“Land Use in Texas: Muslims for Christian Secular Values” by Sharmin Sadequee

Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston, Texas by Jim Evans (CC BY-SA 4.0).

From McKinney to Weatherford to Josephine, Texans are losing sleep over the Muslims moving in and allegedly instituting “sharia law.” It’s a disaster! 

In early 2025, a viral video raised public concern about the creation of Muslim “sharia cities” in the heart of Texas. In the video, Yasir Qadhi, a prominent Muslim American scholar, promoted a potential housing development project for the rapidly growing Muslim population in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The EPIC City project, a 402-acre development led by the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), would create a master-planned community of a few hundred homes, a mosque, a faith-based school, a community college, shopping malls and recreation centers, and housing for the elderly. 

Even before developers could submit formal permits to county officials, opponents raised moral panic over what the land might be used for. Their concerns rarely touched on substantive zoning or environmental factors, instead focusing on the project founders’ religious affiliation. Detractors immediately accused the Muslim community of creating an exclusive Muslim enclave, an endeavor that goes against traditional Judeo-Christian American values and the Fair Housing Act. Although a Department of Justice investigation into the project was closed, the governor of Texas continues to accuse Muslim Texans of establishing “sharia cities” (with no concrete legal basis for such accusations), and investigations continue at the state level.

The Emergence of Muslim Housing Developments

The backlash against EPIC City shows how land use decisions can be politically and culturally charged, especially when the development is associated with a non-Christian and non-white minority group. Similar uproars against Muslim construction of their institutions have been ongoing, raising questions about liberal democratic processes in the U.S. Muslim Texans face numerous obstacles when building their institutions, whether they want to rezone privately owned property in Weatherford or build an intentional community in Dallas. A similar controversy over Muslim land use and anti-Muslim activity arose in 2016 when Muslim Americans in Georgia attempted to build a master-plan, multi-complex community development project centered around a mosque and a cemetery on 130 privately held acres. 

For American Muslims, this episode felt like a revival of the national hysteria that occurred after 9/11, and the consequent discussions about religious freedom, immigration, and cultural integration. At that time, thousands of Muslim Americans were profiled, targeted, and imprisoned under false accusations. The government used and misused Islamic concepts like shariah to violate Muslims’ constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression. Official misinterpretations and mistranslations of Islamic concepts over the last two decades have helped spread and normalize anti-Muslim hate and prejudice. Zohran Mamdani, a New York City Muslim mayoral candidate, recently raised this issue when asked about the Arabic concept of intifada, which has been twisted and distorted by anti-Muslim groups. 

The conflict surrounding EPIC City stems from entrenched systemic anti-Muslim hostility that has been historically normalized within the social, legal, and political structures of the U.S. This long-standing animus has become institutionalized, creating persistent patterns of discrimination and marginalization of Muslims, rooted in the Euromerican public’s own unresolved historical and religious complexities as I argue in the introduction to the book, Secularism, Race, and the Politics of Islamophobia. What the persisting anti-Muslim disposition reveals about the American public is that anti-Muslim groups lack a refined understanding of Islam and contemporary lived experiences of American Muslims. Instead, such anti-Muslim groups regularly interpret Muslim societies and cultures through the narrow lens of their own European historical experiences with Christianity and its interaction with law and politics, a perspective that has become deeply embedded in all social structures in how Euromericans, whether liberal or conservative background, see themselves and evaluate other non-Christian traditions and non-white peoples which I discuss in the following sections.

