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How Texas turned ordinary Muslim civic life into a suspicion category — where religious freedom gets preached loudly, then quietly revoked the moment a mosque, school, civil-rights group, or planned community enters the room.

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By Omar Afra

I grew up Muslim in Southwest Houston,TX during the 80’s and 90’s, and for most of my life it never felt like a problem. Sure, the neighborhood parents found my brother and I to be quite the curioisyty and often tried to convert us by haphazardly preaching the Gospel or taking us to see The Power Team. Naturally, conflicts with my closest friends often descended into insults around my heritage or religion, but I took great pride in responding back with insults about ‘hillbillies’ or ‘rednecks.’ To be clear, being perceived as a redneck in the 80’s in Southwest Houston was nearly as bad as being Muslim. Being called ‘camel jockey’ never really bothered me. Camels are majestic and resilient animals and Arabs conquered both the Persian Empire and took much of the Roman Empire riding camel-back in the year 651 CE. There was no explaining this to my lil’ hillbilly friends though.

Being Muslim was not always easy, but nobody thought we were trying to take over the U.S.A as many do today. Houston was too big and too immigrant to let every identity become a crisis back then. The Bayou City had a way of absorbing difference through exhaustion. Also, in that era, we had Houston Rocket and Nigerian Muslim Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon who did wonders to soften our collective image. He even beat Michael Jordan famously while fasting for Ramadan.

That is what makes the current moment so strange. I remember the hostage crisis being part of the background noise of childhood. I remember the first and second Gulf War, and the aftermath of 9/11 did not seem as ominous as things do now. Of course there were ‘delays’ at the airport, crude jokes, and the sudden interest certain people had in whether you personally knew Osama bin Laden. But even after 9/11, the suspicion felt more episodic, more feverish, but more attached to events. Now it feels more organized and the hate has a legislative calendar and committee hearings to make it all seem official here in Texas. many Lone-Star State politicians have given it the slimy confidence of people who have discovered that Islamophobia can be rebranded as ‘constitutional concern’ and sold to primary voters as border security.

The real insult is that Texas Muslims, as a community, are almost comically ordinary: Law-abiding, family-heavy, education-obsessed, business-starting, charity-giving, doctor-producing, engineering-adjacent, minivan-driving, and socially conservative in plenty of the ways Texas Republicans claim to like. Pew’s 2025 Religious Landscape data found that Muslim Americans are now politically split in a way that should make the Republican Party curious rather than hysterical: 53% identify with or lean Democratic, while 42% identify with or lean Republican, a much narrower gap than in previous decades. That is not exactly the profile of a community plotting to replace the Constitution with a caliphate. It is a swing constituency that just happens to have a different kind of beard than their redneck counterparts. 

On violence, the caricature collapses even harder. Pew found in 2017 that 76% of Muslim Americans said targeting and killing civilians can never be justified, compared with 59% of the general public. Muslims were more absolutist against civilian violence than Americans overall, which is a fairly inconvenient data point if your entire political act depends on treating Muslims as a latent security threat. Charles Kurzman’s long-running work on Muslim-American involvement with violent extremism has likewise documented extremely low numbers compared with the lurid political imagination; his annual report noted only seven Muslim-Americans arrested or killed in alleged violent-extremism involvement in 2020, the lowest total since 2008. The cartoon persists because cartoons are easier to campaign on than the data.

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How Live Nation, Ticketmaster, AI slop, Blue Dot Fever, venue sameness, and the collapse of independent media are turning live music into airport retail — and why the real thing is about to matter more than ever

There was a time, not that long ago, when music scenes actually belonged to cities. You could feel it before anybody explained it to you. Houston had a different pulse than Chicago. Chicago had a different smell than Detroit. New York did not need to announce itself because the room already did it for you. Venues had personalities, sometimes because they were magical and sometimes because the bathroom looked like a war crime. Promoters had taste, grudges, bad habits, debts, flyers, and enemies. Record stores functioned like weird little embassies. Local writers could make a band feel real before any platform gave a shit. You did not need a consulting deck to understand the ecosystem because the ecosystem was alive enough to bite you.

