Texas Republicans are not banning Sharia law.
They are banning a memory they do not want to confront.
Proposition 10 in the 2026 Texas Republican primary asks voters whether the state should prohibit Sharia law. The problem is simple and inconvenient. Sharia law has no legal standing in Texas. It never has. It never could. The U.S. Constitution already blocks religious law from replacing civil law.
So why ask the question at all?
Because this is not legislation. It is theater. And more precisely, it is historical avoidance dressed up as public safety.
A Phantom Threat That Doesn’t Exist
Texas has a population of roughly 30 million people. Muslims make up around 1.5 to 2 percent of that number. At most, that is about 600,000 people. They are spread across Houston, Dallas, Austin, and a few other urban centers. They do not control courts. They do not dominate school boards. They do not set state policy.
They cannot impose anything.
Yet they are being treated as if they are on the verge of taking over.
This should immediately raise a basic question. If the threat is imaginary, what is the fear really about?
Europe’s Selective Memory
European voices in these debates often say, “Look at Europe.” It sounds confident. It sounds experienced. It is also deeply selective.
Europe rarely remembers its own record in Muslim lands.
France ruled Algeria for over a century. The war of independence alone killed hundreds of thousands. Torture was systemic. Villages were erased. Even today, France hesitates to officially call it what it was.
Italy ran concentration camps in Libya in the early twentieth century. Tens of thousands died. This barely appears in European schoolbooks.
Britain presided over catastrophic famines in colonial India, including the Bengal famine, where millions died while food was exported. These were policy decisions, not accidents of nature.
And then there is Bosnia. A genocide against European Muslims in the 1990s, committed on European soil, while Europe debated and delayed.
When Europeans warn about Muslims, they often forget that many Muslim migrations began not with conquest, but with colonial collapse and imperial withdrawal.
Memory disappears when it becomes uncomfortable.
America’s Cleaner Story
The American version of forgetting is different, but just as effective.
American violence is usually framed as unintended. Mistakes were made. Intelligence failed. Good intentions went wrong.
Iraq is remembered as a war about Saddam Hussein, not about the millions displaced or killed and the region destabilized for a generation.
Afghanistan is remembered as a failed project, not as twenty years of night raids, drone strikes, and families living under constant fear.
Pakistan is discussed as an ally, rarely as a place where drones hovered over villages with no warning and no accountability.
Iran is treated as irrationally hostile, while the 1953 CIA-backed coup that destroyed its democracy is rarely mentioned.
Distance helps. So does technology. Most Americans never saw the consequences directly. War was professionalized. Sanitized. Exported.
What you do not see is easier to forget.
So What Are Texas Politicians Afraid Of?
Not Sharia. Sharia is a symbol, not a danger.
They are afraid of pluralism becoming ordinary.
Religious freedom is celebrated when it looks familiar. Churches, crosses, and Christian language feel safe. When a different religion practices the same freedom, suddenly freedom feels threatening.
They are afraid of demographics, not because Muslims are numerous, but because they are young, urban, educated, and increasingly visible.
They are afraid of losing narrative control. Once Muslims are seen as neighbors rather than suspects, the old stories stop working.
And most of all, they are afraid of questions.
Who destabilized whom?
Who ruled without consent?
Who drew borders, staged coups, backed dictators, and walked away?
Those questions are dangerous. So it is safer to invent a threat.
From Law to War to Dehumanization
Watch how the language escalates.
It starts with “law.”
Then becomes “invasion.”
Then shifts to “death cult.”
At that point, this is no longer politics. It is moral erasure.
Once a belief system is described as satanic or inherently violent, its followers stop being individuals. They become symbols. Targets. Acceptable collateral.
History shows where this road leads. It never ends with a ballot proposition.
The Quiet Irony
The loudest defenders of constitutional values in these debates are endorsing collective suspicion, religious tests, and symbolic bans. These are exactly the things the Constitution was designed to prevent.
The contradiction is not accidental.
It is easier to fear Muslims than to reckon with empire. Easier to ban an imaginary law than to face real history. Easier to mobilize voters with panic than with policy.
Texas is not afraid of Sharia law.
The West is afraid of remembering what it did to the Muslim world, and what that history says about the stories it tells itself today.
That is the fear beneath the noise.
And that is why a law that does not exist is suddenly treated as an existential threat.
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