Some Texas politicians insist that Shariah is creeping into the state’s courts, warning of an Islamic invasion. Shariah is the body of religious law drawn from the Quran and the practices of the Prophet Muhammad. In much of the Muslim world it supplies not only the rules of worship but the rules courts apply, from divorce to capital punishment. Iran is the starkest illustration.
The concern traces to a handful of civil cases, none of which produced a ruling that conflicted with Texas law. Shariah surfaced in our courtrooms the way other foreign or religious codes did, in family and contract disputes where both parties had agreed in advance to be bound by some part of it. In Ahmed v. Ahmed, a 2008 fight over a $50,000 deferred dowry promised in an Islamic marriage contract, a Texas appeals court refused to enforce the payment because the agreement failed the Family Code’s requirements. To remove any doubt, lawmakers moved in 2017 to ban foreign or religious legal codes. There is no evidence Shariah is being imposed in a state that is less than 2% Muslim.
Turning to criminal law, those raising concerns about Shariah are right about one important thing: A justice system should answer to constitutional principles and not to a religious orthodoxy. If Texas wants to distinguish its justice system even more from Shariah, the clearest path does not run through duplicative legislation. Rather, it requires fixing the parts of our own courts and prisons that don’t live up to our stated commitment to respect the dignity and rights of every Texan.
Start at the front end. Iranian interrogators have routinely used flogging and other forms of torture to extract confessions, sometimes broadcasting them on state television before an execution. Nothing remotely like that happens here. But Texas law requires recording the confession, not the interrogation that produces it, so details of a crime can be fed to a suspect off camera and repeated back once the recorder is on. Proposals to close that gap for the most serious offenses have been filed but never enacted.
Iran’s executions rest on qisas, retribution in kind, an eye for an eye. Its penal code hands the victim’s family the right to demand a life for a life. Ours claims a different foundation, which is why blameworthiness has to be measured with care. The U.S. Supreme Court barred executing people with intellectual disabilities in 2002 and struck down the test Texas used to identify them in 2017.
Yet Texas still has no statute governing how that call is made. Limits on who may be executed, including an exemption for defendants with severe mental illness, have advanced partway through the Legislature without reaching the finish line.
Iran’s harshest punishments fall hardest on the young. Dozens of youths continue to be executed under a penal code that fixes the age of adult responsibility by so-called religious maturity, and sets it differently for boys and girls. Texas no longer executes 17-year-olds, but it requires those 17 and younger convicted of the most serious offenses to serve 35 or 40 years before they are even eligible for parole, no matter how completely they have changed. Evidence from Michigan and Pennsylvania shows that those given a second look rarely reoffend. Legislation letting them seek parole after 20 years, with the board weighing maturity and rehabilitation and release never guaranteed, cleared the House 110-39 and the Senate unanimously in 2021, only to die over how to word a jury instruction.
The last stop is the cell. No Texas jury has ever sentenced anyone to a summer in a triple-digit box, yet one study found an average of 14 Texas prisoners die each year from heat-related conditions, and two-thirds still live in units without climate control. Iran has the same problem, with a 2025 Human Rights Watch investigation finding Tehran’s prisons reaching 104 degrees. A federal judge in Texas has since ruled that housing inmates without air conditioning is likely unconstitutional, and during that litigation the state’s own hired investigator found it had been falsifying temperature logs offered in its defense.
Texas is not at risk of becoming an Islamic theocracy. Many Muslims came here to escape regimes like Iran’s, which impose one state-controlled reading of religious orthodoxy and ignore the modicum of due process protections found in classical sources of Islamic law. We distinguish ourselves from them not with rhetorical window dressing but by breathing life into our own founding principles, which reject cruel punishment and insist on the dignity of every person.
Marc A. Levin is chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice. He can be reached at mlevin@counciloncj.org.
Have thoughts about this? Send a letter to the editor using our letters form or email letters@dallasnews.com. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.