This video is part of “Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?,” a series featuring Slate’s Aymann Ismail confronting fears about Muslims. Follow along on Facebook.
It happened at the Republican National Convention last year, and it’s happened at just about every right-wing protest I’ve covered in the past few years: People tell me Sharia law is coming to America. Muslims secretly want to impose their will on all of us. In fact, there are already “no-go zones” in United States, and we must act now to stop them from spreading.
Where do they think this is happening? In places like Dearborn, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas. Dallas in particular has become a center of anti-Sharia protests, inflamed partly by reports from Fox News, Breitbart, and others that an Islamic court had been established there to decree medieval justice in America. The protests were loud enough that Texas passed a bill last summer to ban “foreign law” from being applied.
Could this rogue Islamic court be real? And what evidence led Texas to act? In the episode above, I travel to the real-life Islamic Tribunal in Arlington, Texas, to ask one of its founding imams what he does there. Then I meet with Texas State Rep. Dan Flynn, a Republican who represents a rural district outside Dallas and who sponsored the new legislation. He insists the bill doesn’t target Muslims, but the law’s backstory suggests otherwise.
—Aymann Ismail
This series is written and produced by Aymann Ismail and Jeffrey Bloomer, and edited by Aymann Ismail.
You can also watch episodes on why some young Muslims radicalize, profane Muslim comedians, why it’s so hard to stop wearing the hijab, homophobia in Islam, and Ramadan.
