MAGA Congressman Tells Muslim American: “My Wife Doesn’t Want to Hear Your Oppressive Prayer Calls”

At the No Kings demon­stra­tion in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., British-born polit­i­cal pun­dit and Trump crit­ic Meh­di Hasan, who is Mus­lim, high­light­ed the impor­tance of America’s free­dom of reli­gion pro­tec­tions under the First Amend­ment.

“I think if you can play church bells, you can play the call for prayer,” Hasan said, illus­trat­ing his point. Refer­ring to his own and oth­er Mus­lim Amer­i­cans’ sta­tus, he added:
“We are as Amer­i­can as any­one else.”

The First Amend­ment con­tains two key pro­vi­sions regard­ing reli­gion: the Estab­lish­ment Clause, which pro­hibits the gov­ern­ment from estab­lish­ing a reli­gion, and the Free Exer­cise Clause, which pro­tects cit­i­zens’ right to prac­tice their reli­gion freely, so long as it does not con­flict with pub­lic morals or a com­pelling gov­ern­men­tal inter­est.

MAGA-aligned Con­gress­man Bren­don Gill (R‑TX) respond­ed on social media, assert­ing:

“We can move here en masse and fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­form the land­scape of Amer­i­can pub­lic life.”

The remark reflects anti-immi­gra­tion view­points assert­ing that mass immi­gra­tion under­mines a Chris­t­ian-based con­cep­tion of Amer­i­can iden­ti­ty. Hasan fired back at Gill, not­ing:

“Your wife is an Indi­an Amer­i­can, the daugh­ter of an Indi­an immi­grant.”

Gill replied:

“My wife is a Chris­t­ian and does­n’t want to hear your oppres­sive Mus­lim prayer calls, either. If you want to live in a Mus­lim coun­try, go back to the UK.”

Hasan respond­ed sharply:

“Mul­ti­ple sit­ting GOP mem­bers of Con­gress now sound like Ku Klux Klan wiz­ards. The lev­els of igno­rance, racism, and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism are off the charts. Good luck to the poor Mus­lim Amer­i­cans who have to live in this guy’s dis­trict.”

Gill rep­re­sents Texas’s 26th con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, which includes parts of Den­ton, Tar­rant, and Collin coun­ties. Accord­ing to 2020 data from the Asso­ci­a­tion of Reli­gion Data Archives, there were an esti­mat­ed 37,413 Mus­lims in Collin Coun­ty, 31,421 in Tar­rant Coun­ty, and 6,868 in Den­ton Coun­ty.

For con­text, less than 1.4% of Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as Muslim—a num­ber pro­ject­ed to reach 2% by 2050. Around 42% of Mus­lims in the U.S. were born in the coun­try. Glob­al­ly, only Vat­i­can City has no Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion.

Hasan became a nat­u­ral­ized U.S. cit­i­zen on Octo­ber 9, 2020, writ­ing at the time:

“I’m offi­cial­ly a cit­i­zen of the Unit­ed States and ready to vote, weeks before the most con­se­quen­tial U.S. elec­tion of our life­times.”