Recently in Houston, Mohamed Hussein walked into the Texas Republican Convention as a delegate. He walked out in tears.
Hussein, a conservative-leaning Muslim American whose family came from Egypt in 1992, attended not as a protester but as a participant — a citizen who believed he had a place in his party. What he found instead was a convention where the tagline “Unity Drives Victory” shared floor space with a “Don’t Sharia My Texas” panel, where a former Southern Baptist pastor told him to his face he should convert to Christianity or leave the country, and where fellow delegates tried repeatedly to have him and other Muslim attendees expelled.
Nick Mumejian
When Hussein broke down sobbing, the pastor who had just told him there was “no place in America” for him came over, put an arm around his shoulder, and offered to pray for his conversion.
For more than two decades, I have engaged Islam as a Christian scholar of religion. I have edited one of the oldest academic journals of Islamic studies in the English-speaking world. I have sat at the feet of some of the most luminous Muslim scholars of our generation. And I am telling you: What happened in Houston was not a defense of Christianity. It was a display of ignorance dressed in the costume of conviction.
And Christians — especially Baptist Christians who know something about being a religious minority targeted by state power — should be ashamed of it.
So let me tell you what I wish more Christians knew about Sharia.
Start with the word itself. “Sharia” derives from an Arabic root that evokes a path leading down to water — specifically, the path that leads a thirsty animal or a thirsty person to a source that gives life. It is not, at its root, a legal code. It is not a system of punishment. It is, literally, the way to the water. It is guidance toward what sustains life.
That etymology is not incidental. It is the heart of what Sharia means to the vast majority of Muslims who practice it every single day, in every corner of the world, without cutting off anyone’s head.
The late Yahya Michot, one of my professors and one of the great scholars of Islamic intellectual history, used to teach his students that Sharia occupies a kind of middle position in the Abrahamic tradition. He pointed out that classical Islamic theology understood itself as navigating between two extremes: On one side, a Torah-centered legalism that could become burdensome and rigid and on the other, a Christian antinomianism that, in the Islamic reading, had severed law from practice so thoroughly that ethical accountability was left to individual conscience alone.
“It also is worth knowing that there is no single Sharia.”
Sharia, in this framing, was the wasatiyyah — the middle way, the balanced path between law — that crushes and freedom that untethers. You may agree or disagree with that theological analysis. But it is worth knowing that it exists, because it means Sharia, as understood by Muslim theologians, is not an alien imposition. It is a considered response to questions that Christians have also wrestled with for millennia.
It also is worth knowing that there is no single Sharia. This is perhaps the most important thing I can say, and it is almost never said in American political discourse.
Islamic jurisprudence developed over centuries through a rich and contested tradition of scholarly interpretation. There are four major Sunni schools of law — the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali schools — each named for a founding scholar, each with its own methodological emphases, each arriving at different conclusions on countless practical questions. And that’s before you account for Shi’a jurisprudence, Ibadi traditions, Sufi approaches to Islamic ethics and the enormous diversity of local practice across 14 centuries and dozens of cultures.
When people invoke “Sharia” as if it were a monolithic foreign power waiting to seize Texas, they are doing something roughly equivalent to a Muslim politician warning Americans about the dangers of “Christian law” — as if Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Roger Williams, Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King Jr. all meant the same thing by the same words.
A useful comparison: Torah. Jews who are serious about their tradition understand Torah not as a list of rules designed to oppress people but as a gift — a covenant framework for how to live in right relationship with God, neighbor and creation. The rabbinical tradition that developed around Torah interpretation is extraordinarily rich, deeply contested and has produced centuries of argument precisely because the tradition takes both the text and human flourishing seriously.
Sharia, in Islamic tradition, plays an analogous role. It is the living interpretive tradition through which Muslims ask: What does it mean to love God? What does it mean to love my neighbor? How do I pray, fast, give, make contracts, resolve disputes, care for the poor?
“For most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, Sharia is not a threat to anyone.”
For most of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, Sharia is not a threat to anyone. It is the texture of a life lived before God.
What Mohamed Hussein was practicing leading up to and during the Texas Republican Convention — praying, fasting during Ramadan, giving to charity, trying to live with integrity in public life — is Sharia. He said so himself, standing in that room full of people who wanted him gone: I am practicing Sharia right now.
And he was right. The man was trying to participate in democracy. The man was trying to love his country. He was, to use language more familiar to Baptist ears, trying to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly.
I am not naïve about the ways that religion — any religion, including my own — can be weaponized toward oppression. There are interpretations of Sharia I find deeply troubling, just as there are interpretations of Christian Scripture I find deeply troubling and that have been used to justify slavery, the subordination of women, the persecution of LGBTQ people, and the violent exclusion of religious minorities.
The answer to bad theology is not the erasure of the tradition. It is better theology. It is deeper engagement. It is the hard, patient, necessary work of listening across difference.
Instead, this summer in Houston, a former Baptist pastor told a weeping man his faith disqualified him from the country of his birth. And then the same pastor offered to pray for him.
Mohamed Hussein said he forgave him. That, too, for what it’s worth, is Sharia.
I have spent the better part of my adult life trying to build bridges between Christians and Muslims, convinced we have far more to learn from each other than the panic merchants of our respective traditions want us to believe. What happened in Houston is a reminder of what is at stake when ignorance gets organized. The path that leads to the water — the way that sustains life — is precisely what we close off when we decide our neighbors’ thirst doesn’t matter.
Christians who claim to follow Jesus, who said the second-greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself, should have something to say about that.
I know I do.
Nick Mumejian serves as senior pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, and as interim editor in chief of The Muslim World journal at Hartford International University where he taught and has been an editor of the journal for more than 16 years.