That is what is being lost. Not “the music business,” which will survive in some grotesque reptilian form as long as there is a beverage sponsor and a line item for premium parking. What is dying is the American music scene as a civic organism: venues, writers, photographers, poster artists, public funding, freak promoters, college radio, stubborn bartenders, impossible landlords, underpaid sound engineers, local sponsors who still had enough shame not to turn every event into a performative poser bullshit activation, and audiences willing to take a flyer on a thing they did not already know from the algorithm. That world was messy, often broke, occasionally bat-shit loco, and infinitely more culturally productive than the smooth little trick-fuck now being sold back to people as “fan experience.”

The Department of Justice lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster is usually framed as an antitrust case about ticket fees, venue contracts, and monopoly power. It is that, of course. The DOJ alleged that Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s conduct and dominance across the live-concert ecosystem harms fans, artists, venues, innovation, and promoters. That is not some underground zine rant from a guy smoking near the loading dock; that is the federal government describing the live music business as a captured system. DOJ: Justice Department Sues Live Nation-Ticketmaster for Monopolizing Markets Across Live Concerts. The legal fight matters, but the cultural fight underneath it matters more. Live music is not just a transaction. It is one of the last mass rituals that still reliably pulls human beings out of the private misery of their screens and into a shared physical event. It is older than capitalism, older than venues, older than ticketing, older than the word “content,” older than the dead-eyed corporate priesthood currently pretending to optimize it.

People have been gathering around rhythm, voice, fire, chant, drums, grief, sex, prayer, mourning, ecstasy, and noise since time immemorial. For a lot of people, live music is the closest thing they have to touching the divine without joining a church or taking mushrooms in a field with a trustafarian named Bodhi who says his father is “in finance.” That sacred thing is now being priced, routed, bundled, segmented, surveilled, and VIP’d into spiritual exhaustion. Pollstar reported that the average ticket price for the top 100 touring artists hit $135.92 in 2024, up from $130.81 in 2023, even as ticket sales and other touring metrics softened. Pollstar: 2024 Year-End Business Analysis. That number does not even fully capture what fans feel at checkout, because the actual consumer experience includes service fees, facility fees, platinum pricing, dynamic pricing, parking, merch inflation, and the general sensation of being mugged by software wearing a lanyard.

Michael Rapino gave away the worldview when he said the concert business still had “a lot of runway left” on pricing, comparing concerts to sports and arguing that tickets remained underpriced. Rolling Stone: Live Nation CEO Says Concert Tickets Are Underpriced. The quote has stuck because it is too honest. Runway is not a cultural word. It is not how anyone who loves music talks about a room. It is how a corporation talks about extraction capacity. The audience is not a community in that sentence. It is remaining margin. The show is not a ritual. It is an under-monetized asset. The future implied by that sentence is not more music. It is more stratification: more VIP sections, more premium sightlines, more branded “experiences,” more artificial scarcity, more pricing tiers, more ways to make the regular fan feel like a peasant who accidentally wandered into a shareholder meeting.

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https://testset.media/article/skynyrd-wrote-anti-gun-anti-war-anti-capitalist-songs-then-the-rebel-flag-ate-the-bands-legacy

Omar Afra

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There are bands that get overpraised because they look cool in hindsight ( Talking Heads, The Replacements ), and bands that get punished because their audience eventually became unbearable ( TOOL, Bob Marley ). Lynyrd Skynyrd belongs to the second category.

Not because the criticism is unwarranted. The Confederate flag was not some harmless symbol they hoisted behind the stage every night. It was a poisonous choice, and Skynyrd dragged that shit it around long enough for the symbol to become welded to the band’s public identity. Guitarist Gary Rossington told CNN in 2012 that the band would stop using the flag because it had become associated with hate groups, then walked that back after fans complained. The still-touring band regularly used the repugnant battle flag in live shows for decades. That is not some benign footnote. That is a self-inflicted branding wound with a tetanus infection.

Then there is the other problem: the “Lynyrd Skynyrd” that kept touring long after the original band had ceased to exist as an actual creative organism. The original run was basically 1973 to 1977: five studio albums, one live album, then the plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines. The post-1987 version, fronted by lil’ brother Johnny Van Zant, has now toured far longer than the original band ever existed, and after Rossington’s death in 2023 there were no founding members left. The official band bio now lists a current lineup without any original members. It is basically a glorified tribute band Larping as the real deal.

