CAIR Lies. Islam Definitely Insists Its Religion Should Control Politics

The Federalist ^ | 11/12/2026 | A.J. ben Daud

[DFG]

A local school board meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, morphed into a raucous discussion of free speech and Islam Wednesday, as more than 100 people signed up to comment, primarily on the reported posts of a board member who questioned the religious nature of Islam. One week earlier on Nov. 3, the Florida chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, demanded that school board member’s resignation over an apparent Facebook share declaring, “We got lost in the myth that Islam is a religion.”

The screenshot was attributed to Duval County School Board member Tony Ricardo. Action News Jax said it could not independently verify that he shared it. CAIR’s demand was categorical: “We call on the school board member who shared it to resign.” But this post deserves a more serious answer than a resignation campaign.

I am an ex-Muslim who lived 19 years under sharia, the legal and political order Islam presents as God’s law. Islamic sources describe an order reaching from prayer to government, courts, and punishment. That order is a theocracy: rule by divine law with God as sovereign.

CAIR wants a public official removed while offering Americans a definition of sharia that leaves its governing authority out of view. In CAIR’s October 2025 congressional memorandum, CAIR calls sharia a “personal moral and spiritual framework” and “a voluntary moral compass, not an alternative legal code.”

CAIR also assured Congress that sharia commands Muslims to obey the laws where they live. Its own factsheet attaches the condition: Muslims obey “so long as those laws do not require them to engage in indisputably evil conduct.” Sharia defines what counts as evil, so American law receives a conditional loyalty, granted on sharia’s terms.

Islam names itself “Deen al-Islam,” a phrase usually translated as “the religion of Islam.” The Quran, Islam’s scripture, uses the language of “deen” in its own voice. In 3:19, it declares, “Indeed, the deen in the sight of Allah is Islam.” And in 5:3 it says, “Today I have perfected your deen for you … and chosen Islam as your deen.”

For Americans, “religion” evokes belief, worship, and a congregation someone freely joins or leaves. But the Islamic concept translated as “religion” actually names a total order of divine government and sovereignty. English readers hear “religion,” while the Arabic claims “government.” That system is a theocracy, with God as sovereign and sharia as His law.

The Quran makes that meaning concrete in the chapter on the prophet Joseph. In 12:76, Mustafa Khattab’s English translation renders the king’s deen as “the King’s law.” The verse uses deen for the legal system that governed the kingdom. The 11th-century jurist al-Mawardi, in his treatise on Islamic government, describes the imamate, the office of the Muslim ruler, as succeeding prophethood in guarding the deen and administering worldly affairs. The ruler’s office joins religious guardianship to government.

The 20th-century Muslim thinker Abul A’la Maududi is equally direct. In “Four Basic Quranic Terms,” he describes deen as the “entire way of life,” encompassing sovereignty, submission, a “system of thought and action,” and judgment. Even “state,” he explains, only approximates the term’s breadth. Maududi spells out the duty this theocracy creates. In a state governed according to divine law, “it is the religious duty of every Muslim to obey the state and all its commands.” Political obedience becomes part of religious obedience.

This is a matter of long-held doctrine and mainstream practice. Al-Mawardi and Maududi both place worldly rule inside the obligations of deen. CAIR’s “voluntary moral compass” omits precisely the power these accounts assign to Islamic authority: the power to govern.

Worship gives that theocracy its moral force. Prayer and fasting train the believer to obey divine commands. Communal expectations and the prospect of eternal judgment turn those commands into civic duties. Within a sharia order, those duties reach into marriage, inheritance, property, public conduct, and punishment.

Because I was raised inside that system, I recognize what disappears when Americans hear only the language of personal spirituality. But a rule understood as God’s command carries a weight beyond ordinary political preference, and piety and public authority can reinforce each other throughout daily life.

Modern governments have put that theocracy into writing. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a 57-state body of Muslim countries, issued the 1990 Cairo Declaration. The declaration subjects all its declared rights and freedoms to sharia. Article 25 makes sharia the sole reference for explaining its provisions, while Article 19 ties crime and punishment to sharia. Its treatment of speech makes the stakes concrete. Article 22 permits free expression within the principles of sharia and bars information that violates the “dignity of prophets” or “weaken[s]” society’s faith.

Compare that with John Locke’s 1689 “A Letter Concerning Toleration.” Locke, the father of the toleration tradition America inherited, confined the magistrate’s jurisdiction to “civil concernments.” Churches could persuade their voluntary members; civil government held the power to command through law and punishment.

Locke was direct about Islam:

It is ridiculous for any one to profess himself to be a Mahometan only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, whilst at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor.

A mufti is an official Islamic legal authority. Locke warned that a Muslim’s religious duty placed his political allegiance with a foreign Islamic authority, which made it a civil matter beyond private conscience. He made the jurisdictional stakes explicit. When a church’s members “ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince,” he warned, this amounts to “the settling of a foreign jurisdiction” in one’s own country.

That warning still applies. The same OIC that placed every right under sharia in the Cairo Declaration spent more than a decade sponsoring a United Nations resolution against the “defamation of religions.” The State Department opposed that campaign as an effort to prohibit speech deemed insulting to religion and to justify blasphemy laws.

CAIR’s resignation demand works in the same direction, treating a public official’s description of Islam as disqualifying and using religious protection to police what Americans may say. The foreign jurisdiction Locke named now arrives in America as an international speech rule, enforced through pressure at home.

Still, Locke defended civil rights for Muslims: “Neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.” Muslims hold the same rights of conscience and civil protection as every other individual. Religious protection covers conviction and worship; its protection ends where coercion or violence begins.

America already criminalizes conduct commanded or excused by sharia, including apostasy punishments for leaving Islam, domestic abuse, and violence against children. The law protects people, and every injunction claimed as divine answers to that same law. The moment a belief claims authority to compel, punish, or govern others, it enters the jurisdiction of civil law.

Two days after CAIR’s effort to force Ricardo to resign, on Nov. 5, WUSF reported that CAIR and CAIR-Florida suspended advocacy and operations in Florida after a federal judge left the state’s domestic terrorist designation in effect during litigation. CAIR disputes the designation and plans an appeal.

The larger question concerns Islam’s governing claim. Calling deen “religion” has political consequences when protection for believers becomes a shield around a theocracy.

I lived under the order that CAIR describes to Congress as a “voluntary moral compass.” Americans can defend freedom of conscience while examining the laws and powers claimed in God’s name. But a civilization serious about its liberty must understand the theocracy that seeks to govern it.

A.J. ben Daud (a pen name) is the author and analyst behind Audax Field Notes, where he examines Islamic doctrine, political power, and the future of the West. An ex-Muslim who lived under sharia for 19 years, he writes from direct experience with the system he now analyzes; his articles for The Federalist may address subjects he also discusses on X.

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TOPICS: Conspiracy
KEYWORDS: cair; deen; jacksonville; sharia

[Poison Pill]

All religions insist their dogma should control politics. That’s what religions do.

[Jim W N]

Islam isn’t just a religion.

Islam is a tyranncial legal/political/religious system at odds with the U.S. Constitution and has NO PLACE in America at all!!!

[Harpotoo]

where do these POS build their mosques? On top of our Churches and Temples!

[Harpotoo]

You R an idiot!