politicians

NEW YORK — Some of the loudest cheers for Sen. Ted Cruz at the Republicans’ recent midterm convention in Dallas came after the Texas politician targeted Muslim Americans and their faith’s religious code.

“Sharia law has no place in America,” said Cruz. “We need to stand together and stop it now.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott chimed in moments later, vowing to “fully ban Sharia law in Texas.”

Muslim American civic leaders and scholars — in Texas and other states — are responding forcefully to this latest surge in anti-Sharia rhetoric that dates back more than 15 years.

They passionately defend Sharia — the way it’s practiced in the United States — as positive guidance that has elements in common with the codes of other faiths, such as the Ten Commandments and the collective body of Jewish law derived from the Torah. They rebut the claims of GOP critics that Sharia is a coercive code that threatens the U.S. Constitution and judicial system.

Though there are multiple interpretations of Sharia, its essence is to serve as a code for how Muslims should live and worship — covering such matters as prayer, pilgrimages, fasting, charitable donations and personal virtue.

Among the most energetic of Sharia’s defenders is Illinois-based Sabeel Ahmed, director of an outreach project called GainPeace. He travels widely around the U.S., with a recent focus on Texas, speaking at mosque-sponsored workshops and open houses.

“Sharia is often misunderstood,” Ahmed posted on Instagram after a midsummer visit to Plano, Texas. “Many people think Sharia is only about punishments, but in Islam it is Allah’s guidance for living with faith, justice, mercy, and responsibility.”

Ahmed attributes the durability of anti-Sharia vitriol to politicians and social-media influencers who want to rile up their voting base or their followers.

“They gain popularity by saying it,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s the job of the Muslims to educate what is the proper meaning of the word Sharia. We cannot be angry or hateful.”

Sharia’s role varies significantly among Muslim nations

Among those appalled by the anti-Sharia surge in the U.S. is Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a Sudanese-born Islamic scholar who taught for many years at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. He is a longtime critic of the relatively small number of governments in Muslim nations that coercively enforce Sharia, saying Muslims are better off in secular states where their religious observance is a matter of free choice.

An-Na’im says he and other Muslim Americans embrace Sharia willingly as a core part of their identity, even as they also embrace American values.

The demonization of their beliefs displays “a shocking ignorance of what Sharia means,” An-Na’im said. “It’s a total dehumanization of the other, the rejection of their right to be human.”

The rhetoric is similarly dramatic among Sharia’s opponents — epitomized by the two U.S. representatives from Texas, Republicans Keith Self and Chip Roy — who co-founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress.

“Sharia is a direct threat to our Constitution and Western values and seeks to replace our legal system and erode our basic freedoms,” Roy said earlier this year. “Our immigration system must be prepared to confront this challenge and defend our Judeo-Christian values.”

By last count, the caucus had more than 60 members. All of them are Republicans, and its members have introduced several anti-Sharia bills since the caucus was formed last December. None of those measures have been successful.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has designated the caucus as an anti-Muslim hate group.

“The bigoted rhetoric used by this caucus resembles the hatred that anti-Catholic politicians once unleashed against Irish Americans,” said CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor.

“Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years,” he added. “No one who wrote the Constitution or enforced it since has empowered these legislators to pick which religions get to exist in America.”

Texas has been a battleground for Sharia disputes

There has been substantive anti-Sharia action in Texas. In August, Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded documents from the Dallas-based Islamic Tribunal, which provides religious guidance to Muslims.

Paxton said in a news release that the investigation by his office sought to determine if the tribunal was engaged in illegal activity, such as acting as a court, applying foreign laws that conflict with Texas or federal law, or issuing rulings that imply government authority.

“This is America, and we will not be governed by sharia law,” Paxton said.

The Islamic Tribunal subsequently updated its website with a “ Clarification of Mission and Activities,” stressing that its guidance “complements, and never replaces, the legal, social, and professional services available in American society.”

“The Tribunal does not function as a court of law and does not issue legally binding judgments,” it said. “Our role is limited to mediation and religious arbitration requested by members of the Muslim community in matters related to faith, family guidance, and internal religious affairs.”

Any matters requiring legal enforcement are referred directly to the Texas judicial system, said the tribunal, which likened its work to the services provided by Jewish Beth Din courts and Catholic ecclesiastical tribunals.

Sharia defenders seek to broaden understanding of its essence

Asma Uddin, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law, has argued in her writings that many American politicians are depicting ordinary Muslim religious practices — such as prayer, choice of apparel, family counseling and mosque attendance — as evidence of a political danger.

In an interview with the AP, Uddin depicted the current wave of anti-Sharia rhetoric as fearmongering by politicians who view the issue as advantageous for them.

“When politicians use this, it’s giving them exactly what they’re looking for,” she said. “They’re looking for a scapegoat … and this gets people riled up.”

Sabeel Ahmed, who has made three outreach trips to Texas so far this year, plans a trip to Houston in a few weeks for another mosque open-house. He’s also working on a book to be mailed to Christian clergy across the U.S., seeking to broaden their understanding of Sharia and other Islamic practices.

