ISLAM IN THE UNITED STATES: AN EPIC FUTURE?

The religious future of the United States is no doubt important to consider, as when a majority of any religion are present in a country, the religious outlook certainly influences how the country is led and how the laws are made and interpreted.

When a given religion is organized and currently planning large specific communities for their faith and practice, we should take even more notice of them.

We have seen a surge of this activity with Islam in not only the rest of the world but in the United States, and in a place that one rarely associates with it.

The state of Texas.

Let’s take a closer look at this; and the implications if it continues.

There are, right now, developers and Islamic religious figures attempting to build specific communities for Moslems in Texas.  One of the better-known ones is a place known as Epic City.

It is designed from the ground up as an Islamic small town, complete with specialized types of housing, a commercial area, and a large mosque in the center of it.

This development is not just a plan, though.  It is happening right now near the town of Josephine, Texas outside of Dallas/Fort Worth.

It’s not as if this is or should be a secret.  As we like to say in other cases, it’s not a conspiracy theory when they are doing it right in front of you every day.

There is a website for the city project, which is associated with the East Plano Islamic Center, which may foreshadow concerns about radicalization.

An introductory video describes the project as “more than just a neighborhood, it’s a way of life” as a “meticulously designed community that brings Islam to the forefront.”

It appears that there are at least one thousand buyers for these lots as of last year.  The total size of Epic City, if completed, would take in about 402 acres.  However you measure it, it’s very large.

Reportedly, some local leaders have been endorsing this project.  Governor Greg Abbott is not one of them and has publicly come out against this project; calling it illegal.

Fair questions arise.  If a Moslem community was to be built here—would it be a gateway to the institution of Sharia law there?  Who would handle policing there?

Would it violate law on fair housing laws?  Or even if not, what would it be like if you were the lone Christian or Jew in the community?

What would the implications be for Texas—or the United States—if many such communities appear with a consummate increase in practicing Moslems here?

It is no longer a strictly hypothetical question.

Religious freedom is one of the cornerstones upon which the United States was built.

I have heard some say that the United States is a Christian nation and I must respectfully disagree.  It is more accurately understood as a Masonic nation.

Many of the Founders were Masons and not necessarily Christians; George Washington himself was a Deist.

In the Masonic practice one must believe in “a God,” (sometimes referenced as the Great Architect of the Universe) and in that respect most common human religious faiths can say they believe in such a being.

There tends to be an assumption among many Americans that when they hear “God,” one is hearing about the one in the church they attended, if only as a kid.

That is an incorrect assumption.

Although the Founders may have considered the Masonic notion of religious openness and plurality ideal after seeing the religious persecution internal in the Christian faith in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, it is doubtful that either the Founders nor most of the first Americans (who were, by contrast, mostly Christian) envisioned the approach of Islam onto the American continent, or how that spirit of religious openness might go wrong upon that happening.

It is the opinion of this operator that this left a huge “blind spot” in the firing arc of America’s defensive cultural batteries.

We are seeing the ascendancy of a religion that has not shown itself to be broadly compatible ideologically with the American founding concept nor our rule of law as it has developed.

When you point this out, one expects the cries of “intolerance,” “bigoted,” and “narrow-minded” to ring out as if a button were pushed, usually from the lips of someone who may, against odds, look normal but is probably “wonderfully diverse” in their deportment, thinking, or speech.

This is not to say this is unconditional; clearly, some Moslems have been able to reconcile their faith with the American way in individual cases and at least “get along.”

The real question is what the larger body of faith has done, is doing, and will do relative to it in the future, particularly if it grows to dominance and is intent to do things like build its own towns and enclaves.

I would posit that a fair test of what a United States that is majority-Moslem would look like socially, legally, and politically is to see what existing countries that are majority-Moslem are like now in those regards.

I could detail conditions in European immigrant communities, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, or Turkmenistan, but suffice to say that they are all less free, much more authoritarian, and much harder (if not impossible) to openly practice another religion in or especially to proselytize another religion in safely.

You may see videos of the violence, murders, poverty, political unrest, and treatment of women or “the Kafir” for yourself if you think I am wrong somehow; and the sock puppets who believe all people can get along unconditionally are usually the first to be beheaded.

Just to throw a critic a fair bone, let us examine not an established bloody and violent abode of the Prophet, but a country that has done a good job of being majority Moslem while staying reasonably secular and advanced to this point—Malaysia.

This nation; a former British possession that retained a lot of the legal and administrative trappings of the colonizers when they became independent, might be one of the best-case scenarios arising out of a Moslem-majority United States.

Even so, we have some liabilities out of the gate.

Freedom of speech is much more limited, with “seditious” speech or writing specifically criminalized, along with restrictions on large gatherings without police clearance, and a license being required to “publish” anything.

Malaysia does have professed religious freedom in the country’s constitution.  Nonetheless, there are tensions between Islam as considered proper there and “the other.”  (It seems that this is common in any country or region where Islam has a presence, regardless of the law.)

Possibly also to get ahead of that, Malaysia states that the propagation of any religious doctrine or belief among persons professing the religion of Islam may be controlled or restricted by the individual states in Malaysia.

And secondly, the freedom to profess and practice one’s religion must not result in an act contrary to any general law relating to public order, public health, or morality.

I am no lawyer, but I am a cop: and those clauses have all sorts of holes in them.

Moslems in Malaysia are also subject to the jurisdiction of Sharia courts as well as the regular ones.

So, the unified and classless rule of law that we havein the United States, in theory, is absent in Malaysia, with a divided one possessing strong religious and ethnic overtones present instead.

As far as the Second Amendment, you can forget it—more than likely, possessing a firearm or the wrong ammunition without licensing will get you hanged or put in prison for a long time.

For search and seizure, in general the laws are much less protective of the person being searched or investigated and much more pro-state; particularly again for a “security offense.”

This may relate to Malaysia’s turbulent history politically, including a Communist insurgency.

Again, as a cop, I can see holes big enough to drive a truck—excuse me, a lorry—through, complete with a miscreant tied to the hood and being whipped with a rattan cane.

(Malaysia’s once-unified territory, Singapore, got on the radar in 1994 when American vandal Michael Fay wound up on the castigatory end of that country’s corporal punishment policy.)

There is no Malaysian bill of rights that specifies any human rights that are either pre-existing or inviolable.

Although other factors and history, to include the prior British imperial occupation, have certainly played in, it would appear that there is no basis for or desire to have the level of freedoms there that we enjoy in the United States.

Nor is there any evident guarantee the existing ones will persist.

Perhaps someone might say I picked the wrong country and possibly a more “Western” country such as Turkey might be a better example.

I say it’s not, per the U.S. Department of State.  Due to space limitations, I will ask that you read here if you are curious.

Altogether, a fair-minded person can conclude that if Islam inspires or can inspire a level of tolerance, freedom, and liberty that equals or exceeds the American ideal, it has yet to demonstrate this anywhere in the world.

Even allowing for the best-case scenario in a mostly secular Moslem nation and not considering the more common majority-Moslem nations, where outright despotism and massacres of “non-believers” and even the wrong class of “believers” is common, an Islamic America would be a dangerous place to live.

Is this a religion that we want to give ground to in the United States?  Without due concern for the historical results that have been seen so widely elsewhere?

Houston, we have a problem.

Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.