The Slippery Slope From Secular State to Islamic Rule: Mosque to City Hall

In February 2023, a copy of the Quran that a 14-year-old autistic boy had brought to his school in Wakefield, England, was dropped and lightly scuffed. No law in England makes that a crime. Within days, however, the boy had received death threats, and his mother stood before a crowd in a local mosque, with a police officer in the room, apologizing for what her son had done. A secular country watched a family submit to a blasphemy rule that Parliament had abolished in 2008.

Liberal societies measure freedom by asking what the state forbids. By that measure the Wakefield mother was free, and so, in the same sense, would be a Dearborn engineer who quietly stops ordering wine at company dinners. In either case, the state forbids nothing. Something else does. The economist Timur Kuran named the mechanism preference falsification in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. People misrepresent their private views when dissent is costly, and each public act of conformity raises the price of dissent for everyone else. Moderates cannot find one another because each sees only the rest of the conforming faces. Outsiders mistake the conformity for consensus.

Selection, more than conspiracy, explains who sets those demands. The devout volunteer for the mosque board, write the checks, and teach the weekend and afternoon school. The moderate who disagrees rarely fights; he simply attends less, which is what Albert Hirschman called exit, and every exit leaves the institution more orthodox than the community it claims to represent. Gulf money and imams trained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan accelerate the sorting. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who helped found the European Council for Fatwa and Research in 1997, predicted that Islam would return to Europe through preaching rather than conquest. In France, Bernard Rougier’s 2020 study of the suburbs documented entire ecosystems of mosques, bookshops, associations, and sports clubs under Islamist rule.

The orthodox also hold a warrant the moderates lack. Quran 3:104 and 3:110 describe the believing community as one that commands the right and forbids the wrong. Classical jurists built those verses into hisba, a standing duty to correct deviations in worship, dress, sexual conduct, and public morals, a duty that could fall on an official or on any qualified Muslim. Apostasy, in all four Sunni schools, was a communal breach rather than a private change of mind, and the prescribed penalty was death. A moderate who treats these rules as optional, on the orthodox reading, fails an obligation his neighbors can enforce. That asymmetry settles most contests before they start. The orthodox man believes God requires him to intervene, while the moderate believes only that he would prefer to be left alone.

Enforcement in a Western enclave requires no religious police, because the levers already sit in community hands. A couple married by nikah alone, never registered with civil authorities, has no civil divorce to seek, so a wife who wants out must petition a religious body. Britain’s 2018 Siddiqui Review of Sharia councils documented precisely that dependence. Dame Louise Casey’s 2016 review found self-appointed leaders, usually older men, claiming to speak for entire communities. Add the matchmakers who govern a family’s prospects, the imam who will or will not bury your father, the ethnic business network that offers a newcomer his only job, and the madrasa where the children spend their Saturdays. Each is voluntary. Together they amount to a jurisdiction.

Nassim Taleb calls the result the dictatorship of the small minority. When compliance costs the flexible majority little, and the inflexible minority will accept nothing else, the minority sets the default. Halal-only catering, no alcohol at the wedding, modest dress at every gathering: each concession is small, which is why they grant each one. The sanctions for refusing climb in steps, from gossip and the label of a bad Muslim, to exclusion from the marriage market, to takfir, declaring a fellow Muslim an apostate. At the top of the ladder sits rare violence, which deters far beyond its frequency. Samuel Paty was beheaded in October 2020 after an online campaign begun by a student’s father. A religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School has lived in hiding since 2021 for showing a cartoon of Muhammad in class. Every moderate who reads those stories does the arithmetic.

The most damning evidence concerns the children. The secular forecast held that immigrants’ descendants would drift toward the host culture, as Italian and Polish grandchildren did. In France the drift is running backward. The IFOP survey released in November 2025 found that 57% of Muslims aged 15 to 24 rank sharia above the laws of the Republic, and that Friday mosque attendance among Muslims under 25 had climbed from 7% in 1989 to 40%. In Britain, Policy Exchange, the center-right London think tank, found in 2007 that Muslims aged 16 to 24 were roughly twice as likely as those 55 and older to prefer sharia, 37% to 17%, and to support death for apostasy, 36% to 19%. Across six Western European countries, the sociologist Ruud Koopmans found in 2013 that about two-thirds of Muslims surveyed placed religious rules above national law.

