Pakistan has been conducting peace talks with the Taliban’s Pakistani wing, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), for more than a month. The parade of bearded men holding these negotiations has become part of regular programming on Pakistani television networks. At each twist and turn, TTP’s demand has remained the same: the imposition of Sharia in Pakistan. This is a strange platform, since the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, as the country is officially known, already declares that all of its laws must be in accordance with Sharia.

The term Sharia is subject to similar political manipulation in the United States, borne primarily from a growing suspicion of Islam and Muslims. For example, an online campaign known as “Creeping Sharia” aims to curtail “the deliberate and methodical advance of Islamic law (sharia) in non-Muslim countries, particularly the United States.” In this view, a surreptitious and secret movement is underway for the “Islamization” of the United States and requires a pre-emptive response.

Both pro- and anti-Sharia campaigns draw their meanings from the political contexts from which they have emerged. In Pakistan, where the question of what it means to be an Islamic republic is a contested one, it is being interpreted by the Taliban to mean floggings, beheadings, and bans on music and girls’ education. This brand of Sharia vociferously and pointedly rejects all that is Western and imagines its interpretation as purely Islamic. In the United States, Christian conservatives use anti-Sharia campaigns to justify the threat of an “Islamic” enemy. For example, the conservative think tank Center for Security Policy, which supports bans on Sharia, believes it is slipping into U.S. courts and must be blocked. In Florida, an “anti-foreign law” bill was reintroduced for the fourth time this week with support from groups such as the far-right Florida Family Association. By and large, supporters of the Sharia bans in the United States seem motivated principally by their opposition to a multicultural and pluralistic society. One way for them to prevent that is to create legislative bars that seek to demonize minority communities.

American proponents of Sharia bans pay little attention to the U.S. Constitution, which mandates the separation of religion and state. The campaigners continue to promote “anti-Sharia” legislation that seeks to ban Islamic law in U.S. courts, despite the fact that religious laws, Islamic or not, are prohibited from ever trumping American law. Its superfluity notwithstanding, the Sharia bogeyman has helped galvanize support for conservative Christians’ push for laws in a number of state legislatures across the country. In Oklahoma, one of the first states to pass a Sharia ban, a ballot initiative in 2010 resulted in 70 percent of voters approving the ban. Their votes followed a fervid pre-election campaign that painted the Sharia threat as pressing and imminent. At the end of 2013, nearly 26 U.S states had introduced some form of such legislation. So resolute are the anti-Sharia campaigners that they stand undeterred even after a federal judge in Oklahoma declared the bans unnecessary and unconstitutional last fall. In 2014, several states are expected to introduce new anti-Sharia bills into their legislative sessions.