So yes, the skepticism is earned. The flag shit mattered. Three decades of a bad approximation touring amphitheaters yearly did not help either. The uber macho-southern culture that followed those amphitheater tours underscored just how horribly homogeneous their crowds had become . Therein lies the problem: the worst motherfuckers in the room became the interpretive key for the music. A band with one of the great American rock catalogs became culturally filed under “MAGA uncle with wraparound sunglasses yelling about the ‘Trans-Agenda’.”

The political language is intentionally soft. “Fans First.” “Consumer protection.” “Artist protection.” “Transparency.” It is all warm milk and bedtime civics until you remember who benefits from controlling transferability. If Ticketmaster can decide how tickets move, where they can be resold, what platforms are allowed, what price limits apply, what fees attach, and what counts as legitimate resale, then the ticket is not really yours. It is a revocable permission slip inside a privately governed market.

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By Omar Afra

The strangest thing about America’s fear of Sharia law is that almost nobody yelling about it can define it. Ask them what Sharia is, and you usually get a travel brochure from hell: Taliban courts, public floggings, women erased from civic life. Ask a practicing Muslim, and you may get something much more boring: how to pray, how to fast, how to give charity, how to write a marriage contract, how not to cheat people in business, how to die without leaving your ungrateful kids in a legal knife fight.

That does not mean every system claiming to enforce Sharia is harmless. Plenty are brutal, authoritarian, patriarchal, and allergic to dissent. F those guys right in their stupid faces. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are NOT them. But that is the point. “Sharia” is not one clean thing. It is scripture, jurisprudence, custom, politics, state power, colonial trauma, family law, ethics, and in Texas, a giant neon sign onto which people project every fear they have about Muslims.

The word itself, in the Islamic tradition, refers broadly to divine guidance — the path by which a Muslim tries to live a righteous life. The human legal interpretation of that guidance is usually called fiqh, which is where schools of thought, jurists, courts, customs, politics, and arguments enter the room. CFR puts the distinction plainly: Sharia is the ideal form of divine guidance; fiqh is the human interpretation that becomes the basis of Islamic law in practice.

That distinction matters because American politics treats Sharia like it is a single statute book sitting in a mosque basement somewhere, waiting for Greg Abbott to turn his back so it can crawl into the courthouse and replace the Texas Penal Code.

In ordinary Muslim life, Sharia can mean praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, giving zakat, avoiding interest, writing a marriage contract, dividing inheritance, not selling garbage to people, not cheating your business partner, not exploiting the poor, not drinking, not gambling, not acting like a pig when nobody is watching. You can argue with any of that. You can find it too strict, too old-world, too religious, too intrusive, too whatever. Fine. But it is not automatically a coup attempt.

https://testset.media/article/why-is-texas-so-afraid-of-sharia-law

https://testset.media/article/why-is-texas-so-afraid-of-sharia-law

By Omar Afra

The strangest thing about America’s fear of Sharia law is that almost nobody yelling about it can define it. Ask them what Sharia is, and you usually get a travel brochure from hell: Taliban courts, public floggings, women erased from civic life. Ask a practicing Muslim, and you may get something much more boring: how to pray, how to fast, how to give charity, how to write a marriage contract, how not to cheat people in business, how to die without leaving your ungrateful kids in a legal knife fight.

That does not mean every system claiming to enforce Sharia is harmless. Plenty are brutal, authoritarian, patriarchal, and allergic to dissent. F those guys right in their stupid faces. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are NOT them. But that is the point. “Sharia” is not one clean thing. It is scripture, jurisprudence, custom, politics, state power, colonial trauma, family law, ethics, and in Texas, a giant neon sign onto which people project every fear they have about Muslims.

The word itself, in the Islamic tradition, refers broadly to divine guidance — the path by which a Muslim tries to live a righteous life. The human legal interpretation of that guidance is usually called fiqh, which is where schools of thought, jurists, courts, customs, politics, and arguments enter the room. CFR puts the distinction plainly: Sharia is the ideal form of divine guidance; fiqh is the human interpretation that becomes the basis of Islamic law in practice.

