Assimilation, Not Separation: The Case For Saying No To Sharia-Styled Developments Like Epic City

Texas should not wait for the fire to spread before it builds the firebreak. The proposed EPIC City development, a 402 acre project centered on a mosque, faith based schools, homes and a tightly integrated commercial and civic footprint, has forced a simple question that Texas must answer clearly. Will we permit sectarian enclaves, designed to be self contained and self policed, to take root on Texas soil, or will we insist that communities in Texas be governed by the same civil law and the same civic expectations that bind us as one people. Aaron Reitz, a former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and a candidate for Texas Attorney General, gives the only responsible answer. He would stop the enclave experiment before it hardens into a precedent, and he would do so within the four corners of law. His opponents equivocate. His critics trade in euphemism. Reitz treats the public square with the seriousness it deserves.

Start with first principles. A constitutional order rests on one law for all. When a private association acquires enough land, enough financing, and enough political insulation to function as a town unto itself, the risk is not simply discriminatory housing or unpermitted building. The deeper risk is the slow drift toward parallel law, parallel dispute resolution, and parallel norms that change how neighbors relate to neighbors and how authority operates in practice. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s line was clear and correct, Sharia law is not allowed in Texas, nor are Sharia cities, nor are no go zones. The point is not rhetoric, it is jurisdiction. The sovereign must be legible, publicly accountable, and uniform. Where the law is unclear, the law must be clarified.

That is why HB 4211 matters. It tightened Texas property rules that a developer of an enclave could exploit, for example by tying occupancy rights to opaque corporate instruments, by filtering buyers through insider investment pools, and by relying on a religious exemption to effect a de facto religious ownership preference. The reform removed the religious set aside for developments of significant scale, required transparency in ownership and financing, and anchored dispute resolution in Texas courts. These steps are not anti religion, they are pro rule of law. They safeguard the equal rights of any Texan, Muslim or Christian or of no faith, to buy, sell, contract, sue and be sued in ordinary courts. Reitz reads HB 4211 not as a ceiling but as a floor. The lesson of EPIC City is that bright lines discourage experiments in parallel governance. The legislature drew lines. The next Attorney General must defend and, where necessary, extend them in court.

Skeptical readers might ask whether this goes too far. They might cite the Amish, the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in New York, or Catholic orders with expansive landholdings. Do we fear them too. No, because the issue is not religion as such, it is the attempt to import a comprehensive legal code into a civil space that already has one. Catholic canon law binds Catholics as Catholics, not residents as residents. Orthodox Jewish batei din arbitrate by consent under the shadow of state law, not by replacing it. Amish communities are culturally distinct, not sovereign. The problem arises when a development announces, explicitly or by design, that its organizing principle is a religious legal system that will govern daily life in ways that have predictable collision points with Texas and US law, from family law and inheritance, to commercial instruments, to speech and conscience. In such a case, the state is not suppressing religion, it is preserving a single civic forum where disagreements are adjudicated by common rules.

The investigations into EPIC related activity show why vigilance is warranted. Regulators identified alleged unlicensed funeral operations, unpermitted construction, and confusing financial representations to prospective buyers. None of this proves that an enclave would implement religious law in place of Texas law. It does show that the project, as initially marketed, pressed hard against the limits of transparency and compliance. The pattern would be worrisome in any sector. It is more worrisome when the sector is a faith centered municipality sized project that by its own renderings could allow residents to live, worship, educate, shop and socialize without leaving the enclave. A city within a city is not unlawful per se. A city within a city, organized to filter residents, finance participation, and resolve disputes through a religious lens that is not accountable to Texas courts, is a different matter. Drawing that distinction, in advance, is the job of law.

At this point a second objection appears. Does this not stigmatize Muslim Texans who want the same chance that other groups have had to cluster for cultural comfort and mutual support. Respectfully, it does not. Texans of all faiths live where they choose, open mosques and churches and synagogues, and build schools that comply with state law. The line is crossed when clustering becomes enclave, when the rhetoric and the rule set signal an ambition to operate as a semi autonomous zone with its own norms that are meant to supplant, not supplement, civil law. That ambition is not speculative. In Europe we have seen explicit campaigns to brand neighborhoods as Sharia zones, we have seen municipal authorities struggle to enforce neutral rules against ideologically disciplined groups, and we have seen no go rhetoric track real breakdowns in civic trust. Texas should learn from these cases. Anticipation is prudence.

Nor should we ignore the messaging whiplash around EPIC City. Early materials spoke of preserving the community’s makeup and of screening buyers in individualized ways that preserved that makeup. After scrutiny, the language shifted to an everyone welcome posture. The shift might be innocent, perhaps early drafts were clumsy. Or it might reflect a strategic retreat from a design that, as written, was on a collision course with fair housing principles and with Texas’s interest in keeping courts, not religious councils, as the final arbiters of disputes. When a developer changes the plan only after attention, prudence suggests that the state assume the original plan was the real one. That is not prejudice. It is basic incentive analysis. If a path to a de facto religious town exists, and if the public messaging only becomes inclusive under pressure, the state should close the path.

Critics say this is collective punishment, and they point to Muslim elected officials in the US as proof that Islamic identity coexists with American loyalty. The right response is to separate persons from structures. Individuals should be judged as individuals, and their rights are equal. Structures, in contrast, are evaluated for their effects on rule of law, civic trust, and assimilation. When an elected official from a heavily Muslim district opposes US allies, defends slogans that demonize America, or treats foreign conflicts as existential identity markers, observers will naturally ask whether that district has become a monoculture that rewards anti assimilationist politics. The answer will vary by city. The lesson for Texas is neutral. Do not build structures that predictably reward separatism over solidarity.

