America’s courts stand as the bedrock of justice, where every citizen expects equal treatment under a single set of laws. Yet, in pockets across the nation, religious arbitration centers—often operating under Sharia principles—have quietly established themselves as alternative forums for resolving disputes, particularly in family and civil matters. These setups challenge the authority of state and federal systems, creating divisions that favor religious doctrine over constitutional guarantees.
Take the Islamic Tribunal in Dallas, established back in 2015 as the country’s first formal body of its kind for handling divorces and business conflicts. Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently directed local district attorneys, sheriffs, and Attorney General Ken Paxton to probe these so-called Sharia courts, insisting they masquerade as legitimate legal entities while undermining American law.
His move follows a September 2025 law he signed banning residential developments that could function as self-contained Sharia enclaves, like the proposed EPIC City project. Abbott’s actions have sparked backlash from Muslims, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations filing a federal lawsuit against him and Paxton, claiming the investigations smear Muslim communities as terrorist-linked.
Nationwide, religious arbitration in family law remains legal if parties consent voluntarily, but critics argue it often involves coercion, especially for women in tight-knit communities. In practice, these tribunals apply rules drawn from Islamic texts that clash with U.S. standards.
For instance, under Sharia, men can divorce unilaterally, while women must seek council approval, sometimes forfeiting financial rights like the bridal gift known as mahr. Inheritance favors sons over daughters, and in some interpretations, a husband’s authority includes physical discipline for perceived disobedience, as outlined in Sura 4:34 of the Qur’an.
This is the steady and not-so-slow creep of Sharia into America’s legal system. What starts as “cultural” decisions will rapidly become legally binding, first within the communities themselves and then in other aspects of American life. This is all part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-year plan, which is now nearly five decades in the making.
“We must call these councils what they are: centers that host a parallel legal system operating simultaneously with federal and state law within the sovereign jurisdiction of the United States,” said journalist David Bumgardner.
Evidence from abroad, like in the United Kingdom, shows women pressured to stay in abusive relationships or denied knowledge of their civil rights. Similar patterns emerge here, where arbitration decisions can gain enforcement in secular courts, blurring lines between faith and law. This setup not only erodes state power but institutionalizes inequalities that American jurisprudence rejects outright.
On the legislative front, momentum builds to address this. In October 2025, Representative Chip Roy introduced H.R. 5722, the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act, aiming to bar entry to immigrants who adhere to Sharia if it conflicts with U.S. law.
Senator Tommy Tuberville followed with the No Sharia Act, which would prohibit courts from enforcing foreign laws, including Sharia, that violate constitutional rights. Florida lawmakers have filed a state-level version to keep Sharia out of government proceedings.
“Arbitration is a legal term, defining a method of dispute resolution outside of civil litigation… when a religious council makes a determination on the validity of a marriage, or dictates the terms of a divorce settlement or custody arrangement, it is not engaging in worship. It is instead engaging in a legal exercise that blatantly usurps state power.”
Proponents of these tribunals claim they offer cultural sensitivity and efficient resolutions. But allowing them risks a slippery slope where community pressures override individual freedoms, echoing how unchecked immigration policies have enabled such parallel systems to flourish. Ontario, Canada, set a precedent in 2005 by banning religious arbitration in family matters, requiring all disputes to follow provincial law—a model worth emulating to safeguard unity.
The second (and most important and pressing) reason for prohibition is the inherent conflict between the laws applied by these councils and the American principle of legal equality.
At stake is more than procedure; it’s the preservation of a society where justice applies evenly, rooted in traditions that limit exploitation and uphold dignity for all. Sharia’s framework, with its built-in disparities, simply doesn’t align.
American law and Judeo-Christian values cannot coexist with Sharia. Justice for All is non-negotiable.
Shutting down these centers and outlawing Sharia arbitration would reaffirm that in America, one law governs everyone—no exceptions, no shadows.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.