Historian Bill Federer argues Islam functions as a political-military system incompatible with the Constitution

The First Amendment protects religious belief absolutely. But what happens when a system of law, governance, and military doctrine calls itself a religion? That is the constitutional question Bill Federer, historian and creator of American Minute, posed during a wide-ranging interview on The Kim Monson Show.

“Islam is not just a religion because Mohammed was not just a religious leader. He was also a political and a military leader,” Federer said. “And so our effort to split the religious side or even the political military side is you’re trying to split Mohammed.”

Federer, author of What Every American Needs to Know About the Qur’an: A History of Islam & the United States, argued that the inseparability of Islam’s religious, political, and military dimensions creates a constitutional tension that American law has never fully resolved. His central thesis: a comprehensive political-military system should not receive blanket First Amendment protection simply by claiming religious status.

The legal foundation

Federer anchored his argument in two historical quotations. The first came from Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who wrote in the foreword to the 1955 academic treatise Law in the Middle East that “the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.” Federer noted that Jackson, who also served as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, reached this conclusion after a detailed legal comparison, not a political one.

The second quotation came from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said during a 1952 campaign speech in Milwaukee: “The Bill of Rights contains no grant of privilege for a group of people to destroy the Bill of Rights.” It is worth noting that Eisenhower’s original context was Communist infiltration during the Cold War, not Islam. Federer applies the principle by analogy, arguing that any political system seeking to replace constitutional governance forfeits the right to claim constitutional protections as a shield.

“Just by letting a political military group call itself a religion doesn’t mean they get a free pass to overthrow the Constitution,” Federer said.

Muhammad’s three roles and the Medina narrative

Federer traced his argument through the biography of Muhammad, whom he described as having held three distinct roles: religious leader, political leader, and military leader. Mainstream Islamic historians acknowledge that Muhammad held all three roles, though academic scholars such as W. Montgomery Watt typically describe these functions as overlapping rather than strictly sequential, as Federer’s framework suggests.

Federer focused on the Medina period as a case study. He argued that after Muhammad migrated to the Jewish city of Medina, the three major Jewish tribes were systematically eliminated within five years. “So within five years of Muhammad coming into the Jewish city of Medina as an immigrant, there’s not a Jew left in the city of Medina,” Federer said. “They were chased out, killed, or enslaved.” The basic sequence of the Banu Qaynuqa expulsion (624 CE), Banu Nadir expulsion (625 CE), and Banu Qurayza massacre (627 CE) is attested in early Islamic sources and accepted by mainstream historians, though the characterization of Muhammad “playing off political differences” is Federer’s interpretive framing.

From this narrative, Federer constructed what he calls the “immigrate, increase, eliminate” framework, which he presented as a recurring pattern across 1,400 years of Islamic expansion. This framework is Federer’s own analytical construct, not an established model in academic Islamic studies. Mainstream historians of Islamic expansion describe a more complex picture involving trade, conversion, intermarriage, and military conquest in varying proportions across different regions and centuries.

A century of conquest

Federer cited the rapid geographic expansion of Islam in its first century as evidence for his thesis. “The first century of Islam, they conquered from Arabia to Paris,” he said, referencing the period from Muhammad’s death in 632 CE to the Battle of Tours in 732 CE, where Charles Martel halted the Muslim advance into France. The basic chronology is not disputed. Academic historians debate the significance of Tours; some, following Edward Gibbon, consider it a pivotal turning point, while others view the Muslim advance into France as a series of raids rather than a sustained conquest campaign.

Federer also connected the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Age of Exploration, arguing that Islamic conquest of the Eastern Roman capital motivated Columbus’s 1492 voyage. While the dates are accurate, historians note that multiple factors drove European exploration, including Portuguese navigational advances and the desire to bypass existing trade monopolies. The Ottoman conquest was one factor among several.

The legislative response

Federer’s constitutional argument aligns with a growing legislative movement in Congress. The Sharia Free America Caucus, founded in December 2025 by Reps. Keith Self (R-Texas) and Chip Roy (R-Texas), had grown to 26 members from 17 states within its first month and surpassed 44 members by March 2026. Multiple federal bills are pending in the 119th Congress, including the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act (S.3009), introduced by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and the No Shari’a Act (S.3008/H.R.5512). Multiple states, including Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee, have enacted foreign law bans that effectively prohibit Sharia in state courts.

The legal landscape frames the tension Federer identified. In Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Supreme Court established that government cannot regulate religious beliefs but can regulate religious practices that violate the law. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Court held that neutral, generally applicable laws do not violate the Free Exercise Clause even if they incidentally burden religion. And in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah (1993), the Court struck down laws that specifically target a religion. Current legislative efforts use neutral “foreign law” language rather than naming Islam directly, a strategy designed to survive constitutional challenge after Oklahoma’s 2010 Sharia-specific amendment was struck down by federal courts.

A distinction between system and believers

Federer was careful to distinguish between the political-military system he critiques and individual Muslims. He acknowledged that “most Muslims are moderate” and described many as viewing the goal of global Islamic governance as distant or figurative. His argument targets what he described as the structural and doctrinal architecture of Islam as a governing system.

“Sharia law says it’s top down dictated by Allah and they hate law where people govern from the consent of the governed bottom up,” Federer said, drawing a final contrast between constitutional self-governance and what he characterized as an incompatible political theology.