Olivier Roy, no man of the right, calls the mechanism deculturation. The first generation brought a village Islam braided with local custom. Their children lose that culture without being fully admitted to the new one, and they replace it with a portable, scriptural Islam learned online, stricter on dress, sex, and apostasy than anything practiced in the old village. Minneapolis supplied the extreme American case: beginning in 2007, dozens of young Somali-American men left to fight for al-Shabaab, and in 2016 nine more were convicted of conspiring to join the Islamic State. The sons came out harder than the fathers.

The ratchet does not stay inside the family. Hamtramck, Michigan, once a Polish Catholic town, compresses the whole arc into a single generation of municipal history. Two decades ago, a Christian-majority council allowed mosques to broadcast the call to prayer. In 2015, liberal residents celebrated the election of the first Muslim-majority city council in America. In 2023, a council, by then entirely Muslim and socially conservative, banned Pride flags from city property, and many of the residents who had cheered in 2015 showed up to object. They lost. The old majority’s tolerance turned out to be a one-way grant, extended by people who assumed they would always be the ones doing the extending.

North Texas has its own exhibits. In 2008, federal prosecutors in Dallas won convictions against the Holy Land Foundation, a Richardson charity, for funneling money to Hamas. The trial evidence included a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum describing the group’s work in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Today the model has a site plan. EPIC City, since renamed The Meadow, proposes more than 1,000 homes, a K-12 faith-based school, a mosque, clinics, and retail on 402 acres in Collin and Hunt counties. In 2025, the Texas Legislature responded with House Bill 4211, banning religiously exclusive resale rules and routing disputes into Texas civil courts. An institution that decides who may buy, who may sell, and where quarrels are settled converts voluntary membership into leverage. In November 2025, Governor Greg Abbott designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations and barred both from acquiring land in Texas.

A national majority is unnecessary for national concessions. Leverage suffices. Denmark repealed its blasphemy law in 2017. In December 2023, after Quran burnings brought security threats and diplomatic pressure from Muslim governments, the Danish Parliament made the improper treatment of religious texts a crime, restoring a blasphemy rule in all but name within six years. Yale University Press, publishing Jytte Klausen’s 2009 scholarly book about the Danish cartoons, removed the cartoons themselves for fear of violence. No Muslim majority existed in Copenhagen or New Haven to demand either concession. Each was extracted by the credible prospect of disorder.

History shows where the road ends once the numbers allow. Richard Bulliet’s study of medieval conversion found that Iran took two to three centuries to become majority Muslim, with a curve that stayed flat for generations and then rose sharply once Islam became the social default. Status, taxes, and networks did most of the work. Most women at Cairo University went unveiled in the 1960s; by the 2000s, most were veiled. Bangladesh, founded as a secular republic in 1972, made Islam the state religion in 1988. Turkey, the 20th century’s model of Muslim secularism, reconverted Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020. In each case, the agents were organized minorities, the Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Gulf-funded preaching networks, working on societies that had seemed to be secularizing a generation earlier.

Americans heard a version of this warning in 1835, when Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy claimed that Catholic immigrants under priestly control would subvert the republic. The Catholics assimilated, and the Know-Nothings became a punch line. Why expect a different ending now? The American Church never asked its parishioners to settle contracts, inheritances, or crimes anywhere but in secular courts, while sharia claims jurisdiction over all three. Distance once weakened immigrants’ ties to the old country’s clergy; satellite television and preachers on YouTube now renew them every hour. Muslims are about 1% of Americans, but Bulliet’s curve always looks flat in its early decades, and enclaves run on local density rather than national share.

The first casualties are moderate Muslims, many of whom crossed an ocean to escape the clerics and found that the clerics had followed them onto the mosque board. A secular goverment that treats self-appointed leaders as the community’s voice hands those leaders a second lever, its own deference. Require civil registration of every religious marriage, refuse to enforce any religious arbitration that strips a woman of rights a civil court would grant her, and prosecute threats against apostates like any other threat; the orthodox are patient, and a secular state that waits for a crisis will find the curve already bending. Liberalism promised the moderate Muslim the right to be left alone. It cannot keep that promise by leaving his community alone.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.