Detractors of the EPIC project claim that a faith-based housing development runs counter to so-called Judeo-Christian American values and promotes segregation. Meanwhile, supporters of EPIC City deride all opposition as mere Islamophobia and racism. However, these simple perspectives do not fully capture important broader issues. There are larger cultural, racial, and legal stakes, all of which are intertwined with how varying sections of the American public understand religion, society, and the public sphere. This contestation exposes the deep connection between so-called Christian values and the secularity promoted in and through Enlightenment philosophies on land, religion, capitalism, and property. Judeo-Christian values mirror secular values and vice versa. However, these values are only extended to Euromericans, even as it is the Muslims of EPIC who are more fully aligned with their tenets. At its core, this dispute asks whether a private community can maintain religious and racial exclusivity in the modern United States. The conflict centers on what Walter Mignolo calls “the darker side of the Enlightenment,” a system rooted in and stemming from Eurocentric Christianity that offers liberty and modernity to some while controlling and marginalizing racial and religious minorities. It is with these concerns in mind that, in this essay, I consider the groups involved and the tensions that arise when religion is defined and delimited by project detractors, fair housing laws, and faith-based communities and their supporters.

Voices of Opposition to Muslim Housing Developments

The Collin County Commissioner’s public hearing, where residents accused EPIC City of compromising so-called “Judeo-Christian” values and violating fair housing laws, went on for four hours. One of the participants asserted that immigrants need to integrate into American society and avoid isolation: “We need to be tolerant, but we need to prevent any group from securing a foothold that would so strongly violate our norms, our culture and our Constitution. I oppose this [project] very strongly” (1:38:30 time stamp). Another resident expressed his concerns about whether children’s schooling would be provided by the private community or public institutions: 

How in the world are we going to control the school inside a compound that is so isolated that we don’t know what’s going on? Is the school going to be mandatory watched over by TEA [Texas Education Agency], our legislature, just like our regular [public] schools are? What are we doing with a compound that does not want to assimilate with the rest of our communities? This is so wrong. This country is based on Judeo-Christian values. We live by two constitutions. I am solely against this community that wants to build a compound like this, and we do not have any control of it. (1:40:05 time stamp)

The participant asserts that schools administered by a religious community need to be put under surveillance so that the majority society can control minority institutions. In other words, minority institutions should not have their own freedom to exist and exercise what they want in the Land of the Free and Brave.

Another participant argued that a self-contained Muslim establishment would threaten the ideals of separation of religion from civil government and destroy freedom, rights, and equality outlined by the US Constitution: 

This is our land, our country, our heritage. . No matter how people try to spin or deny, our founding was built entirely on Christian Biblical principles, such as presumption of innocence, due process, jury of your peers, blind justice, just to name a few. We have a lot of other people across the world who immigrate here with the goal to assimilate and become American to integrate into American society . . . Mosque is not only a place of worship, but also a command center for community control, for legislative enforcement, and demographic consolidation. EPIC City is the starting point for further Islamic expansion to establish a stronghold where Shariah law can be enforced de facto and without official legislation. There will be no public oversight, and American values will be dismantled. (1:41:48 time stamp)

Many people worried that EPIC City would discriminate against people of other faiths: 

They want to build a facility separated from everybody else who is not Muslim; that is, if you are not Muslim, you are not invited in. They would discriminate against Christians, Jews, non-believers, Hindus, anyone else. They want to have their own private facility. We gotta ask the question, why didn’t they move into [other] development and assimilate in society?. . . They want their own entity because they want to discriminate against us…Islam is not a religion. It’s an ideology where everyone else is excluded and takes over the world. (2:21:24 time stamp)

Another objector expressed,

Enforcing the law and following the tenets of our Constitution are what make America the greatest country…I watched the video of the spokesperson for EPIC City, Yasir Qadhi. . . . My question really becomes: if you have been in this country for 30 years, why haven’t you assimilated? Why aren’t you part of the community? Why would you need a separate community where you discriminate against other people with racist beliefs and have something outside of what is normal? If you have been in America or a citizen, why would you need to move outside of that and have something different?… I really reject the view of Islam because they do not believe in the Holy Trinity. (2:24:52 time stamp, emphasis added)

One resident invoked their experience living in California, a more liberal-progressive state:

I defected from California. . . .There was no freedom or liberty. . . . This is America, where we do not segregate ourselves! We don’t isolate ourselves! We do not have strict community enclaves that are separate from all other people. This is about assimilating into America. (3:20:15 time stamp)

For the detractors, assimilation requires non-white and non-Christian populations to give up their culture and adopt majority traditions and behavior to be regarded as equal. 

