The Republican Who Wants To Banish His Own Constituents

The Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee—a small city about 45 miles south of Nashville—had been around for only a few years when white supremacists burned it down. On a Saturday in early 2008, three young men went to the mosque armed with spray paint and Molotov cocktails. According to a federal indictment, they first defaced the exterior walls with swastikas and phrases including White Power. Then they broke into the building and set it aflame.

“Everything on the inside was charred,” a former member of the Islamic Center told me. “The roof had come down, and they had to demolish the building afterwards.” The mosque, which had a few dozen members, had been the first in Columbia and was, for a time, the only Muslim house of worship between Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. After the fire, its leaders bought an empty church building nearby and converted it into a new mosque, though they initially kept their plans for the space a secret to avoid a community backlash.

The former member who related this to me asked that I not publish his name, because nearly two decades later, the Muslim community in middle Tennessee is again on edge. The membership of the rebuilt Islamic Center of Columbia is smaller but still active. Its mosque sits less than a mile from the district office of the area’s U.S. House member, Andy Ogles. But Representative Ogles, a Republican in his second term, doesn’t seem to want Muslims to reside in his district. And he doesn’t want them anywhere else in the country, for that matter. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles posted on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”

[Ali Breland: Meet the new Proud Boys]

Ogles is a Trump loyalist who has proposed amending the Constitution to allow the president a third term. Ogles has long denigrated Muslims; he’s pushed for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda and with whom Trump has lately been chummy) to be denaturalized and deported, and just last week, he called for a ban on immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. His comments on Monday were more sweeping, and a more direct attack on America’s constitutional values. They also imply an outright rejection of thousands of Ogles’s own constituents.

Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District includes parts of Nashville and several counties to the south. For 20 years, its House representative was a centrist Democrat, Jim Cooper, who had welcomed a Muslim community in Nashville that grew over the years to more than 40,000 people. It comprises significant Kurdish and Somali populations that arrived as a result of refugee-resettlement programs, as well as a sizable number of Palestinians. In Columbia, as in other parts of the region, Muslim physicians who had been recruited to the area because of a need for more doctors brought along their families.

After the 2020 census, Republicans in the state legislature targeted Cooper’s seat in redistricting, prompting him to retire. Ogles now has more Muslim people in his district than does any other member of Tennessee’s House delegation (including its lone Democrat, Representative Steve Cohen), according to Sabina Mohyuddin, the executive director of the Nashville-based American Muslim Advisory Committee.

But Ogles barely acknowledges his Muslim constituents, much less represents them, Mohyuddin told me. “This is not someone that anyone feels comfortable contacting for any kind of issue,” she said. “It is a total disconnect.” The AMAC formed in 2012 from a coalition that successfully fought a state bill targeting Muslim communities by seeking to ban “Sharia organizations” in Tennessee. Mohyuddin has since become accustomed to fielding calls about Ogles’s attacks on Muslims. To protect imams seeking a lower public profile, the council advises area mosques to direct media inquiries to Mohyuddin. She was busy preparing a statement responding to Ogles’s proposed Muslim immigration ban on Monday when she saw his even more incendiary comments. “This is going to make everything worse,” she told me.

There was a time, not too long ago, when Republican leaders would sanction, or at least denounce, a member who made a statement like Ogles did. In 2019, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stripped Representative Steve King of his committee assignments after he defended the terms white nationalist and white supremacist in a newspaper interview. (King had been making offensive remarks about immigrants for years, some of which GOP leaders would call out.)

In Trump’s second term, however, the avowedly anti-Muslim influencer Laura Loomer has the ear of the president, and top House Republicans have oscillated between silence and equivocation in response to bigotry from their members. Republican leadership said nothing last month when Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican less than a year into his term, compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs and then proudly defended the comments. Some other Republicans, though, did criticize Fine and Ogles. Richard Grenell, a special presidential envoy and Trump’s appointee to lead the Kennedy Center, replied to Ogles by saying, “Stop attacking the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

When a reporter asked Speaker Mike Johnson about the comments from Fine and Ogles during a press conference in Florida yesterday, the closest that Johnson came to criticizing them was to say that they had used “different language than I would use.” He devoted the bulk of his answer to validating worries about Sharia law. “There’s a lot of energy in the country, and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem,” Johnson said. “That’s what animates this.”

[Jonathan Chait: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal]

Idle warnings about Sharia law—a fixation among conservatives during the 2010s—have reemerged on the right in recent months. They spiked during the Texas Republican primaries after a deadly shooting at an Austin bar early this month, allegedly by a man wearing a sweatshirt that said Property of Allah. To Mohyuddin, the refrains about Sharia law are familiar and ridiculous, but no less disturbing. “Where is Sharia law being used?” she asked, a tone of exasperation in her voice. “This is a made-up boogeyman.”

Ogles’s office did not return a request for an interview. He’s spent the past few days on X reiterating his call to banish Muslims and multiculturalism from American society. Mohyuddin seemed torn about how—or even whether—to respond. On one hand, she felt the need to speak up for Muslims in and around Ogles’s district, who have few allies among the conservative Republicans dominating Tennessee politics. (Muslim constituents have reported being kicked out of meetings with state legislators, the former member of the Islamic Center of Columbia told me.) Yet, on the other hand, Mohyuddin worried that by denouncing Ogles, she and others were just playing into his desire for attention and notoriety. “He’s targeting our community and trying to gain relevance, because no one takes him seriously,” she told me. “And, honestly, it’s working.”