On Thursday afternoon, federal prosecutors in Albany accused a 35-year-old woman named Jessica Bowie of plotting to walk into the New York State Capitol with a homemade bomb. According to the criminal complaint, she wanted to “kill the senators while they are meeting.” She had allegedly sworn allegiance to ISIS online, adopted the name Aisha Saif after converting to Islam five years ago, and spent early August buying nails at an Albany hardware store for the explosive she expected the FBI’s source to deliver. Nobody died. The Joint Terrorism Task Force did its job, and Bowie is presumed innocent until a jury says otherwise.
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The case landed in my inbox the same week I was drafting this piece, and it’s as good a starting point as any for a question conservatives keep answering badly: Is Islam compatible with American values? The honest answer is that the question itself is malformed. Islam, as roughly 4 million American Muslims practice it—prayer, fasting, charity, modest dress, and a mosque on Fridays—is no more a threat to the constitutional order than Catholic Mass or Reform Judaism. Islamism, the political program that treats those same texts as a blueprint for state power, is a different animal entirely. Confuse the two and you’ll either excuse the real threat or slander your neighbor. Conservatives can’t afford to do either.
The Founders didn’t build a religiously neutral country by accident. Article VI bars a religious test for federal office. The First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing a national church. That wasn’t secularism; it was a bet that Americans could be devout and self-governing at the same time, so long as everyone answered to the same civil law on Monday morning regardless of what they did in a church, a synagogue, or a mosque on the weekend. That’s the wager the whole republic rides on. It’s also the exact place where a genuine Islamist program, not personal faith but the political version, runs into a wall.
Sharia, properly understood, is not one document you can hold up and ban. For most Muslim Americans it’s a personal ethical framework, closer to what a devout Christian means by living according to the Gospel than to a criminal code. Nobody seriously objects to that. The problem starts when Sharia gets reclassified as a governing program, one that expects the state to enforce religious law on believers and nonbelievers alike, in place of the Constitution and the civil rights it guarantees to women, converts, and dissenters. A parallel legal system that answers to a cleric instead of a judge doesn’t fit inside a republic built on one law for everybody. That’s true whether the demand comes from an imam, a Baptist preacher, or an HOA board that thinks its bylaws outrank the county recorder.
Minneapolis tests that distinction. In 2023, the city amended its noise ordinance to let the adhan broadcast from Cedar-Riverside’s mosques at any hour, the same exemption already given to church bells and the shofar. That’s a First Amendment accommodation, decided by an elected council, not a surrender of civil law to religious authority. Critics who call it creeping Sharia are repeating the category error above: mistaking accommodation for one faith’s practice as imposition of that faith’s law on everyone else. Individual Minnesotans who say on video they’d prefer Sharia to American law don’t change that math. A stated preference isn’t a legal claim, and a neighborhood full of people who hold one still answers to the same courts and Constitution as everyone else. Hamtramck, Michigan, makes the point sharpest: a city of roughly 28,000 residents that elected an all-Muslim council and mayor in 2021, described as the first Muslim-majority city government in the country. Its council has said publicly it won’t let religion drive its votes, and nothing in Michigan law would let it if it tried. Dearborn gets the same label, though the census doesn’t track religion, so any figure there is an estimate, not a count. None of this proves the fear behind the DFW and Minneapolis stories. It proves the opposite: Muslim Americans can win elections and run cities without the republic’s legal architecture bending an inch.
This isn’t abstract. Female genital mutilation has been a federal crime since 1996, tightened further by the STOP FGM Act, precisely because “it’s our culture” isn’t a defense to child abuse in an American courtroom. “Honor” violence gets the same treatment: murder is murder, and the label doesn’t create a religious exemption from the penal code. Coerced marriage runs into the same wall that protects every American’s right to marry, or not, on their own terms. None of that has anything to do with whether a woman down the street wears a hijab to the grocery store. It has everything to do with whether religious authority outranks the law when the two collide, and in this country, it doesn’t. Ever. For anybody.
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Britain just made the underlying problem explicit. This week the Home Office published a nine-page guide, “Understanding Behaviours and Expectations in the UK,” telling new asylum seekers in plain language that rape is a crime, that women don’t need a man’s permission to work or leave the house, and that female genital mutilation is illegal. The Home Office says the pamphlet isn’t evidence that asylum seekers as a group are more likely to commit these crimes, and it’s right that one country’s booklet doesn’t prove anything about the next country’s arrivals. But no government spends public money explaining that rape and genital cutting are illegal to a population it has no reason to worry about. The document is itself the tell. This isn’t just a British problem waiting to happen here. It’s already here. The CDC estimates more than 513,000 women and girls in the United States are living with or at risk of FGM; a threefold increase since 1990. The agency attributes this to immigration patterns, not any change in the underlying practice. That number is not a prediction. It is the current count. The fix isn’t a pamphlet handed out after arrival. It’s vetting for those answers before the visa or asylum grant, not after.
The lower-stakes version of the same fight showed up this summer at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, where staff floated adding ablution basins (footbaths for the pre-prayer washing ritual) to restrooms in the international terminal. The project was filed with state regulators at a preliminary $300,000, which shrank to $120,000 once reporters started asking questions, which tells you plenty about airport cost estimates. Governor Abbott called foul on a government-owned facility installing religion-specific fixtures, and DFW eventually pulled the plug. He had a point, and it cuts in every direction: the same rule needs to apply to a mosque’s amplified call to prayer, a church’s bells, and the guy blasting a boombox at 6 a.m. Content neutral, decibel neutral, one rulebook. Special treatment for one faith’s plumbing or noise ordinance isn’t tolerance. It’s favoritism with a different label.
Here’s where I’ll concede the point my critics on the left will make: most Muslim Americans have nothing to do with any of this. They serve in the military, run small businesses, and would be as horrified by Jessica Bowie’s alleged plot as anyone reading this magazine. Painting an entire faith with the acts of a violent fringe is the category error this piece keeps warning against. But acknowledging that doesn’t require pretending the fringe doesn’t exist or that it’s evenly distributed across every religion in America. Sociologist Charles Kurzman has tracked 159 fatalities in Muslim American violent extremism cases since September 11, 2001. The Anti-Defamation League logged more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the twelve months after October 7, 2023, a jump of over 200%, with a meaningful share tied to rhetoric that treats Jews collectively as legitimate targets. New Orleans lost 14 people on Bourbon Street last New Year’s to a truck driven by a man the FBI says was inspired by ISIS. You can hold two facts at once: the community is not the threat, and the ideology is real.
The line isn’t between Muslims and everyone else. It’s between people who accept that the Constitution is the only supreme law in this country and people, of any faith or none, who don’t. Prosecute the Jessica Bowies. Say no to parallel legal systems and government-funded religious plumbing, for Islam or anyone else. And stop pretending that 4 million law-abiding neighbors are the same thing as the ideology that occasionally recruits from among them. That distinction used to be called common sense. We could stand to recover a little of it.
