement, the identical Act of Parliament, the identical religious arbitration — and not one British politician has ever risen to demand its abolition. The Jewish court is fine. The Christian panel is fine. Only the Muslim one is a danger to the realm. Britain had its own evidence sitting on the shelf, disproving the fear in black and white. It swallowed the fear anyway.
The next rung
Now strip these laws down to what they actually do. They are not banning stonings. No American legislature was ever going to stone anyone; no American court was ever asked to. What they are banning is the marriage contract, the arbitration panel, the religious divorce — ordinary religious practice, the same practice every faith in the country carries out in the open. The amputation is the poster. The practice is the target.
And here is why it should frighten you even if you never meet a Muslim in your life. A government that teaches itself it can strike one faith’s practice out of the law has not learned a lesson about Islam. It has learned a lesson about power. The machine does not care about the label once it is running. Build a mechanism to carve Muslims out of the protection everyone else enjoys and you have built a mechanism that carves. Whoever holds it next gets to choose the next name.
The courts saw it coming. When Oklahoma wrote its ban into the state constitution, a federal court struck it down — and not as a favour to Muslims.²⁴ It fell because the Constitution forbids the government from singling out any one religion for special disfavour, full stop. That is not a Muslim protection. It is the protection standing over the Beth Din, the church conciliation panel, the Quaker meeting house, and your own pew on a Sunday morning. One clause, shielding all of them at once. Pull the thread loose for Islam and it runs for every faith behind it.
Notice what Oklahoma’s own lawyers were forced to admit in that courtroom: that no court in the state had ever once applied Shariah to anybody. The law fixed nothing, because nothing was broken. It was never meant to fix anything. It was built to mark a people — and to find out whether the state could get away with marking a faith and calling it safety. This time the answer was no. But they keep coming back, bill after bill, state after state, because the ban on Shariah was never the prize. The power to ban a religion is the prize. A government that wins that power does not give it back, and it does not keep it aimed where you first pointed it.
So understand where you are standing. This is a ladder, and the rung marked “Muslim” is only the bottom one — chosen first because they judged it the rung you would be least troubled to watch them climb. Your church is on this ladder. Your synagogue is on this ladder. The hand that clears the lowest rung is already reaching for the next. The only question these bills are really asking is whether you will hold the ladder steady while they climb it — or kick it over while it can still be kicked.
Read it yourself
Go back over what you were handed. A word, dropped in your lap as a threat — Shariah, coming for your courts, your family, your country. Now look at what is left of it.
There is no book to ban. There is an argument fourteen centuries old, with no final answer, that Muslims wage among themselves. The savagery pinned to it is older than Islam and abandoned by everyone, sitting in the Bible on the accuser’s own shelf. The courts they want outlawed are the courts the Jews and the Christians run, in the open and unbothered — the courts the State of Israel runs for its own Muslims. And the man who drew up the ban is a partisan of the one nation on earth that keeps the very thing he would abolish here. Every plank of the fear, pulled up and turned over. Nothing underneath any of them.
So the fear was never about your safety. It was a product. Someone built it, priced it, and sold it — for votes, for clicks, for the donation your outrage triggers on its way past. You were not the one these laws were meant to protect. You were the customer. And the sale only closes if you never stop to read — never read the contract, never read the verse, never read the report a government commissioned and then buried. Fear is the one product a single afternoon of reading destroys. That is why they need you frightened, they need you incurious, and they need you exactly there.
You are no longer there.
And here is the last thing they would keep from you, because it turns the knife around in their hand. The word they taught you to fear traces back to the Qur’an — so open it. In it, God commands justice, and good to one’s neighbour, and forbids oppression. He tells the believer to stand firm for what is right even against himself, his own parents, his own kin.²⁵ That is the source they are pointing at when they say “Shariah.” The woman in Kansas, robbed of what was hers by a law that spat on the contract in her hand — that book commanded the justice their law denied her. The oppression was never in her faith. It was in the ones who wrote the ban, and in every hand that has helped them carry it since.
They will keep selling the fear; it is what they do. But a product survives only while the buyer stays ignorant — and you have just read to the end. Tell someone what you found here. It is the one thing they cannot afford.
