In Texas, ordinary Muslim religious practices are increasingly being treated as political threats

Texas officials have spent the past year treating ordinary Muslim practices — prayer, arbitration, mosque construction, even a private Eid party at a water park — as evidence of political threat. Gov. Greg Abbott designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations a foreign terrorist organization, threatened to pull $530,000 from Grand Prairie over the water park event, and opened an investigation into a Dallas religious-divorce arbitration group whose rulings carry no more legal force than any private arbitrator's. Attorney General Ken Paxton's probe into the Islamic Tribunal has produced no public findings.

State Rep. Alan Schoolcraft, co-leading a 'Sharia Free Texas Caucus,' says lawmakers intend to define what counts as a religion, arguing Islam is 'much more than a religion,' without specifying which practices would lose protection. The comparison to Jewish and Christian religious arbitration bodies, which operate under the same legal framework without official scrutiny, went unaddressed by state officials. A Republican railroad commissioner nominee posted in June that he 'won't rest until every Muslim is gone.'

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