That distinction matters because American politics treats Sharia like it is a single statute book sitting in a mosque basement somewhere, waiting for Greg Abbott to turn his back so it can crawl into the courthouse and replace the Texas Penal Code.

In ordinary Muslim life, Sharia can mean praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, giving zakat, avoiding interest, writing a marriage contract, dividing inheritance, not selling garbage to people, not cheating your business partner, not exploiting the poor, not drinking, not gambling, not acting like a pig when nobody is watching. You can argue with any of that. You can find it too strict, too old-world, too religious, too intrusive, too whatever. Fine. But it is not automatically a coup attempt.

And here is the part that should embarrass every Sharia-panic merchant currently wandering around state politics with a microphone and a hillbilly understanding of the world’s fastest growing religion: literally no serious Muslim constituency in the United States is calling to replace American civil law with Sharia. There is no national Muslim campaign to abolish the Constitution. No mosque PAC is running on “Medina by Tuesday.” No Muslim city council candidate in Dearborn, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, or Paterson is promising to swap municipal code for medieval punishments between pothole repairs and zoning variances. American Muslims are mostly asking for the same exotic privileges everyone else wants: safe neighborhoods, decent schools, fair treatment at airports, not getting hate-crimed, not having their kids called terrorists by some vape-scented junior fascist in third period. The great Sharia takeover appears to consist of people wanting halal food in public schools, prayer accommodations at work, the right to build mosques without the town hall turning into a militia podcast, and occasionally a mortgage product that does not violate their conscience. Terrifying stuff. Alert NORAD.

America already deals with religious law and religious custom all the time. Jewish communities use rabbinical courts and religious arbitration. Catholics have canon law. Christian organizations have morality clauses. Churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques all maintain internal rules for marriage, divorce, discipline, education, burial, charity, and money. Courts may recognize private contracts shaped by religious values, so long as those contracts do not violate public policy or constitutional rights.

That is the legal line. Pretty simple. Private religious life is protected. State coercion is constrained. Nobody gets to beat their wife because they found a cleric with a podcast. Nobody gets to override civil rights law because they used an Arabic word. Nobody is gonna force your kids to eat halal. Nobody gets to build a parallel criminal court in Collin County. The Constitution already knows how to handle this.

Which is why the panic is so obviously performative.

The modern Republican Sharia scare works because it does not require legal plausibility. It only needs emotional voltage. It takes the least understood word in Islam and wires it directly into the American amygdala. Mosque? Sharia. Halal mortgage? Sharia. Muslim school? Sharia. Muslim families buying land together? Sharia compound. Muslim neighborhood with a mosque, school, healthcare facilities, retail, and homes? Congratulations, you have unlocked the Fox News side quest. Jesus H. Christ. ( PEACE BE UPON HIM ).

My home state ofTexas has been the clown car for this, because of course it has. Two things we do better than anyone: smoke a brisket to perfection and allow our state government to constantly turn the clock back against progress.

The North Texas development formerly known as EPIC City — later called The Meadow — became the perfect prop. The plan, involved a Muslim-oriented community with more than 1,000 homes, a mosque, school, healthcare facilities, retail, and sports amenities. Developers said they were complying with the law and not trying to impose Sharia. A Cato Institute submission bluntly summarized the basic reality: no “Sharia law” was coming to Texas, and the developers had said they had no intention of implementing it.

That did not stop the state’s finest group of ill-informed frat-bags from stampeding toward the cameras.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law in September 2025 framed around banning “Sharia compounds” and “discriminatory compounds” in Texas. His own press release accused EPIC and EPIC City of trying to use religion as a form of segregation. CAIR called the rhetoric “divorced from reality,” saying there were no “Sharia compounds” in Texas and that the language stigmatized Muslims. If he only cared about the Texas grid half as much as he was bothered by mooooslims.

Then Abbott escalated further. In November 2025, he purported to designate CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations, while barring them from owning property in Texas. The Guardian noted the very inconvenient civics-class problem here: under U.S. law, states do not have authority to designate foreign terrorist organizations; that power belongs to the federal government through the Secretary of State.

