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Historian and author Dr. Michael Phillips, SMU Professor Dr. Rick Halperin and Hadi Jawad, co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas, submitted the op-ed below on the ongoing epidemic of Texas Islamophobia.
You can forgive Texas historians if they are overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu as they witness the hate and vitriol aimed at Muslims by Texas Republicans today.
The over-the-top Islamophobia embraced in recent years at all levels of the state GOP echoes the paranoid slanders once aimed at Texas Catholics by the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in Dallas, W.A. Criswell (the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas), and other bigots who strived to make the state an unwelcoming place for newcomers.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, whose district extends from San Antonio to Austin and who next month faces off against Sen. Mayes Middleton in the Republican runoff for state attorney general, recently joined Rep. Keith Self of Collin County to form the anti-Muslim Sharia-Free America Caucus in the U.S. House.
Sharia is a set of principles Muslims believe derive from the word of God. American mosques sometimes offer non-binding mediation services based on sharia to resolve business disputes or marital conflicts among their members, similar to what’s offered at synagogues and Catholic churches across the country. Such voluntary mediations unfold entirely in-house.
Roy and Self, however, claim that American Muslims conspire to force sharia on all Americans.
Self said his Sharia-Free America Caucus will defend the country against “the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas” and “save Western Civilization” from the supposed threat of Muslim law.
Florida Rep. Randy Fine joined Roy and Self in the caucus and made headlines by falsely claiming that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, seeks to ban the ownership of dogs in the Big Apple because he supposedly sees them as unclean under Islamic law.
With the support of Roy and Self, Fine introduced a bill protecting the country from a non-existent threat, the Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act.
The law would “prohibit federal funds from being provided to any state or local government that bans dogs as pets.”
Fine clearly articulated the ugly bigotry animating the anti-sharia caucus by declaring on the social media platform X, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
For his part, Roy introduced the Mamdani Act, which would authorize the U.S. government to deport non-citizens living in the United States if they support Marxism, socialism, communism, or “Islamic fundamentalist doctrines,” publish materials supporting these ideas, or belong to organizations promoting such beliefs.
The law would also allow the U.S. government to strip naturalized U.S. citizens of their citizenship and deport them because of alleged anti-American viewpoints, without the possibility of court review.
“Why do we continue to import people who hate us?” Roy asked in an interview with the far-right Breitbart News. “[T]his legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas.”
Roy and his allies strike a sadly familiar note.
The American, or Know-Nothing Party, blew in like a tornado riding a storm of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant hatred that swept the country, including Texas, in the 1840s and 1850s. A dozen members of the party won election to the Texas State House in 1855. Sam Houston, the former president of the Texas Republic who represented the state in the U.S. Senate and would shortly thereafter win the governor’s mansion, endorsed the party’s platform.
The party’s hyperbolic fear of the Catholic church can be found in an 1855 edition of the Texas State Times, a pro-Know Nothing publication. The newspaper invited its readers to imagine a nightmare world in which “our Senate and cabinet [is] composed of a majority of Catholics . . . The inquisition, the crucifix [and] . . . torture . . . would be reared in the forum of Justice . . . our rivers blush with the blood of protestants.”
Famously, the Ku Klux Klan ran Dallas in the early 1920s. In 1922 Hiram Welsey Evans, a Dallas dentist, took over the national organization. On October 24, 1923, more than 150,000 attended a special Ku Klux Klan Day at the State Fair of Texas. On that occasion, Evans made a speech in which he charged that Catholic immigrants plotted to take over the country and make the Pope the king of America.
“Catholicism is built,” Evans insisted in one of his pamphlets, “. . . upon the . . . idea of the individual as subject instead of citizen.”
Under Evans, the Klan, along with labor unions and the eugenics movement (which advocated selective breeding to create a so-called “master race”), persuaded the Congress to pass the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictive immigration law in American history.
The law imposed quotas on Eastern and Southern European countries with large Catholic and Jewish populations. Immigration from those parts of Europe dropped to almost zero. The world’s most famous Holocaust victim, Anne Frank, and her family, could not enter the United States because of the Johnson-Reed Act, which wasn’t repealed until 1965.
As the historian Norman D. Brown noted, in 1928 former Texas governor Oscar Colquitt, a Democrat, opposed Al Smith, his party’s Catholic nominee for president, in part blaming him and the Catholic church for New York laws that he claimed permitted the social “mixing of whites and blacks” and racial intermarriage.
Such intense religious intolerance persisted throughout the Civil Rights Movement.
By 1960, Criswell presided over the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. He proclaimed the candidacy of a Catholic, John F. Kennedy, for the presidency posed a mortal threat to American Protestantism.
