Landmark Lawsuit Pits Sharia Regime Against Constitution

On Sept. 17, the American Freedom Law Center filed a landmark lawsuit on behalf of a Dearborn, Michigan, resident, alleging that the Arab-majority Detroit suburb, led by Muslim officials, has promoted Islam and discriminated against and fostered hostility towards Christians and Jews — in violation of the Constitution’s establishment clause.

The details of the case brought by my courageous colleague, Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland, are shocking. She alleges that Dearborn’s leaders have endorsed glitzy Ramadan displays and advertised an iftar dinner with public funds. Conversely, they have allegedly ignored Cleveland’s requests for comparable commemorations for Christian and Jewish holidays and sidestepped concerns over public rallies glorifying jihadism. They have also berated a Christian pastor and fellow constituent. Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud called Pastor Ted Barham a “bigot” and “Islamophobe” who “is not welcome here” when he questioned the city’s renaming of a city street for an avowed Hamas and Hezbollah supporter.

The complaint cites past instances where courts have found the city to have discriminated against non-Muslims.

Having petitioned her elected leaders to treat all religions equally, only to face stonewalling, Cleveland has taken them to court in defense of her and her neighbors’ sacred rights.

A victory for AFLC could end such discrimination and set a powerful precedent. It would send a message to other like-minded officials nationwide. Cleveland’s complaint should also serve as a clarion call for Americans about the potential consequences of Islamization.

Islamization in the U.S.

The suit comes amid a post-9/11 surge in Islamic immigration to America, as American Muslims increasingly seek not only accommodations for their religious and cultural practices but assimilation of others into their worldview, and as Muslim mega-donors, leaders, and sometimes terror-tied institutions push for their co-religionists to secure greater political power.

The case raises questions about whether non-Muslims in other increasingly Muslim locales will get the Dearborn treatment too. The court’s response will reveal to Americans whether the law will provide refuge should we find our rights infringed.

The suit claims that “acts, customs, policies, practices, and/or procedures that favor Muslims and discriminate against Christians and Jews” reflect the mayor’s “message … that Christians and Jews are not welcome … and are, indeed, second-class citizens.” [Emphasis added.]

Islam is a proselytizing religion. To bring the world under Allah’s command, it calls for employing means including persuasion, subversion, coercion, and violent jihad. Allah’s rule takes the form of sharia law, governing not only religious practices but all aspects of life, public and private. Sharia abides neither freedom of religion nor speech, brooks no dissent, subjugates women and minorities, and imposes a host of illiberal rules.

Persecution of Non-Muslims

The charge of second-class citizenry is poignant given the plight of non-Muslims living under Muslim rule.

Historically, in accordance with Islamic doctrine, Muslims imposed Islam on infidels under threat of the sword. Rulers designated recalcitrant non-believers, who were spared a bloody death, as dhimmis, second-class citizens. Their masters levied a special jizya tax on them, prevented them from freely worshipping, and persecuted them.

Today, across the Middle East and Africa, Christians in Muslim lands face persecution. The Islamic world is rife with Jew-hatred — buttressed by the religion’s core texts.

In Europe, dhimmitude, a term coined by Cairo-born scholar Bat Ye’or to describe the inferior status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, is arguably evident. Amid a mass influx of Muslim immigrants, governments have assimilated into their system, imposing de facto sharia speech codes by punishing those who blaspheme Islam under the guise of “hate speech” regulations.

While leftists and Islamic activists have sought to weaponize charges of “Islamophobia” against Americans who speak openly and honestly about Islam in a bid to silence them, the First Amendment has to date held — albeit while Islamic supremacists have exploited it to advance their cause.

American Muslims’ Worldview

Some 60 percent of American Muslims hail from foreign countries, mainly ruled by regimes with sharia-subordinate constitutions. Demands for separate public religious accommodations, halal food, sharia-compliant financial products, and public blaring of the call to prayer have followed as the Muslim population in America has swelled.

At the same time, startling percentages of American Muslims harbor views antithetical to those of Americans and the American system. Sixty-six percent of American Muslims support the Muslim Brotherhood, the tip of the Sunni Islamic supremacist spear, and an organization with which myriad prominent U.S.-based mosques, advocacy organizations, and student groups are affiliated. Forty-four percent support Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian offshoot, consistent with polling of Palestinian Arabs themselves.

As the prolific former Brotherhood acolyte-turned-apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote, the subversive organization she once served has “described long-term strategies of settlement, organizational embedding, and the use of Western freedoms to advance Islamic rule and weaken Western civilization from within.” Those strategies have born poisonous fruit, as several European governments have recognized, and has increasingly become evident in the U.S.