So we have a governor of Texas pretending to ban imaginary Sharia compounds, pretending to wield federal terrorist-designation powers, and pretending that a Muslim civil rights group is some invading jurisdiction. This is what happens when people who spent years mocking campus safe spaces discover that their own emotional support animal is anti-Muslim panic.

Attorney General Ken Paxton, never one to leave a dumb fire un-gasoline’d, also kept pushing against the Muslim-centered development. Spectrum News reported in March 2026 that Paxton urged Collin County officials not to approve development permits tied to the project, as he was preparing for a runoff election. Sen. John Cornyn requested a federal civil rights investigation into the development, raising concerns that it might discriminate against Christians and Jews or impose Islamic law; AP reported that the development had not yet been built and that its lawyer argued the scrutiny was rooted in anti-Muslim bias.

The whole thing became so stupid that Republicans started using “Sharia” against each other. The New York Post reported that during the 2026 Texas GOP Senate primary, Rep. Wesley Hunt labeled Cornyn “Sharia John” for Ramadan messages, while Cornyn promoted anti-Sharia legislation and Paxton sued to stop EPIC City.

“Sharia John” is one of those phrases that makes you want to put the whole republic in rice overnight and hope the moisture comes out.

In Central Texas, candidate Chip Roy is accusing Mayes Middleton of being “Mecca not MAGA.” Kudos to the moron who thought that slogan was clever and extra points for the hillarious image below.

But this is the point. Once anti-Muslim hysteria becomes an acceptable organizing tool, it does not stay neatly aimed at Muslims. It mutates. It becomes a loyalty test. It becomes a primary weapon. It becomes a way for one Republican to accuse another Republican of being soft on the caliphate because he said something normal during Ramadan. These people think they are riding the tiger. They are mostly just feeding it.

And they know better. Or they should.

Muslims are roughly 1% of the U.S. adult population, according to Pew Research Center. Pew also found that most Americans know relatively little about Islam and that many do not personally know a Muslim. That is the perfect environment for a political scam: tiny population, low public literacy, high symbolic value, endless foreign-policy imagery, and enough post-9/11 residue still floating around the bloodstream to make the whole country react like a dog hearing fireworks.

The Sharia panic gives politicians a beautiful little machine. It lets them talk about Muslims without saying Muslims. It lets them dress bigotry up as constitutional concern. It lets them pretend they are defending women while supporting every local Christian patriarch with a school board seat and a purity-ball fetish. It lets them pretend they are defending secular law while trying to staple the Ten Commandments to every public surface that will hold glue.

And let’s be adults: many governments that claim Islamic law do terrible things. The Taliban are not a branding problem. Iran’s morality police are not a misunderstanding. Saudi-style religious authoritarianism is not just “different cultural context.” There are Muslim-majority countries and movements where women, dissidents, sexual minorities, religious minorities, and free thinkers get crushed under systems that use God as a police baton. Nobody serious should hand-wave that away.

But American Muslims building mosques, schools, neighborhoods, charities, businesses, and family courts are not the Taliban with better zoning lawyers.

The sleight of hand is treating every Muslim institution as a larval theocracy. A Muslim community wants a school? Indoctrination. A mosque buys land? Beachhead. A Muslim nonprofit sues the state? Lawfare. Muslim families want to live near each other? Separatism. A Muslim civil rights group complains about discrimination? Terror-adjacent, somehow. Every normal activity of community life gets translated into threat language.

And that tells you what the fear is really about.

The panic begins when Muslims stop being isolated individuals and start behaving like every other American religious community: pooling capital, buying land, opening schools, forming legal organizations, lobbying, voting, suing, fundraising, publishing, building institutions, and telling politicians to go to hell when necessary. The fear is not that Sharia will replace American law. The fear is that Muslims may become a durable American constituency with enough money, organization, and legal confidence to stop asking permission.

That is what Abbott and Paxton and the rest of the Sharia vaudeville act are playing with. They are not just scoring cheap points. They are teaching millions of people that Muslim civic life is inherently suspicious. They are taking the ordinary mechanics of American religious freedom and marking them as foreign contamination when Muslims use them.

