On July 17, 2026, the governor of Arkansas posted this to her official accounts:
"In our state, you cannot replace Arkansas law with Sharia law. We will not allow it. Period."
Her attorney general quote-tweeted her an hour later to agree that Arkansas is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."
Here is what they were protecting Arkansas from.
Five houses off John Barrow Road
New Africa is a small subdivision in Little Rock's John Barrow neighborhood, built by a local mosque, the Islamic Center for Human Excellence. The Arkansas Times went out and looked at it this month.
It's five houses. Two of them are lived in by Christians. The imam lives in another. The only sign it exists is a sign that says "New Africa Community." It has been there for nearly two decades.
Buyers sign a Bill of Assurance — the same kind of covenant a homeowners association makes you sign, with rules about upkeep and conduct. That document says the development exists "for the purpose of creating a wholly owned residential Al-Islamic community conforming to the social guidelines given in the Quran." That's the sentence that launched a thousand posts.
Tauheed Salaam, part of the development team, explained what it actually means: no stealing, no crime, take care of your family, keep the property up. Nobody is made to wear a hijab or convert. The rules cover the community's public spaces, not what you do inside your own home — you can have a drink in your own house.
And he reached for an analogy that ought to stop this whole story cold. They hope people take examples from the Quran, he said, the same way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.
Hold onto that one.
How five houses became a statewide emergency
The Arkansas Times traced the panic back to its source, and it isn't a court case or a police report. It's a content pipeline.
- On March 31, the RAIR Foundation — an outlet the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-Muslim hate group — published a piece claiming Little Rock had been "conquered" by Islam, with a section on New Africa.
- On April 4, pro-Trump influencer Terrence K. Williams pushed the story to his 4.5 million Facebook followers. It drew more than 18,300 likes, 7,800 comments and 6,300 shares.
- That same day, Arkansas state Rep. Alyssa Brown posted about "a story out of Little Rock about an Islamic Shariah organization" that "is going viral" and "deserves more attention."
- Brown then co-sponsored House Resolution 1016, the "Arkansas Property Rights Protection From Sharia Law Act," with primary sponsor Rep. Marcus Richmond. In a later post, Brown cited "a viral post about the Islamic Center compound here in Arkansas."
A hate group's blog post became a bill in the Arkansas Legislature in four days.
It died. On April 15, the House Rules Committee rejected it — and the man who took it apart was a fellow Republican. Rep. Jeremiah Moore pointed out the bill wouldn't even reach a white supremacist compound in northeast Arkansas:
"If we're trying to worry about disclosures for Sharia Law, I would also like to cover the white supremacists up near Ravenden. I'm pretty sure they're trying to do the exact thing that you're describing here…"
That was in a session so short that lawmakers had to vote just to consider non-budget bills. On the same day, another Republican was begging the committee to let him raise the homestead property tax credit because "gasoline is high, groceries are high." The imaginary threat got a named bill with three sponsors. The compound Moore was talking about got nothing.
Then the governor picked it up anyway
Three months after her own party's committee killed the bill, Sarah Sanders posted her warning to Arkansas.
Nobody could say why. Commenters under her own Facebook post asked where it came from — "Where did this come from lmao," one wrote; another called it "a dog whistle inviting hate crimes and deportations." A spokesperson for Sanders didn't respond when the Arkansas Times asked what inspired it.
Attorney General Tim Griffin amplified her post about an hour later with his own, on X and on Facebook. His office said it had "received repeated inquiries about the status of Sharia law in Arkansas." When the Times filed a public records request to see those inquiries, the AG's office refused to release them, claiming an exemption for the attorney general's working papers.
So the official story is: we responded to concerned citizens, and no, you can't see them.
There is no takeover. There never was.
Let's be clear about the thing itself. "Sharia" is a religious framework — prayer, fasting, charity, how you treat your family, how you do business honestly. It does not override American law, any more than kosher rules or Catholic canon law do. American courts answer to the Constitution.
This panic is also not new, and it has never once found anything. A 2013 Brennan Center report counted lawmakers in 32 states introducing "foreign law" bans, and found the practical result wasn't safety — it was confusion over marriages, divorces and prenuptial agreements with religious or foreign origins, and over how international businesses do deals here.