Numerous polls indicate American Muslims are disproportionately antisemitic versus other groups. Relatedly, as I recently chronicled at RealClearInvestigations, American Muslims have made support for Palestinian Arabs over Israelis — an inherently religious conflict — core to their identity. Associated animus towards Jewry, the Jewish state, and the Judeo-Christian West increasingly serves as the glue holding a burgeoning Red-Green alliance together.

More alarming is what may be preached in American mosques. While such studies are sparse, a 2011 analysis indicated that of 100 such houses of worship, 80 percent had texts advocating violence; in 84.5 percent, the imam recommended studying violence-positive texts; and 58 percent invited imams known to promote violent jihad.

Ali asserts that “Islamist literature and rhetoric present the West not simply as a place of refuge or opportunity but as a field of settlement in which future generations, raised inside Islamist-shaped institutions, may one day demand Sharia-based norms through democratic or quasi-democratic means,” and cautions that while Europe is further down this road to Islamization, “America is catching up fast.”

Juxtapose this background with the views and actions of Dearborn religious leaders and residents, the record of its mayor, and the city’s alleged disparate treatment of non-Muslims.

Dearborn and surrounding municipalities have been hotbeds for pro-jihadist agitation. Local mosques have commemorated the deaths of “martyrs,” including Hezbollah leaders and other designated terrorists in recent years. Imams openly celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. An October 2024 report from George Washington University’s Program on Extremism identified Dearborn as a “hub” of “US-based Islamic centers that most unequivocally disseminate the ideology of the Iranian regime.”

Locals have taken to the streets en masse, clad in Hamas and Hezbollah garb, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute — as they have for two decades, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” in celebration of International Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day, which was established by the father of Iran’s Islamic revolution.

Earlier this year, following the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, leader of a regime with the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands, Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed told staff he would not be commenting on the theocrat’s demise for fear it would inflame constituents.

Likewise, El-Sayed said “hurt people hurt people” in rationalizing an attempted jihadist attack on nearby Bloomfield, Michigan’s Temple Israel earlier this year by the relative of an assassinated Hezbollah commander. The assailant, hailing from nearby Dearborn Heights, is one of many from the area linked to terror — including those prosecuted for plotting, planning, and supporting Hezbollah and ISIS.

Dearborn’s Muslim Mayor

As for Mayor Hammoud, that he harangued Pastor Barham over his criticism of the renaming of a city street for Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani should not have been surprising. The mayor celebrated the renaming for the pro-jihadi newsman at a public ceremony, calling him “the voice of this community.” Previously, Hammoud spoke at a “Stand With Lebanon” rally that Siblani emceed, in which the publisher said Israelis fleeing northern Israel under threat from Hezbollah should “Go back to Poland.” Hammoud, speaking before participants who reportedly shouted, “Death to Israel,” extended his “Greetings to the resistance, from Dearborn, Michigan!” Likewise, at a putatively pro-Palestinian event held a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7 jihad, Hammoud dubbed Dearborn a “city of resistance” – arguably a euphemism for jihadist support. He has called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide,” a blood libel. In commemoration of an exhibition the city promoted this summer highlighting stories of Gazan children killed during the war, Hammoud added that Israel’s “genocidal campaign … has spread to Lebanon” too.

Last year, under public questioning regarding alleged noise violations stemming from local mosques’ blasting of the call to prayer, Hammoud dismissed constituents’ concerns, calling it “for me … not an issue.” As a state representative, Hammoud opposed legislation aimed at banning the use of sharia law in Michigan courts.

Like El-Sayed, a close ally of his, Hammoud has garnered the support of and spoken before the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history. He has also addressed another organization prosecutors named as a co-conspirator in that case, the Islamic Society of North America, and garnered the support of adjacent groups.

Hammoud attends the Islamic Center of America, identified in the George Washington University report as a key node for Tehran propaganda. Preachers there have eulogized Qassem Soleimani, memorialized the cleric who authorized Hezbollah’s 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut, and promoted Iran’s propaganda. Hammoud is reportedly close with a former mosque leader, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi. Elahi has not only praised Iran’s leaders, but allegedly headed the Iranian Navy’s political-ideological office in the 1980s.

So is Dearborn’s alleged discrimination against non-Muslims a coincidence, or evidence of creeping dhimmitude? Will non-Muslims in similar communities face a similar fate? And will the American justice system protect us from such attacks on our most sacred rights?

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.