They know not the forces they are unleashing, or maybe they do and have made peace with the ugliness. Either way, once you normalize anti-Muslim bigotry as a campaign tool, you create incentives for dumber, meaner, more theatrical men to push it further. Today it is “Sharia compounds.” Tomorrow it is Muslim land ownership. Then Muslim charities. Then Muslim candidates. Then Muslim speech. Then some deranged man with a phone full of clips decides he has been deputized by the algorithm to “defend America.”

That is how this garbage travels: from press release, to primary ad, to cable hit, to Facebook uncle, to armed crank.

The truth is that America is not drowning in Sharia. America is drowning in people who learned one Arabic word and decided it explained 1.9 billion human beings.

Sharia, like any serious religious-legal tradition, deserves argument, criticism, reform, and debate. Muslims have been having those fights for centuries, usually with more sophistication than the average state legislator who thinks fiqh is a brand of Greek yogurt. The question is not whether Sharia should be immune from critique. Nothing should be immune from critique. The question is whether America can discuss Islam without turning into a Klan-motif Chuck E. Cheese animatronic every time Muslims organize a bake sale, buy some acreage, or say the word “community.”

So why is everyone so afraid of Sharia law?

Because most people have no idea what it is. Because politicians discovered ignorance is cheaper than policy. Because the word has been turned into a recruiting tool for a movement that needs enemies more than it needs facts. Because Muslims, for the first time in a long time, are becoming visible enough in American civic life to scare people who prefer their minorities grateful, atomized, and quiet. Fortunately, we do not have a tendency to simply shut up. Quite the opposite. Alhamdulillah ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ for that, y’all.

Omar Afra is a writer, cultural producer, and founder of Test Set. His work focuses on culture, technology, power, war, and the infrastructure beneath public life. More at  testset.media/authors/omar-afra.

By Omar Afra

https://testset.media/article/federal-courts-finally-rule-live-nation-a-monopoly

funniest part is that nobody in live music needed a jury to tell them this. Promoters, managers, venues, and fans definitely knew it. On April 15, 2026, a federal jury in Manhattan finally did the ceremonial thing and ruled that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in major concert venues and ticketing, after a case pressed forward by more than 30 states even after Trump administration came to a soft-ass-settlement.

The

The real takeaway is that the court just said out loud what we have all been living with for years: this is not just a big company with market share. It is a vertically integrated cancer. Promotion, venue ownership, venue operation, ticketing, exclusivity, routing leverage, artist access, fan data, fee extraction — all of it stacked into one cruel leviathan. The states argued that Live Nation used that machine to squeeze rivals, lock up amphitheaters, and tie promotion muscle to ticketing dominance. The jury agreed.

Which also makes the earlier federal settlement look even lamer and more corrupt than previously. That March deal let Live Nation dodge a breakup, capped some service fees at 15%, and required changes at a limited number of venues, while a large bloc of states kept going because they thought the settlement was too weak and too convenient. They were right to keep throwing elbows.

Now comes the part people should actually pay attention to. This verdict is not the end of anything. It is the part where the court says, yes, the house is crooked. The next question is whether anybody makes them tear the house apart. Judge Arun Subramanian still has to decide remedies, and that is where either this shit gets serious or turns into another expensive inconvenience for a company that has spent years treating public outrage like weather. Possible outcomes include damages, venue divestitures, or broader structural changes. Live Nation has already made clear it plans to keep fighting.

And that is how this likely plays out in the real world. If the remedy is mostly cash and compliance language, Live Nation takes the L, rewrites some contracts, hires another gaggle of lawyers, and keeps the machine running with a performative public relations campaign. Nothing fundamental changes. Independent promoters still get boxed out and major venues still route through the same gravity well. Fans still get nickeled and dimed under cleaner, more protective wording. But if the court actually goes at the plumbing — venue control, exclusivity, promotion-tied leverage, Ticketmaster exclusive lock-in — then this could become the first real breach in the wall. That would not magically fix ticket prices overnight, and it would not resurrect a healthy middle class of live music by itself. But it would create room for independent promoters to almost compete and alternatives that are not built around extracting the maximum amount of money from a captive audience because there is nowhere else to go. The verdict matters because it finally says the obvious shit out loud. What matters more is whether the court has the nerve to treat monopoly like monopoly instead of a slap on the wrist.