America doesn’t owe you a blank check

There are not many subjects on which a conservative Christian expects to find himself nodding along with Bill Maher. Yet in a recent monologue on immigration, Maher said something that deserves to be taken seriously—not because Maher is a conservative, but precisely because he is not. And his focus was more specific than the usual immigration debate. He was not talking about immigrants in general. He was talking, pointedly, about a pattern of Muslim resistance to social and cultural assimilation in the West.

I arrived in this country 19 years ago as a legal immigrant, carrying real appreciation for what America represented. I was met, instead, by the peculiar spectacle of people born here despising their own culture, values, and inheritance. That is what made Maher’s monologue land differently. He is no culture warrior, and yet there he was, saying what many quietly think but few will say on air: If you want the American Dream, you have to accept American values. He rightly observed that some immigrants have decided they would rather America accept theirs.

Maher was careful to say this isn’t about erasing culture. Keep your grandmother’s cooking, your language at home, your holidays—no one asks an immigrant to abandon any of that. What he insists on instead is civilizational allegiance: Do you accept the democratic foundations of the society you’re joining, or do you expect that society to bend around your religious politics?

Maher’s monologue insists that Western foundations are not negotiable and questions Muslim practices and actions that aim to assert Islamic values over American norms. In doing so, he exposes something larger, and that is Islam functioning as a political program that seeks hegemony and superiority in non-Muslim lands. Islam has a documented record in the West of refusing the very assimilation Maher describes, regarding itself as culturally superior, religiously truer, and socially higher. Moreover, it is theologically against assimilation, calling for the building of parallel structures of authority that undermine the host nation’s civil order.

This pattern has been unfolding for decades. It is time for the West to wake up.

Britain is the clearest case study. Roughly 85 sharia councils now operate across the United Kingdom, issuing religious rulings on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody. The network produces outcomes that disadvantage women and functions as a parallel system challenging Britain’s equality-based principles—Islamic values suppressing British freedoms. Unlike other religious mediation bodies, sharia councils assert moral jurisdiction in a way that creates a rival authority to Britain itself.

Nor are the councils an isolated phenomenon. They sit inside a far larger architecture.

French intelligence has identified roughly seven percent of the nation’s mosques as ideologically tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement whose stated project is not merely religious observance but the gradual Islamization of Europe. One Italian member of the European Parliament put it bluntly while standing before a newly funded mega-mosque: this is “not just a place of worship but a real political project to give life to Islam in Europe.” That is the difference between a religious congregation building a house of worship and a movement building a strategic position with an anti-Western political statement of hegemony attached—and Western governments have been slow to discern it.

The pattern recurs on American soil, in smaller and more granular form.

In cities across the United States and other Western countries, some Muslim communities have pursued practices that prioritize Islamic religious requirements over prevailing American norms and shared public order: mass street prayers occupying roadways and sidewalks; successful campaigns for dedicated wudu foot-washing stations in airports and other public facilities; Minneapolis becoming the first major U.S. city to amend its noise ordinance to permit amplified calls to prayer five times daily, including before dawn; and Muslim taxi drivers repeatedly refusing service to passengers carrying alcohol or traveling with dogs, citing religious prohibition—thousands of documented refusals and resulting policy conflicts.

Further examples compound the pattern: demands for gender-segregated times in public locations, requests for separate changing facilities or special halal food in schools, insisting on resisting host-country norms and laws.

This is Islam functioning exactly as its own classical sharia intends—the soft version of the claim jihadists make with weapons. Islamic law carries an inherent claim of supremacy over non-Islamic law—including civil law. Furthermore, a Muslim’s true allegiance can never fully rest while yielding to what they see as a man-made Constitution.

America is not immune to this pattern. It is simply less candid about naming it. Americans must protect our core values—individual liberty, equality under the law, free speech, gender equality, and the expectation of cultural assimilation into a shared civic culture—and insist firmly on upholding them against attempts by some Muslims to advance an Islamic agenda.