This brings us to the comparison that most inflames tempers, enclaves in Michigan, New Jersey, and Minnesota. In Dearborn, long standing demographic patterns, lawful in themselves, have produced a cultural bloc that sometimes expresses itself in ways that unsettle Americans who expect public rallies to celebrate the United States, not foreign movements. In Paterson, the formal branding of a street as Palestine Way is not unlawful, but it is a data point about the direction of local identity formation. In Minneapolis, the concentration of one diaspora has elevated politics that are unmistakably tied to external conflicts. None of these facts justifies discrimination. They do justify a conservative reading of civic risk. Politics tracks social structure. If Texas allows purpose built sectarian cities, Texas should expect social and political dynamics that reflect that design. Law can set up better expectations.

Aaron Reitz understands that law is a teacher. The Attorney General’s posture shapes the expectations of developers, investors, and local officials. A clear signal that sectarian towns will face strict scrutiny, that access, sale, and dispute resolution must be public and neutral, and that messaging games will be treated as evidence of intent, will change behavior. It will also give cover to city councils and county judges who know that communities held together by a single religious law will generate enforcement headaches. Reitz has the background to do this work with care. He has seen how federal policy is drafted with attention to collateral effects. He is a constitutional conservative who understands that public order is a precondition for liberty. He is willing to say, in plain terms, that Sharia styled developments are incompatible with Texas’s legal culture. By contrast, a candidate who floats bromides about religious liberty in the abstract while ignoring the concrete risks of enclave design does not meet the moment. Texas does not need speeches, it needs standards.

A third objection says that markets will sort this out. If an enclave is unattractive to most Texans, it will remain small. If it violates the law, ordinary enforcement will suffice. Why not stand back. Because the relevant harms are structural and path dependent. Once an enclave of sufficient size is platted, financed, and partially occupied, legal leverage diminishes. Injunctions become takings claims. Piecemeal enforcement looks like harassment. Local officials who sign off early will resist hard course corrections later. The state’s interest is in clearing the underbrush so that we never reach the point where parallel legal structures have teeth. The moment to act is pre commitment, not post hoc.

There is also the question of trust. A self contained development that promises to educate children in a comprehensive religious worldview, to process disputes using the categories of that worldview, and to constrain commerce through that worldview’s rules about loans and contracts, will test the patience of neighbors who expect the civic yardstick to be the Constitution, not a religious code. Even if every promise to comply with state law were kept, and even if criminal radicalism never appears, the inevitable result would be a pocket of social life where the incentives do not run toward integration. A community so designed will naturally elect internal leaders who defend the design against outside critique. That is faction formation by architecture. The point of state law is not to prohibit religious life. It is to prevent civic privatization by any faction, religious or secular, that seeks to substitute its code for the neutral rules of the Republic.

Some will say that focusing on Islamic enclaves reveals a double standard. What about tech company towns, what about ideologically uniform university districts, what about retirement compounds that function like small cities. The reply is that the same principles should govern all. No development should be allowed to privatize what must remain public, specifically, the law that binds buyer and seller, the court that resolves disputes, and the equal access of Texans to live where they wish without religious screening in fact or in practice. If a tech town proposed corporate arbitration as a mandatory replacement for courts, Texas would say no. If a university town proposed excluding disfavored political groups from buying homes, Texas would say no. If a religious enclave proposes screening buyers through vague compatibility tests and announcing that religious law will be embedded in community life, Texas should say no. Equal standards are the definition of fairness.

The prudential case does not deny religious liberty. It preserves it. Muslims in Texas, like Christians and Jews and Hindus and others, enjoy constitutional protection to worship, speak, organize, and educate their children. Those protections are strongest when set in a civic order that refuses to play favorites and refuses to allow privatized law. The road to sectarian conflict begins when the state is captured by one faction or when the state cedes basic functions to private factions. Reitz’s message is that Texas will do neither. The state will defend religious liberty for all, and it will defend one public law for all, and it will not permit experiments that predictably erode either pillar.

Finally, there is the matter of tone. Public officials must speak with clarity but without malice. They must distinguish hard policy from hard feelings. Reitz’s stance does that. He does not traffic in fear for its own sake. He does not smear Muslim Texans. He states a civic truth. Texas has a single legal system and a single civic identity. Good neighbors can practice their faiths within that order. Texas will not permit any group, left wing or right wing, secular or religious, to build a quasi sovereign town that tries to supplant that order. He also recognizes the federal dimension. In President Trump’s second term, federal policy has shifted toward re centering assimilation as a national expectation. A Texas Attorney General who aligns with that shift will help the state secure federal support when projects cross state and federal lines, for example in immigration sponsorship, nonprofit financing, or civil rights enforcement. Coordination matters, and a principled posture at the state level makes coordination easier.

The case for Aaron Reitz thus turns on a simple syllogism. Texas must keep one public law. Sharia styled enclaves are designed to introduce a second law. Therefore Texas must set up legal firebreaks now, not later, and must choose an Attorney General who will enforce those firebreaks without apology. Electing Reitz is not a vote against a faith. It is a vote for a constitutional habit that has preserved the peace of this republic, one law for all, no enclaves, no exceptions. Texans know, from long experience, that the first virtue of a free society is the courage to say what is true and to act on it before the costs rise. This is such a moment.

If you enjoy my work, please consider subscribing: https://x.com/amuse.

Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.

READ NEXT: Shock Wave Hits US Ally — Top Party’s Candidates Suddenly Dying