Muslims in San Antonio gather at a local mosque. Credit: Sarah Brooke Lyons

Texas Republicans intensified their attacks against Islam this week, playing on unfounded concerns that the state’s 300,000 Muslims are financing terrorist organizations and wish to implement Sharia Law here.​

On Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick formally named “preventing Sharia law in Texas” among the state Senate’s top priorities in the 2027 legislative session.

“Only state and federal laws apply in Texas and ‘Sharia law’ or other secondary judicial systems have no place in Texas,” Patrick, who controls the Texas Senate’s agenda, wrote in his memo.

Although there’s no real threat of Sharia Law — a loosely defined legal framework based on the most literal interpretations of the Quran — being implemented in Texas, that hasn’t stopped Patrick from whipping up fears about it.

Specifically, Patrick’s memo demands that the Senate examine entities including the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC City, a Muslim-centric planned masterplanned community that’s become the center of controversy and conspiracy theories among the far right.

Patrick’s demands come a year after the U.S. Department of Justice closed an investigation into EPIC City after failing to find any civil rights violations involving the proposed project.

Not to be outdone, Gov. Greg Abbott, in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, demanded Paxton’s office strip the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil-rights organization, of its nonprofit status and eliminate its ability to operate in the state.

“Your office may even seek a lien against all existing property the nonprofit has in this state,” Abbott wrote. “You have used these tools before; I urge you to use them to combat CAIR.”

Abbott’s letter comes after he last fall formally declared CAIR a foreign terrorist organization, despite little evidence that the nonprofit poses a threat to state or national security or has done much beyond its chief role of advocating for U.S. Muslims’ civil rights.

Texas has the fifth-largest Muslim population in the U.S., and CAIR would likely fight any attempt by Texas officials to revoke its nonprofit status in the courts.

In comments to Texas Public Radio about recent claims spread by Abbott and Patrick, CAIR National Deputy Director Ahmed Mitchell said most Muslims aren’t interested in imposing Sharia law, adding that it “defies logic” to think that a minority population wields the power to radically reshape the entire state’s justice system.

He also rejected Abbott’s claim that his organization supports terrorism.

“These are all debunked conspiracy theories that have been spread online for years,” Mitchell said. “I never thought I would see the governor of a state putting them in writing in an official proclamation. This is all nonsense that can be easily rebutted with a simple Google search. For example, CARE has spent 30 years condemning terrorism, very vocally.”

Patrick and Abbott’s rhetoric echoes that of GOP candidates down the ballot this election season, who are heavily leaning into fears about an “Islamic invasion of Texas.”

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican incumbent, facing a tight primary against Paxton, dropped a seven-figure ad buy late last month stating “radical Islam is a blood thirsty ideology” that has no place in Texas. Without offering a shred of evidence, the clip attempts to link CAIR to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel and December’s Bondi Beach shooting in Australia. 

Meanwhile, attorney Aaron Reitz, who’s running to take Paxton’s seat as AG, released an ad declaring that Democratic politicians had “imported millions of Muslims into our country.”

“The result? More terrorism, more crime, and they even want their own illegal cities in Texas to impose Sharia law,” claimed Reitz, a former chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

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Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...