Sharia, Judge Syed, and Gov. Newsom

California Governor Gavin Newsom in June handed down 14 new judicial appointments. Most will pass without a second glance. One should not.

Haaris M. Syed is now a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court—one of the largest trial courts in the entire country. And before he put on the robe, he spent years fighting Los Angeles County in court over something that should make every American pay attention: his retirement plan.

Syed refused for years to accept the county’s retirement match because the investment options were interest-based. Under Islamic Sharia, interest (riba in Arabic) is haram—religiously forbidden. So he pushed, with help from Stanford’s Religious Liberty Clinic, until the county agreed to build him a Sharia-compliant option inside its 401(k) and 457 plans.

Unsurprisingly, CAIR-LA, the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, publicly celebrated his appointment to the bench.

Let’s get the facts straight before we get to the meaning, because facts matter. This was not a lawsuit Syed simply “won” overnight. It was a years-long accommodation process.

There is no public evidence that Syed intends to apply Islamic Sharia rulings from the bench. Every judge in America, whatever their religion, is bound by the Constitution. That’s not in dispute, and no one should pretend otherwise. But here’s where many are concerned: This isn’t just a personal faith accommodation. If Syed’s story were simply “a Muslim man who avoided pork or fasted during Ramadan,” nobody would blink. Personal piety is not the issue. But riba, and the entire body of Islamic finance law behind it, is not a private dietary preference. It’s part of a legal system—Sharia—that governs far more than money. It governs marriage and divorce, women’s rights and inheritance, apostasy and criminal punishment, and, importantly, the legal standing of non-Muslims.

And in that system, as any honest reading of classical Islamic jurisprudence will tell you, Muslims and non-Muslims are not treated as equals. Neither are men and women.

And before shouts of bigotry and islamophobia escalate, we should insist that this is simply what the primary Muslim texts and centuries of jurisprudence actually say, and any knowledgeable Muslim trained in these sources knows it.

So, when a public institution builds a Sharia-compliant carve-out because a lawyer insisted on it, and that same lawyer then becomes a judge, the question isn’t “does he pray five times a day?” The question is: What happens when a legal mind formed by demanding accommodation to Sharia principles is asked to rule on cases touching family law, religious liberty, or civil rights involving Islamic practice?

No one can read hearts, and no one knows intentions—we can only judge statements and actions, and inspect the fruit of someone’s deeds. No one can accuse Judge Syed of planning to rule from the Quran or the Hadith instead of the California code. As of now, there’s no precedent of such a thing occurring. Still, once you understand what Sharia actually claims about equality—or the lack of it—you understand why this story is not “no big deal.”

Here’s the part that should worry Americans most, and it has nothing to do with any one man’s personal faith. It has to do with the governor who appointed him. Judges take an oath. Voters take a stand. Elections have consequences, and so do the political instincts behind them.

When a politician has a track record of leaning favorably toward accommodating Sharia-based demands—treating them as just another flavor of diversity rather than as a distinct legal-religious system with real implications for religious freedom and equality—and that same politician gets to fill the highest trial courts in the state, you are no longer talking about one man’s 401(k) accounts.

You are talking about who gets to decide what “fair and balanced” law looks like for millions of Californians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. That’s not a slippery-slope argument—it’s simply how judicial appointments work. Governors pick judges who reflect their worldviews, dispositions, and instincts. If those instincts treat Sharia accommodation as an unqualified civil rights win, without wrestling honestly with what Sharia actually says about non-Muslims, women, and apostates, then citizens have every right to ask hard questions—not about Syed’s character, but about the standard being applied.

Muslims are human beings made in the image of God, worthy of love, respect, and fair treatment under the law. But Islam and its Sharia, as a legal and political system, do not treat all people as equal, and Islamists work deliberately to expand that system’s reach into Western institutions. CAIR’s own founder has spoken openly about building a generation of Muslim lawyers and policymakers to shape America’s legal system from within. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s a stated goal.

So don’t be distracted by whether Judge Syed personally seems like a decent man. He may well be one. The real question is whether Californians understand what they’re actually voting for when they choose a governor—and whether they’re paying enough attention to notice what gets built, one accommodation at a time, inside the very courts meant to protect equal justice for all.