Photo by Mouna Rashid

Janan Najeeb, is the founder and executive director of the Muslim Women’s Coalition, Wisconsin Muslim Journal, Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival and the Islamic Resource Center.  She is also founder of Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance.

This week there was a congressional hearing branded “Sharia-Free America,” it was not a serious constitutional threat. It was a modern-day witch hunt, a spectacle designed to manufacture fear, stigmatize an entire faith community, and normalize the dangerous idea that Muslim Americans are somehow alien to the U.S. Constitution they have lived under, defended, and contributed to for generations. This hearing was meant to show that Muslims are outsiders and don’t belong in the United States.

The hearing brought back memories of the many presentations I have been invited to give across Wisconsin, where I have been questioned by audience members about Muslims imposing Sharia law on fellow Americans.  The questions almost always came from people who don’t know any Muslims.  I still recall a middle-aged Caucasian Christian woman, who drove in from a rural area of the state to hear my presentation, Virgin Mary in the Quran.  She stood up and said she was afraid of Muslims, although I was the first Muslim she ever met.  When I asked her why, she said because we wanted to impose Sharia law on Americans. When I asked her to explain what she meant by Sharia law, she couldn’t come up with a single explanation, she just knew she was afraid of it.  I explained the absurdity that one percent of the U.S. population, of which half are probably not practicing Muslims, would overthrow the Constitution and impose another law.  She was not convinced because as she said, it was going to happen based on “the Bible channel.”

For most Muslims, Sharia is a personal moral and spiritual framework that guides everyday life. It commonly manifests through practices such as prayer, fasting during Ramadan, charitable giving, ethical business conduct, dietary choices like eating halal food, family responsibilities, and striving to live with honesty, compassion, justice, and self-discipline according to Islamic teachings.  Similar to Canon law for Catholics and Halakha for Jews, these laws guide personal practices of one’s faith.

At a time when Americans are struggling with rising costs, political instability, attacks on democratic institutions, and escalating extremism, Republican lawmakers chose once again to drag Muslims before Congress as political scapegoats. Led by Representative Chip Roy and members of the so-called “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” the hearing recycled tired and debunked conspiracy theories portraying Islam itself as a civilizational threat.

The hearing’s title alone, “Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam & Sharia Law Are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution” reveals its purpose. It was not about public safety or constitutional law. It was about telling millions of Muslim Americans that simply being Muslim makes them suspect, dangerous, and not real Americans.

It doesn’t matter that here is no evidence that Muslims are attempting to impose religious law in the United States. Even the hearing’s witnesses failed to identify any credible systemic effort to replace the Constitution with Islamic law. Yet facts were irrelevant. The goal was fear. The goal was spectacle. The goal was to turn Muslim visibility in American life into something sinister.

Ordinary expressions of Muslim identity; mosques, halal food, Qurans in libraries, Muslim charities, prayer accommodations, student groups, and community organizations, were all framed as evidence of infiltration and extremism. In other words, simply existing publicly as a Muslim became the accusation.

This is not new in American history. Whenever I have been invited to speak about Muslims in America, I always begin by talking about our country’s history of intolerance. Every generation of demagogues chooses a minority to portray as incompatible with “real America.” Catholics were once accused of loyalty to the Pope over the Constitution. Jewish Americans were smeared as disloyal outsiders. Japanese Americans were held in internment camps under the guise of national security. Black Americans were terrorized and continue to be terrorized under laws justified as protecting social order, and Hispanics are stereotyped as illegal and a demographic threat.

Today, Muslims occupy that role in the political imagination of the far right.

What makes these hearings especially dangerous is not merely their bigotry, but their deliberate inversion of reality. While lawmakers obsess over an imaginary Muslim plot to overthrow the Constitution, the actual threat to democratic pluralism is coming from racist extremist movements openly seeking to impose a narrow, exclusionary vision of White Christian Nationalism on the country.

Across the United States, we are witnessing escalating efforts to fuse religion with state power and it is definitely not coming from Muslims. It is white Christian nationalist movements demanding religious control over public education, reproductive rights, voting rights, immigration policy, and the judiciary. It is extremists who openly declare America a Christian nation and seek to erase the separation of church and state. It is politicians invoking Christianity while stripping away the civil liberties of those who disagree with them.

Yet somehow, the target of congressional hearings is a minority religious community that makes up barely 1% of the population.

The hypocrisy is staggering.

Representative Jamie Raskin rightly noted the absurdity of these hearings, pointing out that there are less than a handful of Muslim members of Congress and no evidence whatsoever that they seek to impose religious law. He reminded lawmakers that the First Amendment exists precisely to prevent the government from policing religious belief.

Representative Mary Gay Scanlon dismantled the hearing’s foundation with devastating clarity: Republicans, she argued, had “made up a conspiracy theory about their Muslim neighbors” to frighten voters. Her warning was critical: words matter. When political leaders repeatedly portray Muslims as threats, hate crimes rise, discrimination intensifies, and real people become targets. And that danger is no longer theoretical.

It is amazing how every time Republicans expect challenging elections, they resort to demonizing Muslims to increase their poll numbers.

The rhetoric surrounding the caucus has become increasingly explicit and dehumanizing. Representative Randy Fine was condemned for remarks comparing Muslims unfavorably to dogs. Representative Andy Ogles reportedly declared that “Islam is a religion of violence.” Some caucus members have backed proposals effectively targeting Muslims for exclusion from immigration based on their faith.

This is how persecution evolves, not overnight, but slowly. First comes suspicion. Then exclusion. Then legal discrimination. Then normalization of hatred.

History teaches that democratic societies do not descend into authoritarianism all at once. They do so when elected officials convince ordinary citizens that a minority group is fundamentally incompatible with national identity and constitutional values. The language of “civilizational threats” and “incompatible cultures” has been used repeatedly throughout history to justify exclusion, surveillance, and repression.

That is why civil rights groups, interfaith leaders, and constitutional advocates reacted with such alarm to these hearings.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, called the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group, it was the first time in its history it applied that label to a congressional caucus. The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations condemned what it described as the weaponization of government against Muslim Americans through “the politics of fear.” Even religious liberty advocates from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty warned that targeting Muslims undermines constitutional protections for all Americans.

Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee articulated the issue clearly: when government officials target religious groups with baseless accusations and broad stereotypes, they legitimize discrimination and model bullying instead of constitutional equality.

And that is precisely what this hearing accomplished.

It told Muslim children watching that their faith will always place them under suspicion. It told Muslim professionals, students, immigrants, and families that no matter how much they contribute to society, some politicians will still portray them as infiltrators. It emboldened extremists who already harass mosques, threaten Muslim elected officials, and spread anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian hatred online and in public life.

Perhaps most chillingly, these hearings attempt to redefine religious freedom itself. The Constitution does not protect only popular religions or politically convenient faiths. It protects everyone. The moment the government begins deciding which religions are “compatible” with America, constitutional liberty itself is in danger.

Muslim Americans do not need loyalty tests. They do not need congressional approval to belong. They are doctors, teachers, business owners, soldiers, activists, neighbors, and public servants. They are part of the fabric of this nation.

The real question Americans should ask is not whether Islam is compatible with democracy, but whether politicians exploiting fear and bigotry for power are compatible with the Constitution they claim to defend.

Because a government that singles out one faith community for suspicion is not protecting freedom and the U.S. Constitution. It is actually a threat to both.