However, some hearing participants voiced support for the project, noting how systemic racism and injustice persist in Texas. They argued that state authorities were misusing their power to target projects like EPIC City, which were just trying to make a better life in Texas. A former local Democratic candidate from a Euromerican background shared his thoughts:

EPIC deserves fair treatment, and we must advocate for an inclusive Texas for everyone regardless of race, religion, and gender…It’s disappointing that these so-called Christians with American values are so quick to abandon those values and the Constitution. (1:13:10 time stamp)

For four hours, public commenters asserted that a faith-based, master-planned community development would be a cultural, social, and political catastrophe that has never existed and can never exist in the U.S. The hearing concluded without any resolution. After all, EPIC City was still just an idea; developers had yet to file any kind of project proposal. 

Religion, Secularism, and the Fair Housing Act

Supporters of EPIC City accuse its opponents of Islamophobic racism that violates Muslims’ “religious freedom.” The opponents accuse Muslims of creating a “religious enclave” and discriminating non-Muslim groups from having access to housing developments. These approaches overlook the fact that white, Christian planned communities have historically discriminated against other white Christians as well as non-Christian and non-white population from housing developments in the U.S. This fact raises questions about whether racism is solely to blame or if this issue speaks to a particular American understanding of religion and “religious freedom” and how they operate with/in law and politics, including the Fair Housing Act.

The Fair Housing Act (FHA), a 1968 Civil Rights-era law prohibits discrimination in the sale or rental of public or private housing. According to FHA, it is unlawful to publicize the sale or rental of housing that indicates any preference based on race, religion, or gender—housing must be open to anyone. When a religious entity decides to sell or rent homes, it cannot restrict the sales to co-religionists. Entering the for-profit real estate market is considered a public commercial activity and is, therefore, not protected under “religious freedom” laws. In other words, FHA makes a distinction between what it considers “religion” and whether it is or is not protected when it enters the consumerist marketplace.

According to American religion scholar Sara Koening, there is a broad American cultural perception that religion is corrupted and no longer “real” if it is intertwined with profit (i.e., capitalistic ventures). This cultural perception stems from the historical experiences and tensions within European Christianity that shaped Euromericans’ understanding of religious establishments, commercial activities, and public institutions. These themes can be traced to Martin Luther’s protest against the indulgences of the Catholic Church some five hundred years ago. The violent historical trajectory led to the split in Christian Europe and the developments of secularism in successive years redefining what is or is not religion and how it should and should not operate and be regulated in public spheres. Privatized beliefs and related private religious rituals are protected but put under the regulation of secular public authorities when it exceeds its designated spaces. An enduring predicament between religious/sacred (private) and capitalistic/profane (public) activity is maintained in the United States. For EPIC City’s opponents and the FHA, the entanglement of religion and profit-seeking commercial public activity is unacceptable. 

When religious groups as nonprofit organizations engage in non-commercial housing activities that serve a mission-based religious purpose like affordable housing projects, their activities are protected by religious freedom laws. In these endeavors, religion remains inside or internal to the community. If the housing project ever aims to make a profit, religion crosses into the public space of commerce and market and loses its nonprofit “private” exemption. In this way, religion comes under the secular regulation of FHA that evaluates religion based on the private-public distinction of Christian secularism. According to American religion and law scholar, Winnifred Sullivan, contemporary U.S. laws and politics operate under a Christian, and particularly Protestant secular ethos, that does not aim to create equality between religious communities but rather regulate and control non-Christian religious groups by making a distinction between “good” and “bad” religion. In this particular American context, when religion is or becomes discernible, particularly minority religious systems, it is no longer considered “good.” This is because the shared culture, heritage, religion, and ethnicity of the majority serve as the dominant and legitimate model in a constitutional democracy. Within this framework, minorities and minority religions are evaluated and subjected to the standards and criteria established by the majority.