Texas has been running the play the longest. In 2015, a mosque in Irving offered its members voluntary mediation. Then-mayor Beth Van Duyne accused the mosque's leaders of creating separate laws for Muslims and "bypassing American courts," and led Irving officials in endorsing a state bill to forbid judges from using foreign laws. Mosque leaders said she was stirring up anti-Muslim feeling. Eleven years later, nobody has produced the takeover.
Texas passed a "Sharia ban" that never mentions Sharia
Greg Abbott has told Texans he banned Sharia law. He didn't.
The law he signed is House Bill 4211, signed June 20, 2025. Its official title is "Relating to certain residential property interests controlled by certain entities." It governs how business entities own and sell homes in a development. Read the text yourself: the words "Sharia," "Islam," and "Muslim" do not appear in it a single time.
That didn't stop Abbott from posting that he had banned "Sharia law" and "Sharia compounds," and telling Texans to report anyone attempting "Sharia compliance" to law enforcement. CAIR-Texas called it "reckless, discriminatory, and divorced from reality" — and pointed out that the developers of EPIC City, the Muslim community near Dallas the law was aimed at, had said they supported the bill, because they were already following the rules.
They were telling the truth. The Justice Department closed its investigation into EPIC City without bringing any charges.
None of that slowed anything down. In the March 2026 Republican primary, the state party put "Texas should prohibit Sharia law" on the ballot as Proposition 10 — one of ten advisory questions used to set party priorities. It passed with 94.81%, and Abbott promised more:
"Even though I've signed a law that bans Sharia law in the state of Texas, this is going to be something that we take going into the next session and make more crystal clear and more expansive."
He is promising to expand a ban on something that isn't happening, under a law that doesn't say what he says it says.
Congress built a caucus around it
In Washington, this became an organization. On December 18, 2025, Keith Self of Texas and Chip Roy launched the "Sharia Free America Caucus." Within a month it had 26 members from 17 states. By March it had 50.
The roster reads like a directory of this site: Majority Whip Tom Emmer, plus Reps. Brandon Gill, Michael Cloud, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, Byron Donalds, Scott Perry, Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, Eric Burlison, Josh Brecheen, Sheri Biggs, Ralph Norman, Barry Moore, Tracey Mann, Russ Fulcher, Mike Kelly, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Clyde, Mark Harris, Nick Begich, Cory Mills and Mike Haridopolos.
Read their own words in Self's press release and watch how fast "we're protecting the Constitution" turns into something else. Cloud called it "an assault on our Constitution, our freedoms, and the Christian foundations of our nation." Gill complained about "the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas." Ogles skipped the legal argument entirely:
"Islam is a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest."
That is not a statement about a legal code. It's a statement about a faith and the people who practice it. Ogles kept going: in March 2026 he posted that "Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie." The same week, Randy Fine wrote that "we need more Islamophobia, not less," and Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of the September 11 attacks beside a photo of New York's Muslim mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates."
In February 2026, CAIR designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the group's 32-year history it has designated a congressional caucus. The reason was the legislation. One bill members back, the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act, would let the government revoke visas and deport any foreign national judged to be "an adherent of Sharia law." There is no test for "adherent." It's an official deciding whether your prayers count against you.
This isn't only an objection from the left. At the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Republicans themselves called in February, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin testified against the bill, arguing it violates the First Amendment's protections for free speech and free exercise of religion, sweeps in enormous numbers of people who pose no threat, and would actually harm national security by handing extremists a recruiting pitch.
The Senate has its own version. On February 12, 2026, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas introduced S. 3887, the "Defeat Sharia Law in America Act," with Tommy Tuberville as his co-sponsor. It would make "Sharia-based" discrimination a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Cornyn described a religion practiced by nearly two billion people as "an existential threat to our way of life." CAIR's Alabama chapter called the bill an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom," pointing out that Sharia guides daily religious practice much the way Jewish Halacha does.
Follow the money, and the calendar
If this were a legal emergency, you'd see it in the courts. Instead you see it in ad buys.
Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" negatively, according to figures the ad-tracking firm AdImpact gave NPR — most of it in Texas, right before its primaries. That's roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles.
