The Threat is Sharia

The enemy adheres to an all-encompassing Islamic political-military-legal doctrine known as sharia. It obliges its followers to wage jihad toward the worldwide triumph of Islam through a global Islamic state ruled under a restored caliphate.

Millions of Muslims—many in America—do not live by strict sharia tenets or engage in jihad. The uneven imposition of strict doctrine across Muslim-majority and minority countries creates the appearance that sharia varies widely. In recent years, some advocates have argued there is no single sharia and that all interpretations are equally valid. In practice, particularly among many Sunni authorities and in matters concerning non-Muslims, sharia is treated as a singular, comprehensive code. It is totalitarian in character, incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, and hostile to freedom.

Its adherents are making a determined, sustained, well-financed effort to entrench sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Too many communities, to borrow Mao’s metaphor, provide the “sea” in which jihadis swim—offering little opposition and thus signaling tacit agreement with the ends, if not the means. Resistance carries risks inside Islam, including denunciation as an apostate, a capital offense under sharia.

Support takes many forms: channeling “charity” that, under sharia, can fund jihad; schooling children in sharia at mosques or madrassas; and participating in—or staying silent about—abuses that sharia condones or commands, such as forced and underage marriage, honor violence, female genital mutilation, polygamy, and domestic abuse.

Evidence of sharia’s creeping influence appears in American life. One stark case arose in New Jersey in 2009, when a judge initially denied a restraining order to a Muslim woman abused and raped by her husband, citing his religious beliefs. An appellate court reversed the decision in 2010, affirming that American law derives from the Constitution—and that alien legal dictates have no place in a U.S. courtroom. The fact that such a reversal was required is instructive.

Misperceiving the Threat

Few Americans grasp how diverse and successful the efforts to insinuate sharia into the United States have been—or the full implications of this totalitarian doctrine for our freedoms, society, and government. Since 9/11, most recognize the danger posed by violent jihadis. Far fewer recognize the equally serious menace posed by operatives who work by deceit and stealth from inside the gates.

These actors share the same strategic objectives as openly violent groups: global imposition of sharia and restoration of a caliphate to enforce it. They differ mainly in timing and tactics. What appears as innocuous outreach—dawa—is better understood as the early phase of “preparing the battlefield,” shaping conditions for later coercion and, ultimately, violent seizure of political authority.

American leaders, academia, media, and much of society have grown ill-equipped to recognize this dimension of jihad. Decades of eroded confidence in American principles, combined with well-funded programs that shape campus and interfaith discourse, have dulled our perception. A massive propaganda effort further obscures the doctrinal roots of jihadist violence and stealthy supremacism in sharia itself. The cumulative result: infiltration and influence by an enemy within that seeks to replace the Constitution with sharia.

The Muslim Brotherhood

The most important movement advancing Islamic supremacism, sharia, and the caliphate through—at present—non-violent means is the Muslim Brotherhood. In an internal strategy memorandum for North America, the Brotherhood described its campaign as a “civilization jihad”: a long-term project to establish itself in the United States and, once rooted, to wage a “grand jihad” aimed at undermining and ultimately eliminating Western civilization from within.

Commentators often call this “stealth jihad.” The label fits: leaders and operatives have long emphasized that tactics depend on strategy and phase, with violence held in reserve. They frequently use dual messaging—saying one thing to general American audiences and another to in-group listeners—masking intent while advancing the same end state.

The breadth of organizations aligned with or derived from the Brotherhood inside the United States speaks to its planning, resources, and reach. Political correctness, multicultural pieties, and willful blindness have combined to make officials hesitant even to describe the problem candidly, much less to confront it.

The Wellspring of Jihad

The enemy is comprehensible and can be analyzed in concrete doctrinal terms. Conformance to sharia—in its political-legal sense—poses a strategic threat to the American constitutional order.

Successive administrations have failed to define the problem accurately. Some officials insist Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, in part because sharia-adherent actors do not classify their own jihad as “terror.” Yet those same actors routinely tie their operations to religious duty and doctrine.