While Luther understood the Church’s indulgences to be exploitative and corrupt, Europeans like Max Weber, however, explained that Reformation Christians widely supported secular vocations and commercial activities. Wealth generation was seen as a sign of divine favor and helped usher in the early stages of capitalism. Although opponents of EPIC City and FHA find the entanglement of religion and profit-seeking capitalist commercial activity unallowable, a cursory review of U.S. history demonstrates alignments between intense religious belief (private) and laissez-faire/free market capitalism (public) have been prevalent since the inception of this country. 

Religion, Capitalism, and Master Planned Communities in the U.S.

Faith-based planned community and for-profit developments are deeply rooted in American history, beginning with the persecuted European settlers who established homes, cities, and businesses. Planned community projects were part and parcel of American colonization. Early European Puritan settlers viewed their migration to New England as a divine mission to establish a godly society, and commercial activities were seen to support the development of these religious communities. As Max Weber knew, early settlers emphasized hard work, frugality, and community welfare. Their economic practices helped establish cities like Boston and New Haven, which were developed as religiously organized communities where the church played a central role in civic engagements. These self-contained urban religious enclaves also became important centers of trade, education, and cultural influence. According to American Historian Mark Peterson, early settlers needed to build an economic infrastructure to thrive as a religious community.

 In this “spiritual economy,” religious life depended on economic and material resources, such as funding churches, schools, cultural centers, and developing other social institutions. Commerce was not a threat to Protestant Puritan Christianity; rather, commercial activities helped sustain and galvanize religio-social life. Historian John Frederick Martin even argues that some early European settler towns were founded for profit, not only for religion. Another historian Stephen Innes confirms that Christian Puritanism promoted a commercial capitalist society within a religious framework of stewardship. In early America, religion and commercial profit-making activities worked in tandem to develop and maintain the Euromerican Christian settler community. Examining a more recent history of the U.S. beginning with the 1980s, scholar of twentieth century America, Kevin Kruse, states that neoliberal laissez-faire economic enterprise gave emergence to the idea of America as a “Christian nation” and the American capitalist Christianity. In other words, religion collaborated with and put in the service of for-profit economic activities of neoliberal capitalism and its global expansion.

Early European settlers’ economic activities were also linked to the global capitalistic enterprise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which helped establish exploitative slave trading with non-white colonized regions of the globe, and legitimated these market activities as a Christian religious duty. Profits from the slave trade and slave labor were often reinvested into local and regional infrastructure and community development projects, including city infrastructures in Texas. The segregation of enslaved Africans—who built cities, mansions, schools, churches, roads, and railways—was also upheld by religious logic. 

Christian minorities like the Amish, Mennonites, and The Church of Latter-day Saints own vast plots of land and engage in commercial activities, where the market, church (i.e., religion), and family operate together to sustain their congregational communities. A contemporary example is the successful, vibrant “custom made” planned Catholic city in Florida, Ave Maria, boasting a majestic Catholic church, faith-based school and university, and capitalist commercial enterprises, such as real estate, restaurants, offices, and shops. While the town is open to people of all faiths, Catholicism influences its culture. Ave Maria experienced its own troubles in the development phase. The town obtained legal permission to create the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, a special legal designation used for master planned communities. This designation gave developers government-like control over the town’s development (e.g., managing infrastructure, zoning, and other public services). However, controversy arose about who has governing power over Ave Maria. In a typical town, registered voters elect local officials; under the stewardship model, landowners, specifically Ave Maria’s developers, appoint the governing board, giving them private control over public functions. Critics argued that this arrangement undermined liberal democratic principles. In a Collier County hearing (reminiscent of EPIC City’s hearing), opponents accused Ave Maria’s developers of establishing a “theocracy” by mixing religion with civic engagement and commercial activities. 