“Islam is not to be feared,” Ahmed said. “People should meet a Muslim, go to the mosque, reach out to us. Let’s emphasize the commonalities we have.”

Crary writes for the Associated Press.

It’s not your imagination. Political discourse on Twitter really has grown meaner in recent years, according to a new study.

The research, published Thursday in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that the level of incivility in tweets by members of Congress increased by 23% between 2009 and 2019 — a change the study’s authors attribute in part to how Twitter’s “like” and “retweet” buttons reinforce the spread of toxic content.

Its findings mark “the first robust evidence that incivility is rising among American politicians on Twitter,” wrote the study’s authors, hailing from several U.S. and Canadian universities.

Researchers examined 1.3 million tweets from official congressional accounts between 2009 and 2019. To quantify the levels of incivility, they used artificial intelligence to analyze the messages and assign a toxicity score from 0 to 100, reflecting the likelihood that someone would consider the text to be rude or disrespectful.

The analysis classified a 2009 tweet by then-Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) with a high incivility score of 45.1 for accusing a rival of “going AWOL” from his congressional post. And a 2019 tweet by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) — which said another politician was “endorsing infanticide & proudly doing it!” — scored at 47.6.

To some degree, the increasingly antagonistic tone is due to more civil members of Congress being replaced by less civil ones, the study says. But the findings attribute more of the shift to members themselves changing over time and posting more provocative tweets.

The increase in incivility was most pronounced among liberal Democrats, especially in the first half of President Trump’s term.

“They were much more likely to be reacting negatively to Donald Trump — both his behaviors and his tweets,” said Robb Willer, a co-author and director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University.

The study analyzed tweets during President Obama’s two terms and the first two years of Trump’s presidency. (The sample did not include posts from the contentious 2020 election or the start of President Biden’s term.)

The analysis also evaluated Obama’s and Trump’s tweets. Obama’s posts had an average incivility score of 13.4, which remained fairly steady over his two terms. In Trump’s first year, his score was 18.8, and it climbed to 23.0 by 2019.

The study didn’t place any moral judgments on Twitter incivility, Willer said. People sending harshly worded tweets “might have all sorts of explanations that might be morally well-founded and valid for why they engaged in the speech they did.”

Whatever the motivation, the more toxic tweets stand out in Twitter’s crowded online platform. The average congressional tweets were not especially uncivil, with relatively low scores. But the tweets with higher toxicity scores tended to get much more attention, via retweets and likes, which increase the public’s exposures to such messages and make incivility seem more prominent than it actually is, according to the study.

The study’s results indicate “the people running these accounts are learning from these metrics they can see and doing more of whatever gets likes and retweets,” Willer said.

But, as the common Twitter disclaimer goes, retweets and likes don’t equal endorsement. People may retweet a message to draw attention to content they dislike, for example. Willer said their research indicated that users are largely not fond of toxic tweets, despite appearances to the contrary.

“There’s a possibility here that the Twitter platform, with its pretty spare metrics, may be misleading people that certain tweets are more popular with people … than they really are,” Willer said.

Just as congressional Twitter feeds have grown more toxic, so have the tweets of the general population, the authors said, based on a rough sample of civilian posts.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), one of the most prolific tweeters of California’s congressional delegation, said he wasn’t surprised to hear that incivility has grown on the platform — which he blamed partly on anonymous users and bots. His own feed has plenty of pointed messages to Republicans, often delivered with dry humor, as well as standard fare highlighting his work in Congress.

After 13 years on the platform, Lieu said it’s still hard to predict what will take off in the Twittersphere.

“Sometimes I’ll write what I think is an amazing tweet about a very important policy point and get only a few” likes or retweets, he said. But an evening observation that Scotch and peanut butter make a tasty combination will yield “astronomical” engagement.

One consistent factor for a viral tweet: Trump.

“What I’ve found is in the last five years, when the former president would say something stupid or say something false, and I responded to that, that would get higher engagement,” Lieu said. “If the former president is going to say 27 false things a week, I’m going to try to highlight all 27 false things he said.”

While Twitter has not been seen as a hub of civility for some time, some on the platform expressed fears this week that the tone may worsen now that Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk is set to take the reins. Musk says Twitter’s current system of content moderation clamps down on speech. He has said he wants fewer restrictions on what can and cannot be posted, although he has not given many specifics; users have warned that loosening the rules could lead to upticks in harassment, abuse or pornographic images.

Republicans, meanwhile, have celebrated Musk’s takeover, anticipating he will lift moderation that they see as silencing their views. Among other issues, they object to Trump and other prominent right-wing politicians being blocked or suspended from the site. And Twitter’s fact-checking of false claims of election fraud and COVID-19 misinformation has had a disproportionate effect on right-leaning accounts.

“The most uncivil aspect of Twitter is the company’s transparent censoring of free speech and silencing of conservatives,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall). “Additionally, the platform will not reach its potential or best serve its users until it demonstrates a commitment to fundamental fairness. I’m optimistic that may soon happen.”