A pig’s head, burning Qur’ans, “Shari’ah cities” and warnings of “Islamification”: something extraordinary is happening in Texas, where Islam has become one of the state’s most contentious political battlegrounds.
In December 2025, far-right activist Jake Lang turned up outside one of America’s most prominent mosques carrying a severed pig’s head with a copy of the Qur’an stuffed inside it. The target was the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) in Texas, home to internationally renowned Islamic scholar Yasir Qadhi.
But what happened outside EPIC was only the most grotesque manifestation of a much larger battle taking place across Texas. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the state has emerged as one of the main frontlines in America’s battle over Islam.
Texas is home to more than 300,000 Muslims and major Islamic institutions and personalities. Qadhi and fellow scholar Omar Suleiman are based in the Dallas area, alongside thriving mosques, Islamic schools, charities and Muslim businesses.
But alongside that increasingly confident Muslim presence has come an extraordinary political backlash — and this time it is not confined to the fringes.
‘Shari’ah cities’ not allowed
EPIC itself has become the centre of that battle. The mosque became associated with plans for a large Muslim-centred residential development northeast of Dallas, originally known as EPIC City and subsequently renamed The Meadow.
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The development envisaged homes alongside a mosque, school and commercial space. But it quickly became a political cause célèbre.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott warned: “To be clear, Shari’ah law is not allowed in Texas. Nor are Shari’ah cities.”
State agencies launched multiple investigations, while Abbott accused those behind the project of attempting to create an exclusively Muslim community governed by Shari’ah.
The developers strongly deny that characterisation and say the development would be open regardless of religion and subject to American law.
After federal housing authorities launched another investigation this year, Abbott declared: “The Meadow will remain just that — an empty field.” The governor insists the dispute concerns discrimination and enforcement of Texas law rather than hostility towards Muslims.
For Yasir Qadhi, the fundamental problem is that the Shari’ah being attacked by politicians bears little resemblance to how ordinary American Muslims understand their religion.
“When I say Shari’ah to the average American Muslim, they would literally think of, OK, I need to be kind to my mother, I need to be a good person,” he told PBS. “Their interpretation of Shari’ah is not one that the Muslims of this country even understand.”
‘These radical extremists are not welcome’
Abbott’s campaign extends far beyond EPIC. In November 2025, he designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood as “foreign terrorist organizations” and “transnational criminal organizations” under Texas law.
Abbott accused both organisations of seeking to “forcibly impose Shari’ah law” and establish Islam’s “mastership of the world”. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state,” he declared.
CAIR rejected the allegations and challenged Abbott’s authority to make such a designation.
Abbott subsequently called on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to strip CAIR of its nonprofit status and eliminate its ability to operate in Texas.
For Omar Suleiman, founder of the Dallas-based Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, such actions are evidence of something much bigger.
“Throughout Governor Abbott’s tenure, Islamophobia has become increasingly normalized and instrumentalized in Texas politics,” Suleiman has said. “Muslims have repeatedly been used as convenient targets — not because our community has ever posed a threat, but because fear of Muslims has proven politically expedient.”
He dismissed Abbott’s action against CAIR as “political theatre”.
‘Don’t Sharia Our Texas’
And Abbott is not acting in a political vacuum.
The Republican Party dominates Texas politics, controlling the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature. The Texas GOP has adopted “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” as an official legislative priority. Its resolution describes Shari’ah as an “incompatible, seditious, subversive, competing enemy system”.
It proposes that advocacy or implementation of Shari’ah should potentially result in criminal punishment and disqualification from public, military and law-enforcement service. Perhaps most remarkably, it calls upon the federal government to “denaturalize and deport advocates of Shari’ah Law”.
And in the March Republican primary, 95% of participating Texas Republican voters supported a proposition stating that Texas should prohibit Shari’ah law.
Republican Congressman Chip Roy, who is running for Texas Attorney General, has gone further by warning that the state itself is being transformed.
“This is a coordinated political effort to Islamify Texas,” he told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. “We’ve got to tweak the Texas Constitution. Whatever’s necessary to protect Texas from being Islamified by the radical Marxists.”
Roy and fellow Texas Republican Congressman Keith Self also established the Sharia-Free America Caucus. Like Abbott, Roy insists that his concern is not ordinary Muslims practising their faith but the political and legal implications of Shari’ah.
Burning the Qur’an to win votes
At the most extreme end of the political spectrum stands Valentina Gomez. The Colombian-born far-right activist and social media personality unsuccessfully sought a Republican congressional nomination in Texas.
In August 2025, Gomez released a campaign video in which she used a flamethrower to burn a copy of the Qur’an.
“Your daughters will be raped, and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all,” she declared. Her accompanying message was even more explicit: “I will end Islam in Texas.”
Gomez does not hold elected office and should not be presented as representative of Texas Republicans generally. But her prominence raises an important question about how far ideas once associated with the political fringe have travelled.
There is obviously an enormous difference between Gomez burning a Qur’an and Abbott investigating a property development. But the language surrounding Islam increasingly overlaps.
Gomez says Islam must be stopped. Abbott says CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood want to “forcibly impose Shari’ah law”. The governing Republican Party describes Shari’ah as a “seditious” enemy system. And Roy warns that Texas is being “Islamified”.
Even wudu becomes political
The battle has even extended to Muslim ablution.
In August, Abbott referred washing facilities at Dallas Fort Worth and Houston airports to federal authorities for investigation.
“These ablution stations single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion,” Abbott said. “They are not interfaith chapels open to all. They exist to benefit the Muslim population alone.”
Houston officials disputed that characterisation, saying the facilities were available to all passengers.
Why Texas?
So why has Texas become such a battleground?
One possible explanation is the growing visibility and confidence of Muslim life itself. Dallas and Houston possess thriving Muslim communities. Mosques, schools, businesses, charities and professional organisations have become permanent parts of the state’s landscape.
EPIC has become a major Islamic institution under Yasir Qadhi, while Omar Suleiman’s Yaqeen Institute has developed an international audience from its base in the Dallas area.
Muslims are building institutions, accumulating wealth and becoming increasingly politically active. EPIC City made that growth unusually visible: Muslims were no longer simply constructing another mosque but proposing an entire development built around a community that openly identified itself as Muslim.
That does not prove that Muslim growth caused the political backlash. But the two phenomena are occurring simultaneously.
America’s most Islamophobic state?
So is Texas America’s most Islamophobic state?
There is no reliable statistical evidence to say that definitively. Hate crimes, discrimination complaints, attacks on mosques and political rhetoric measure different things and cannot simply be combined into an Islamophobia league table.
But Texas stands out for another reason: the extent to which hostility towards Islam has moved beyond fringe activists and into mainstream political debate.
A far-right provocateur can turn up outside a mosque with a pig’s head. A failed congressional candidate can burn a Qur’an with a flamethrower. But in Texas, the argument now reaches much further than that.
The governor warns against “Shari’ah cities” and has designated America’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation a “foreign terrorist organization” under Texas law. Republican members of Congress warn about the “Islamification” of the state. And the Republican Party that controls Texas describes Shari’ah as a “seditious” enemy system and has called for its advocates to be denaturalised and deported.
That is what makes Texas significant. The story is not simply that Islamophobia exists there. It is that ideas about Islam which might once have been dismissed as belonging to the political fringes are increasingly being articulated within the institutions of political power.
And all of this is happening while Texas’s Muslim community is becoming larger, more confident and more established.