Ave Maria and EPIC City were both trying to do something very American—create a space where their values, faith, and way of life can flourish. The problems emerged because, as the American philosopher Dustin Byrd suggests, Europeans, and by extension Euromericans, have historically defined themselves using an ethnically-based national belonging (i.e., shared ethnicity, religion, and cultural heritage)–an ethnosphere. Some Euromericans see national identity in ethnic or religious terms—fundamentally white and Christian/secular. This is despite a prevailing claim that Western societies have adopted a more inclusive, voluntary, and democratic model of community building based on shared constitutional ideals and citizenship in the post-Enlightenment era. For Byrd, these Enlightenment-influenced ideals of separation between ethnicity and democracy only exist in elite philosophical or legal frameworks that many ordinary Westerners have not internalized. Therefore, project detractors often rely on, draw from, and invoke their own experience of the rupture (between religion (private) and politics/commerce (public)) within a particular historical European Christianity when evaluating Islam and Muslims as “Other,” regardless of their political, legal, civic, secular commitments. Even if Muslims obtain legal citizenship and political rights, they do not share the pre-political spirit of the majority Euromerican population (i.e., experiences of pre-modern Christianity), making it difficult for Euromericans to accept them. 

Shariah, Christian Values, and Land Ownership

Many of those opposed to EPIC City worried that Muslims would establish and impose a parallel system of “shariah law” (in reality, a value system that obliges Muslims to treat their neighbors with respect and kindness). These comments are especially ironic given that Texas is a stronghold of religious conservatives, who call for establishing a Kingdom of God in America by integrating biblical laws into the U.S. Constitution. The EPIC City issue forced some conservatives into the odd position of calling for the separation of church and state and promoting secularism. The detractors also insisted that Muslims should “assimilate” to “Judeo-Christian” values. Here, “assimilation” asks Muslims to surrender their Islamic faith tradition. However, this alone does not guarantee acceptance. After all, descendants of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Native Americans were (forcibly) converted to Christianity and accepted dominant cultural behaviors, but are still viewed as unassimilated groups and face racism and discrimination in the U.S.

The EPIC City development project is directed by members of East Plano Islamic Center, a nationally-renowned Texas mosque known for its interfaith initiatives, civic engagement, and humanitarian services. Its strong support for American secularism and the U.S. Constitution is well documented: East Plano Islamic Center hosted local mayoral and city council debates at the mosque, registered the mosque as a polling place for secular democratic national election, and continues to build relationships with multi-faith neighbors. Indeed, national studies of U.S. mosques have found that mosques are the primary institutions through which Muslims engage in the American democratic process. Furthermore, mosques like other religious institutions have to follow U.S. law to exist and function on American soil. As American secularism dictates, mosques like churches adhere to U.S. secular laws and regulations, including restrictions on political endorsements. Many mosques in the U.S. aspire to emulate and replicate the EPIC model, which embodies values of inclusive community planning, education, religious freedom, and land development that the Christian opponents claim as their own. 

The EPIC Muslim community members are proud Americans who boldly demonstrate their everyday “Americanness” through interfaith, civic engagement, and relationships with local politicians. However, these signs of American “integration and achievements” did not protect them from backlash. Like many non-Black American Muslims, EPIC members overlooked the fact that, despite having legal status and gaining technoeconomic success, professional achievements, and upward social mobility, that is believing in and securing the “American dream” — they are still viewed as outsiders to the dominant society and ethnosphere in the U.S. 

The detractors’ claims insinuate, without evidence, that EPIC City might have sought instruction from some “foreign” shariah source on how to use land and develop a project in the U.S., when in reality, they have to follow Texas Real Estate and Property Laws. Landowners in the U.S. have the legal right to propose and plan developments and even obtain special permissions (like Ave Maria), provided they follow zoning regulations, permitting processes, and environmental laws. This is a fundamental aspect of secular property rights, rooted in John Locke’s theory of property, where individuals or groups buy land and use it as they see fit within legal guidelines. 