Sabina Mohyuddin, who runs the American Muslim Advisory Council in Tennessee, put it plainly: "It is an election year and these politicians believe if they spew this hateful rhetoric, they are going to get more votes."
House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the rhetoric, saying "there's a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem." NPR added the part he left out: Sharia is a religious framework, and it does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.
A few Republicans wouldn't play along. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said "freedom of religion is a pillar of our nation and broad brush statements like this are offensive and completely inappropriate." Most of the conference said nothing — a long way from 2019, when Republican leaders condemned Rep. Steve King over his comments on white nationalism and stripped him of his committee assignments.
The freedom argument falls apart on contact
Now go back to Salaam's line: they hope people learn from the Quran the way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.
Because three days before Sanders warned Arkansas about religious law, she stood with the First Liberty Institute to announce that Arkansas ranks #1 in the nation for religious liberty. "Every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience," she said. And one of the laws she credited for the ranking was Act 573 — the law putting the Ten Commandments in every Arkansas classroom.
So: a religious code in every public school is religious liberty. A religious code in a five-house subdivision is an invasion.
That's not the only place the principle collapses.
- Texas requires the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Abbott signed that bill, and in April 2026 the Fifth Circuit upheld the law. A religious text, in every room, by order of the state.
- A federal judge threw Arkansas's version out. In March 2026, Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that "nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments — with or without historical context — in a calculus, chemistry, French, or woodworking class." Sanders called the Ten Commandments "the basis of all Western law and morality" and vowed to appeal. The lawyer running that appeal is Tim Griffin — the same attorney general who told Arkansas that the state is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."
- Arkansas librarians can now face jail. On July 30, 2026, a federal appeals court let Act 372 take effect. Handing a minor an item deemed "harmful" is a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in prison; a separate provision makes some cases a felony carrying up to six. Griffin praised the ruling.
- Texas is near the top of the country in pulling books from schools. PEN America counted 1,781 book bans in Texas in the 2024–25 school year alone.
- Texas bans abortion at about six weeks, with no exception for rape or incest. Abbott signed it, then told Texans not to worry because the state would "eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas."
The government tells you what religious text hangs in your kid's classroom, what books the librarian can hand your teenager, and what you can do about your own pregnancy — and that's liberty. But a Muslim family following religious guidance in their private life is a threat to the Republic.
That's not a principle. That's a target.
Who actually pays
The imam at the Islamic Center for Human Excellence said they haven't had any incidents from all this. They increased their security anyway. That's what it costs to be five houses on the wrong end of a viral post.
It costs more elsewhere. "We know this kind of rhetoric leads to more bullying in school, discrimination in the workplace, hate crimes and vandalism against mosques," Mohyuddin said. By her estimate, Ogles alone has tens of thousands of Muslim constituents in his own district.
And it isn't over. The Arkansas Legislature convenes a regular session in January 2027, and the Arkansas Times notes the Sharia bill could come back. Abbott has promised a "more expansive" version in Texas. The caucus keeps growing.
Every hour spent on an invented takeover is an hour not spent on what was actually squeezing families in that Arkansas hearing room — the price of gas, the price of groceries, the cost of seeing a doctor. Ask your representative what they did about your health insurance premium this year. Then count how many times they said the word "Sharia."
One of those numbers is going to be much bigger than the other.
Sources
- Despite debunkings, misinformation about Little Rock's 'New Africa' persists — Arkansas Times, August 4, 2026
- Arkansas homestead tax credit proposal advances, Sharia Law resolution fails in committee — Arkansas Advocate, April 15, 2026
- House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements — NPR, March 14, 2026
- CAIR Designates House's 'Sharia-Free Caucus' an Anti-Muslim Hate Group — CAIR, February 18, 2026
- CAIR-Texas Calls Gov. Abbott's Claim to Sign a 'Sharia Law' Ban 'Divorced from Reality' — CAIR-Texas, September 12, 2025
- Sanders' July 17 post and Griffin's reply on X
Photo: Rep. Andy Ogles addresses the New York Young Republican Club, Dec. 13, 2025. Adam Gray/Getty Images.
