(RNS) — In case you haven’t noticed, Republican politicians are back to playing the anti-Shariah card.

Examples are legion, but start with last September, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill banning so-called Shariah compounds in his state. A group of congressional Republicans, meanwhile, has formed a “Sharia-Free America Caucus,” and bills to keep America Shariah-free have been introduced by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a candidate for governor in Alabama, and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Randy Fine of Florida. A Georgia candidate for lieutenant governor has posted a scary video about Shariah taking over the U.S.

What lies behind this is no mystery: The GOP is desperately seeking an issue to prevent what looks to be a disastrous midterm election in November.

What worked in 2024 doesn’t look so good in 2026. High prices? Tariffs have kept them up. Foreign wars? They’re back. Illegal immigrants? Thanks, ICE, for taking that off the table.

Which pretty much leaves “men-in-women’s-sports” to get the juices flowing. But if you can’t hold on to Mar-a-Lago’s own state House seat in March, you’d better come up with something better.

Wherefore: Shariah, or, in King Solomon’s proverbial words, “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.” 

To be sure, this dog took a while to disgorge. Just six days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush kept political Islamophobia at bay by paying a visit to the Islamic Center of Washington. “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith,” he said. “And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

Signs of what was to come began with the claim that then-up-and-coming politician Barack Obama (a member of the United Church of Christ) was a crypto-Muslim. The follies, however, didn’t begin in earnest until after Bush left office.

In the spring of 2010 came the hoopla over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. The original idea was to use a site a few blocks from the destroyed World Trade Center to create an Islamic center called Cordoba House — a name meant to symbolize the convivencia ideal of Muslim-Christian-Jewish amity that supposedly characterized Muslim Spain during the Middle Ages.

Let it be noted that Fox News initially applauded the plan as a source of national healing. Then, after Pamela Geller and other virulent Islamophobes attacked it as an affront to those who had died on 9/11, the network switched sides and went into full-throated opposition. The 2010 midterms were, after all, just around the corner.

In November that same year, Oklahoma voters were treated to a referendum amending the state constitution (the “Save Our State” amendment) to forbid their courts from using Shariah. Not, you understand, that anyone in Oklahoma’s small Muslim community was proposing that state courts so use. But that didn’t prevent the referendum passing with 70% of the vote.

The amendment was immediately enjoined and later struck down by a federal judge as a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious free exercise and its ban on government establishment of religion. But in a campaign initiated by Brooklyn lawyer David Yerushalmi, anti-Shariah laws were passed in the mid-2010s by no fewer than 20 states.

Which brings us to President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” the signature issue of his 2016 presidential campaign that, after fits and starts, resulted in the limitation of immigration for a number of majority-Muslim countries (and a few others) during his first term. 

For all that, the anti-Shariah campaign faded from the GOP’s political playbook in the 2020 election cycle, perhaps thanks to Trump’s courting of the Gulf States and his mediating of the establishment of diplomatic relations between them and Israel via the Abraham Accords. After the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, President Joe Biden’s support for Israeli retribution in Gaza opened up a political opportunity for the GOP. Why ratchet up Islamophobia when you can pick up alienated Muslim voters in a swing state like Michigan? 

But what’s a poor political party to do now? Anti-Shariah campaigns seemed to work in the past. I have my doubts, but who knows, maybe they can work again.