Official euphemisms and prohibitions on precise language do not change the reality: jihad, as defined in classical sources and by modern ideologues, authorizes warfare against non-Muslims. When leaders deny this connection, they hobble our ability to prepare, deter, and defeat those who act on it.

A Needed Reality Check

It is correct to note that we are not fighting a tactic like “terror.” We are confronting a coherent movement that defines itself by doctrine. It is also fair to say jihad is a tenet of Islam; but defining it merely as personal striving obscures the legal-military meaning that motivates sharia-adherent campaigns.

The consequences of denial are visible. Before the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, the perpetrator publicly briefed colleagues on sharia’s requirements and his own conflicts as a Muslim soldier. His presentation matched Islamic legal doctrines on jihad. The warnings were explicit—and ignored. A sober understanding of the doctrine could have prompted early intervention and saved lives.

The Enemy Within

Instinctively, Americans sense that “the law of Saudi Arabia” represents brutal repression and expansionist designs. Many therefore presume the primary danger comes only from terrorists. In fact, the greater long-term threat arises from the combination of violent actors and those conducting civilization jihad: cultural subversion, influence operations, propaganda, and legal/financial entrenchment.

This is the approach openly praised by prominent ideologues who forecast victory in the West not by the sword alone but through dawa—gradual, relentless preparation that normalizes sharia’s social and legal claims. The violence remains implicit, reserved for later stages. Together, the violent and the pre-violent lines of effort form a pincer aimed at the same constitutional target.

The Need for Corrective Action

Given the gravity of the threat, it is astonishing that the United States lacks a coherent strategy to defeat sharia’s political-legal encroachment. Core institutions—law enforcement, intelligence, defense, diplomacy—too often avoid teaching the doctrine or mapping the networks that advance it. Meanwhile, First Amendment protections are misused as a shield for seditious activity, even as activists seek to restrict speech that “offends” them—an informal importation of blasphemy norms.

Sharia is fundamentally about power: enforcing a comprehensive code. It supplies a total system—legal, military, social, and economic—backed by mechanisms of control. By its own logic, non-Muslim polities are to be subdued and brought under Islamic rule. That project is not a protected religious practice; it is an attempt to supplant the Constitution.

Despite clear warnings—from documents, leaders’ statements, and defectors who openly describe the objective—many elites still treat sharia as merely a private religious system, rather than a totalitarian program in conflict with constitutional governance.

Recommendations

• Equip policymakers, judges, financiers, business leaders, journalists, community leaders, and the public with an accurate understanding of sharia’s political-legal character and the necessity of keeping American law sharia-free. Resist efforts to install any parallel legal code alongside the Constitution.
• End official outreach that legitimizes or empowers organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood or other sharia-adherent networks. Prioritize aggressive, lawful investigation and prosecution of terror financing and related crimes. Encourage and elevate Muslims who publicly reject sharia’s political-legal program.
• In keeping with Article VI, bar adherents of totalitarian, anti-constitutional ideologies from positions of public trust in government and the armed forces—just as we do with other hate movements and endorsers of criminal abuse.
• Proscribe practices that institutionalize sharia in public life—such as sharia-compliant finance in public funds or policies that confer preferential treatment tied to sharia observance.
• Enforce existing sedition laws. Where mosques or institutions advocate replacing the Constitution with sharia, warn, investigate, and, when warranted, prosecute.
• Ensure textbooks in public schools and Islamic schools do not promote anti-constitutional doctrine. Schools that persist should lose taxpayer funding, accreditation, and charitable status.
• Prevent attempts to create enclaves that apply sharia alongside or in place of American law, including claims over territory around institutions.
• Treat immigration by individuals who openly adhere to totalitarian, anti-constitutional ideologies as a bar to entry, consistent with historic policies toward communist subversion.

These measures will draw opposition—from sharia-adherent activists and from enablers who misread the threat as a simple matter of religious freedom. That debate is overdue. Clarity about doctrine, networks, and objectives is the indispensable first step toward safeguarding the Constitution and the liberties it protects.

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