However, the foundational logic of the American project is a racialized enterprise, governing who is and is not considered a legitimate participant in the American promise. This has been evident since colonial times; as public commentators repeatedly noted, the United States was founded on so-called “Christian values”. These values justified displacing and erasing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, the forced enslavement of Africans brought to work that land, and disenfranchisement and segregation of Black people in Texas during Jim Crow under the guise of “separate but equal.” Therefore, a project like EPIC City not only challenges cultural prejudices, but also a deeply embedded philosophical and political tradition that long equated land ownership, rationality, and progress with white, Christian, and Euromerican identity.

Opponents care little about the details of shariah or how Muslims experience shariah in the contemporary world. Their positions say more about European ancestral history: Christianity, Absolutism, Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Their opposition is not really about whether Muslims support democratic values. It is not about zoning, funeral licenses, or the Fair Housing Act. It is a hegemonic move that positions white Christian nationalism as the default national culture. Everything else is marked as “other” and should be suppressed through a coloniality of secularism and knowledge, wherein only certain worldviews are treated as valid, universal, or “American.” The EPIC dispute is about who gets to define what is “American,” whose values and institutions are treated as legitimate, and how power operates along racialized, colonial lines in modern constitutional democracies. According to civil rights groups, the U.S. constitutional system was not built to protect any specified majority; it protects individual rights, especially for minorities. So-called “American values” belong to everyone, not just the majority population or religious group. However, Texan detractors of EPIC City do not agree with this interpretation. 

Muslims for Judeo-Christian Secular American Values

The scrutiny of EPIC City hides a reassertion of colonial power structures over land, culture, and the definition of religion behind legal questions about mixing religion and civic governance. Detractors call on EPIC City’s Muslims to practice inclusivity. However, their liberal logics of multiculturalism and pluralism are dissonant with the conservative Trump administration and its so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which continues to root out diversity, equity, and inclusivity from institutions. In this case, the Muslim community is living the founders’ Christian and secular vision of religious freedom, while opponents violate the Christian-influenced Enlightenment ideals of the foundation of the U.S. 

The so-called “American values” opponents invoke to demonstrate their modernity, progressivity, and distinctiveness from Muslims are the same values that EPIC Muslims embody through their “civically engaged integrative actions.” The pushback to the EPIC City project exposes how colonial structures continue to shape Euromerican’s self-understanding to police Muslim cultural expression, preventing the building of mosques, religious communities, or any symbol of non-Christian and non-white identity that challenges the dominant cultural narrative. 

The dispute also implicates EPIC Muslims in the settler-colonial erasure project at a time when the world is opposing the settler-colonial violence and genocide abroad. Such “American values” are a predictable outcome of Enlightenment-influenced Christian universalism, rooted in Eurocentric coloniality and the exploitation and subjugation of Indigenous peoples and their lands. Claims to land ownership in the U.S.—both by opponents and EPIC Muslims—benefit from the continuing erasure of Indigenous peoples.

Muslim Americans have recently experienced intensifying Islamophobic hate and violence. Whether in Palestine or Texas, the violence of land dispossession–or attempted exclusion in the case of the EPIC City controversy is not a banal legal matter. It is tied to colonial power structures that continue to shape contemporary lives. The EPIC City contestation is situated within an ongoing struggle over land, belonging, and identity in the American settler-colonial project. In this settler-colonial project, Indigenous and other ethnic and religious minority communities struggled for centuries to claim land and property, and to define what is or is not religion. As Dustin Byrd explains, many Europeans and, by extension, Euromericans, have not fully realized the Christian Enlightenment’s call to create intentional, plural, and inclusive communities. The EPIC City dispute raises questions about constitutional democracy and exposes how Christian-influenced Enlightenment values continue to offer freedom and liberty to some and regulate and control others.

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Recommended Citation

Sadequee, Sharmin. “Land Use in Texas: Muslims for Christian Secular Values.” Canopy Forum, Aug 1, 2025. https://canopyforum.org/2025/08/01/land-use-in-texas-muslims-for-christian-secular-values/.

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