‘McCarthyism with a Texas Accent’

Three years ago, at the outset of the 88th session of the Texas Legislature, Salman Bhojani placed his hand atop a 19th-century Quran in the state House chamber and became one of the first two Muslims ever sworn in to craft Texas laws.

The then-42-year-old lawyer, who was raised in Pakistan and Canada before coming to Texas at 19, entered as one of 64 Democrats in a shrinking minority. His barrier-breaking election had been a thin silver lining. In his first session, he saw plenty of red meat seared into sizzlingly reactionary statute, including a Constitution-testing anti-immigrant assault. But he also saw a coalition of rural Republicans and Democrats hold the line against Governor Greg Abbott’s private school voucher offensive.

Well, that would prove the last time. The next year, Abbott ran those rural rebels out of office, replacing them with more compliant creatures of our Christian nationalist moment. Come the 89th session, vouchers passed, and the stubbornly independent Texas House submitted to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s machine across the rotunda. 

Bhojani and co. also bought time with a quorum break to Chicago, but Republicans muscled through a Trump-mandated gerrymander.

In the meantime, as border crossings plummeted under an asylum crackdown, the Texas GOP found itself in need of another bogeyman. As in a game of racist roulette, that Anglo-colored ball came to rest in the pocket labeled Sharia Law, likely in scare quotes and all-caps.

When he first won elected office in 2018, as a city councilman in Euless—the 60,000-person suburb sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth that he still calls home—Bhojani faced Islamophobia from then-state Representative Jonathan Stickland, who went out of his way in a social media post to say, “He is a Muslim.” 

Today, that looks tame compared to a GOP that has wildly fearmongered about a housing development alongside a mosque in North Texas, known as EPIC City; designated the civil rights group CAIR a terrorist organization; attempted to block Islamic schools from the voucher program; and, in the case of Railroad Commission runoff candidate Bo French, called for Bhojani—and indeed all Muslims—to be denaturalized and deported.

The Observer spoke with Bhojani in early April about rising hate, French, and jungle primaries.

TO: You’ve said that Islam is misunderstood in much of Texas. What’s the main misunderstanding you encounter?

There’s this one word that very little do people take the time to understand it, which is Sharia. This word literally means a path, a righteous path. It’s basically a moral and behavioral framework drawn from the Islamic scriptures, which guides how Muslims pray, how they fast, how they give to the poor, how they conduct their daily lives. It’s a personal religious guidance; it’s not a legal system seeking to replace U.S. Law or the court system. 

[Last legislative session,] Abbott said “I’m banning Sharia law.” Well, the bill that we’re talking about to ban Sharia law, HB 4211, has nothing to do with Sharia. All it says is you cannot buy a membership interest in a company to buy a residential real estate home. … They’re trying to target the EPIC City project, now known as The Meadow. Abbott had to waste state taxpayer dollars by launching a multi-agency campaign against this Muslim-led housing development. But I have known so many developments in North Texas that exactly mimic EPIC city, where they’re saying, here’s this 50 acres, we’ll give five acres to the mosque, and we will build homes. They’re not saying that this is only for Muslims; all they’re saying is, if you have parents that are old, that want to walk to the mosque, if you have kids that want to walk to the mosque, if you want to live close to the mosque, you can do that because Texas is a free space.

I feel that Republicans, like Bo French, have gotten much more extreme in terms of Islamophobia since you started in politics. Do you feel that?

The playbook is the same, scapegoating one community and fear-mongering to be able to get the votes that you need, especially in the Republican primary, [but] the volume has amplified significantly, you’re right. Bo French has been, like, he loves me; he just wants to post about me constantly, I mean multiple targeted social media attacks on me. And then last summer, you know, the rhetoric translated into direct real world threats against me and my family. I was doxxed by extremists, my home was doxxed, my children’s social media accounts were doxxed and exposed online, there were unmarked cars following them, and I’m not even here—I’m in Chicago, breaking quorum, fighting for the democracy that we all believe in. … It just makes me feel that the America that I immigrated to is not the America I live in today. 

If you’ll just engage me for a minute, you know McCarthyism, right? What Abbott is doing is McCarthyism with a Texas accent. So if you think about McCarthy, he didn’t need to prove that someone was a communist. The accusation itself became the evidence. Now from there, you can destroy careers, you can revoke passports, you can blacklist entire organizations. And so here Abbott starts by saying, I’m gonna designate CAIR as a terrorist organization without any evidence, without any due process, without any federal government’s agreement. But now that self-invented label is being treated as if it was a court finding. So then he builds upon the next step. He says he’ll use his designation to ban CAIR or anyone associated with it to buy land in Texas. The second step or third step is that Kelly Hancock cites Abbott’s designation to block Islamic schools from the private school voucher program. And so it’s sort of a pattern that’s happening and every brick in this wall is built on the same invented foundation.

Just to be clear about your position, do you want to see the voucher program expand going forward? 

Absolutely not. I voted against it. Republicans came to me last session and said, you’re Muslim, you should want this private school voucher program for your Muslim schools. I said, absolutely not, these are private schools. Our job as state representatives is to fully fund our public schools. We haven’t done that, so let’s not talk about adding some more. So I’m still against the private school voucher program, but once you open that floodgate, you have to treat everybody equally. 

I think it’s not just Muslims but a number of different groups that are now seeing increased hostilities. What’s the way forward? Is it just simply we’ve got to elect Democrats and beat the Republicans?

What will help is if we improve our political structure. 

I filed a bill last session that says, let’s have a jungle [nonpartisan] primary, where two Republicans can come out, maybe the center Republicans, maybe two Democrats that come out, again center Democrats. … They’re not looking at the fringe. Because then more independents are voting in those primaries, and then the two that come out go off to the general election. So we’ll stay in the middle. The pendulum needs to stay in the middle because 80 percent in the middle do not get involved in primaries. 

Another thing is, let’s have an independent commission draw districts. My district is like a Pac-Man-style district with a cutout of the entertainment district in Arlington and then tentacles going north, south, east, west, all over the place to catch more Democrats. Let’s end this gerrymandering; both sides do it, it doesn’t make it right. And then trying to have ranked-choice voting as well, so that we don’t have to spend money on runoffs. So I think these three structural changes will help our state get more in the middle and help the business owner, help the worker, help get a good education, good healthcare. We won’t be talking about the fringe.

For next session, it could be something smaller or more hyper-local, but is there anything in particular that you’re hopeful about?

I’m hopeful that the religious freedom caucus that I started gets momentum next session. And as we elect more Democrats, where it’s not my way or the highway, it’s more like, let’s come together. Because that was my first session. My first session, there was a lot of Republicans that helped me pass legislation. … And those very Republicans were unseated. My friends, my colleagues, they were unseated last time because of the private school voucher thing. And there was nobody that came to us and said we need private school vouchers except the West Texas oil giants. That’s what they funded Abbott and Republicans for, and my good friends lost. 

That’s what I feel will bring back the energy, if we get five to 12 seats in the House, we may or may not get a majority, but that will make the Republicans come to the table.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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