“The election of a Catholic as president would mean the end of religious liberty in America,” Criswell warned in a July 3, 1960, sermon. The dread over Kennedy’s Catholicism reportedly cracked up the soon-to-be-president’s wife Jacqueline. “I think it’s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he’s a Catholic,” she once said at a party. “He’s such a poor Catholic.”
Today, Texas Republicans are tapping into a familiar playbook. In the absence of constructive policy ideas that might attract support, fear is often an easy substitute.
Vince Minchillo, a Plano-based Republican strategist, admitted to CNN that because unauthorized entry into the United States by migrants from south of the border has dropped since Donald Trump regained the White House, his party pivoted to stirring panic about a new group of outsiders.
Inciting fear of Muslims seizing control of American land and culture, Minchillo said, “is playing as well as anything I have ever seen with Texas Republican voters . . . It’s solid gold.”
About 313,000 Muslims call Texas home, less than one percent of the state’s total population of 32 million. Nevertheless, Republican candidates this year are sounding the alarm that the Lone Star State teeters on the edge of becoming a mini-Islamic Republic, partly because of the sinister plots of Democrats.
Roy has fancifully claimed that much of the Dallas-Fort Worth area has turned into a “no-go zone” where non-Muslims, particularly Christian and Jewish women, fear to tread. Of course, any attempt to force Islamic law on Texas would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment, which prohibits the national or any local government from “establishing” an official religion.
That reality didn’t stop cynics like Gov. Greg Abbott, who has a law degree from Vanderbilt University. In 2017, Abbott signed a bill banning the use of sharia or any other “foreign” laws in the state’s family courts.
In 2025, he also issued a constitutionally dubious executive order smearing a Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, as aligned with the terrorist group Hamas. That measure blocks CAIR from buying real estate. Abbott claimed, without evidence, that CAIR schemed to make sharia the law of the land.
Last year, Abbott cited a similar rationale as he signed a bill meant to block a proposed 402-acre multi-use development that would include 1,000 homes, apartments, stores, a faith-based school, an assisted-living center and a mosque planned by members of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) in Collin County.
Elected officials have manipulated education policies to harm Muslims. Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock unsuccessfully tried to prevent Muslim private schools from receiving any funds from the state’s private school voucher program.
Muslim accomplishments are being erased from memory. The state board of education ditched a requirement that Texas students learn about Muslim contributions to astronomy and algebra. U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill of Flower Mound sounded the alarm on his Facebook page that Texas children might believe that the Alamo is “an Islamic building” if they are told its Spanish architecture was obviously influenced by the nearly 800 years that Muslims ruled what became modern Spain.
The current Islamophobic wave might be comical if it were not so dangerous.
The H-E-B grocery chain has carried halal meat, slaughtered under Islamic religious rules, since 2022. On April 12, however, the presence of those products inspired rightwing outrage when self-styled Republican “political strategist” Isabella Maria DeLuca posted a picture of halal meat for sale at a Melissa H-E-B with the comment, “Insane.” This post inspired a call by some very online right-wingers to boycott the chain.
To be a Texas Muslim today is to face a constant torrent of verbal abuse.
Last September 19, a man intruded into the Sufaraa Center in McKinney and yelled, “there should be no mosques in the USA.”
On December 16 Jake Lang, a January 6, 2021 insurrectionist and candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida, held a rally attended by about 50 in front of the East Plano Islamic Center. He stood in the back of a truck holding up a severed pig’s head that had a Quran, the Muslim holy book, stuffed in its mouth.
In November, a street preacher from Waco harangued Muslim high school students praying outside a coffee shop in Murphy, yelling at them that their prophet Muhammad was a “stupid pedophile.” He gave a repeat performance at White Rock Lake in March when he greeted other praying Muslims by screaming, “Good evening, terrorists, muzzies, suicide bombers. Lend me your ears.”
Rod Vilhauer, who is running for mayor of Frisco, compared immigrants to rats and said on a podcast, “You can’t tell me that Islam is a religion; it’s a terrorist group.”
Meanwhile, Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner Bo French criticized his party for not being anti-Muslim enough. He has called for the deportation of 100 million from the United States (a third of the total population), including all Muslims.
Such words could incite deadly violence. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a Dallas man went on a murderous shooting spree in which he killed two men and blinded a third because he thought they were Muslim.
Texas will be lucky if the current torrent of anti-Muslim rage from the state’s political leadership doesn’t get someone killed.
In the meantime, the state’s Republican Party could end up being seen in the future as carrying on the shameful legacy of other Texans who marched under the banner of anti-immigrant hate, the parade of Know-Nothings, Klansmen, xenophobic preachers, and political opportunists whose ugly paranoia and ruthless scapegoating warped the Texas past.
