Shahid Shafi, a surgeon and immigrant from Pakistan, sailed into his role as vice chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party in July, with a sole dissenting vote.
Since then, Texas Republicans have tried to smother the brush fire lit by Dorrie O’Brien, who cast the single vote against Shafi. On Thursday, the executive committee of the county Republican Party was expected to vote on whether Shafi could keep his new job.
O’Brien, who began to agitate for Shafi’s removal soon after he assumed his role, is one of the 269 Republican representatives eligible to vote. Each one represents a voting precinct in the county. O’Brien has spent the past several months persuading a few more precinct chairs to oppose Shafi.
“We don’t think he’s suitable as a practicing Muslim to be vice chair because he’d be the representative for ALL Republicans in Tarrant County, and not ALL Republicans in Tarrant County think Islam is safe or acceptable in the U.S., in Tarrant County, and in the TCGOP,” O’Brien wrote on Facebook.
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The effort to block a practicing Muslim from a Republican leadership role in Texas is not the first. In 2016, a local precinct chair unsuccessfully tried to prevent another Pakistani-American from becoming a Harris County precinct chairman; Harris encompasses Houston and is the fourth-largest county in the nation.
But this latest controversy has brought out the biggest Republican luminaries in the state, and they offered resolute support for Shafi, who became a citizen in 2009 and who has served as a city council member in Southlake, Texas, since 2014.
“The promise of freedom of religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment in the Constitution; and Article 1, Section 4 of the Texas Constitution states that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in this state,” Gov. Rick Abbott said this week in a statement.
Abbott was joined by Sen. Ted Cruz and George P. Bush, the state land commissioner and grandson of former President George Bush.
Tarrant County, whose biggest city is Fort Worth, has been solidly Republican. But in November, a majority of voters there backed the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Beto O’Rourke, and other state Senate and House seats flipped to the Democrats.
Shafi, 53, reached by phone Thursday, said he would not comment until after the vote. But during the campaign to remove him, he has reaffirmed his political beliefs and tried to swat away the attacks on himself and his faith.
“I fully support and believe in American Laws for American Courts,” he said on Facebook. “I support our Second Amendment rights unconditionally, and I believe in the sanctity of life from conception onwards. I believe in small government, lower taxes, individual responsibility, religious freedom, school choice, energy independence, rule of law and secure borders.”
Shafi said that he felt at home in the Republican Party. He recently told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “I have seen a lot of support from within the party; overwhelming support from elected officials, from rank-and-file members; from people within the county; from people outside the county but within the state. There has just been an outpouring of support.”
He blamed a few party members for causing the dissent, and said that he was fighting for the higher principle of equality.
Across the nation, 66 percent of Muslims identify politically as Democrats; only 13 percent call themselves Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center. Twenty percent say they are independent. Muslims comprise about 1 percent of the U.S. population, about 3.5 million people, but they are clustered in critical political states, like Michigan and Florida as well as larger states like California, Illinois and Texas.
In Texas, the executive director of the Tarrant County Republican Party said Thursday that his organization has received hundreds of phone calls and emails this week calling them racist. The official, Jeremy Bradford, said that the party wanted Shafi to remain as vice chairman.
“Our elected officials support our party platform and our Constitution and we stand for religious freedom,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.