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
Image: See Li (See Li Photo Capital), London, 28 April 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0. Cropped for banner.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Soleimani v. Soleimani, No. 11CV4668 (Johnson County Dist. Ct., Kansas, 28 August 2012); Kansas House Substitute for Senate Bill No. 79 (2012).
² Avitzur v. Avitzur, 58 N.Y.2d 108 (1983).
³ Andrea Elliott, “The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement,” New York Times, 30 July 2011.
⁴ No Sharia Act, H.R. 5512, 119th Congress (2025), introduced by Rep. Randy Fine (FL-06), co-introduced by Rep. Keith Self and cosponsored by Rep. Chip Roy; companion measure introduced in the Senate by Sen. Tommy Tuberville. On the state wave: more than 200 anti-Sharia/foreign-law bills introduced across some 43 states since 2010, roughly a dozen enacted (Southern Poverty Law Center; National Conference of State Legislatures).
⁵ Qur’an 5:48; on the etymology (”the path to a watering place”), standard lexical references.
⁶ On the distinction between Shariah (the divine path) and fiqh (its human jurisprudence), and the surviving schools (madhāhib), see Wael B. Hallaq, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
⁷ Deuteronomy 13; Leviticus 20.
⁸ Mishnah, Makkot 1:10 (”A Sanhedrin that executes once in seventy years is called bloody”).
⁹ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 11, a. 3 (on heresy); the execution of Michael Servetus, Geneva, 1553.
¹⁰ Code of Canon Law (1983), canon 1364 (apostasy, heresy and schism incur excommunication, not death).
¹¹ Council on Foreign Relations, Understanding Sharia: The Intersection of Islam and the Law (updated 2021).
¹² The Beth Din of America (Rabbinical Council of America / Orthodox Union); the London Beth Din.
¹³ Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. §§ 1–16; Arbitration Act 1996 (UK).
¹⁴ On Christian religious arbitration, see the Institute for Christian Conciliation; Encore Productions, Inc. v. Promise Keepers, 53 F. Supp. 2d 1101 (D. Colo. 1999); and Pew Research Center, Applying God’s Law: Religious Courts and Mediation in the U.S. (2013).
¹⁵ Michael J. Broyde, Sharia Tribunals, Rabbinical Courts, and Christian Panels: Religious Arbitration in America and the West (Oxford University Press, 2017).
¹⁶ Odatalla v. Odatalla, 355 N.J. Super. 305 (Ch. Div. 2002) (a Muslim mahr enforced on neutral contract principles).
¹⁷ Qadis Law, 5721-1961 (Israel): the Sharia courts sit within the state system under the Ministry of Justice; qadis are appointed by a state committee and sworn to the state. See Library of Congress, Global Legal Monitor (2017).
¹⁸ Jurisdiction is exclusive over the marriage and divorce of Muslim citizens and concurrent with the civil family courts over other personal-status matters since the Family Court Law (Amendment No. 5), 2001.
¹⁹ Israel’s system of separate state religious courts derives from the Ottoman millet system, continued under the British Mandate: rabbinical, Sharia, Druze and recognised Christian courts each hold jurisdiction over their community’s personal-status matters.
²⁰ Israel provides no civil marriage; marriage within the country is conducted only through recognised religious authorities.
²¹ Southern Poverty Law Center, extremist file on David Yerushalmi.
²² The independent review into the application of sharia law in England and Wales, Cm 9560 (2018), chaired by Mona Siddiqui: sharia councils have no legal jurisdiction (”Sharia law has no jurisdiction in England and Wales”); the majority of those who use them are women seeking a religious divorce; the review recommended amending marriage law so that civil registration accompanies religious marriage, as already provided for Jewish and Quaker marriages.
²³ Robert Jenrick, Shadow Justice Secretary, remarks calling for sharia courts to be banned (2025).
²⁴ Awad v. Ziriax, 670 F.3d 1111 (10th Cir. 2012), enjoining Oklahoma’s “Save Our State” amendment (State Question 755); the court applied heightened scrutiny because the measure singled out one religion (see Larson v. Valente, 456 U.S. 228 (1982)), and the state conceded that no Oklahoma court had ever applied Sharia law.
²⁵ Qur’an 16:90 (God commands justice, good conduct and generosity, and forbids indecency, wickedness and oppression) and Qur’an 4:135 (stand firm for justice, even against yourself, your parents and your kin).