# Anti-Sharia Movement The coordinated campaign, running from roughly 2010, to enact state legislation barring courts from applying "foreign" or Islamic law. **Since 2010, 201 such bills have been introduced across 43 states**; fourteen states introduced them in 2017 alone. It is the most legislatively productive project of the American counter-jihad network, and its own architect has said on the record that the legislation was never intended to have legal effect. ## How it works The template is **"American Laws for American Courts"** (ALAC), drafted from 2010 by attorney **David Yerushalmi** — general counsel to **Frank Gaffney**'s [[Center for Security Policy]] and co-founder of the American Freedom Law Center — and promoted through **ACT for America**, the grassroots organization founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel, which claimed hundreds of chapters and, by one 2015 count, some 300,000 members. Later versions are facially neutral, barring the application of any "foreign law" that would violate constitutional rights. This is deliberate drafting: the first-generation bills named sharia explicitly and were struck down for it. The American Bar Association opposes ALAC as duplicative — American courts already cannot enforce foreign law that violates the Constitution, and no court ever could. **Oklahoma State Question 755** is the case that set the pattern. The "Save Our State" amendment, barring courts from considering "international law or Sharia Law," passed on **2 November 2010 with 70 percent** of the vote — 695,650 to 296,944, carrying every county. CAIR-Oklahoma's Muneer Awad sued two days later; a preliminary injunction issued 29 November 2010; the Tenth Circuit affirmed on 10 January 2012; and on **15 August 2013** the amendment was permanently struck as an Establishment Clause violation. Singling out one religion for disfavor is exactly what the clause forbids. ## The quiet part, said out loud Yerushalmi's own account of the strategy is the most important document in this file: > *"If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose. The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, 'What is Shariah?'"* The bills are pedagogy. Their function is to install a premise — that American Muslims are attempting to impose religious law — in the minds of legislators and voters, through the repeated ritual of debating it. Legal defeat does not impair that function; it may improve it, since each injunction supplies a fresh grievance. This is worth reading directly against [[Project Blitz]], the [[Christian Nationalism]] model-legislation project, which works the same way: a package of bills whose individual passage matters less than the cumulative normalization. **Model legislation as a teaching instrument rather than a policy instrument is a recurring technique in this vault** — see also the [[Ten Commandments]] display laws, where a decade of manufactured litigation is the point. ## The funding and the network The Center for American Progress's **"Fear, Inc." (26 August 2011)** traced the money: **seven foundations gave $42.6 million to this network between 2001 and 2009**, including Donors Capital Fund, the Scaife foundations, and the [[Bradley Foundation]]. It named a small group of "misinformation experts" — **Robert Spencer**, Pamela Geller, **Frank Gaffney**, and [[David Horowitz]] — working through an institutional core of the [[Center for Security Policy]], the Middle East Forum (**Daniel Pipes**, founded 1990), and the Investigative Project on Terrorism (Steven Emerson, 1995). See [[Dark Money Timeline]] and [[Think Tank and Policy Infrastructure Timeline]] for the funding architecture these sit inside. The evidentiary backbone for a decade of "Muslim Brotherhood front" claims was the **unindicted co-conspirator list** from the Holy Land Foundation prosecution — a list naming CAIR, ISNA and other mainstream American Muslim organizations, later held to have violated those parties' Fifth Amendment due-process rights by publicizing them without charges or any forum to respond. Named without trial, and then cited forever after as though named at trial. ## Right-wing politics tributaries **Continuity with the broader project.** The movement's key figures moved directly into the first Trump administration's orbit; the same milieu produced the intellectual case for the 2017 travel bans, upheld in *[[Trump v. Hawaii]]* on **26 June 2018** after the third version added North Korea and Venezuela — the two non-Muslim-majority additions that let the policy survive review. The [[US Immigration Timeline]] carries the enforcement thread; [[Islamophobia]] carries the ideological one. **The structural contradiction.** A movement that wants the Establishment Clause narrowed so Christian practice can return to public institutions also needs it broad enough to disfavor Islam. Those cannot both be won on the same reasoning — which is why the "history and tradition" standard from *[[Kennedy v. Bremerton]]*, which asks what American practice has historically permitted rather than what neutrality requires, is so useful to it. **What it is not responding to.** There is no American movement to impose religious law on the general public that is Muslim. There is one that is Christian, with seminaries, a literature, and officeholders: see [[Christian Reconstructionism]], [[Theonomy]], and [[Dominionism]]. ## See also [[Sharia]] | [[Islam]] | [[Islamophobia]] | [[Center for Security Policy]] | [[David Horowitz]] | [[Project Blitz]] | [[Christian Nationalism]] | [[Theonomy]] | [[Trump v. Hawaii]] | [[Islam Timeline]] | [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]]