Choirdad3

My liberal friends — yes, I have them — have been telling me for months that Republican concerns about Sharia law are overblown. Is there an example anywhere in Texas of Sharia law being used to override American law and do harm? Well, I found it. Specifically, I found it at Texas patriot Tony Buzbee’s wedding. The time: July 2021. The place: Moody Gardens, Galveston. I was seated for dinner across from someone I had not expected to share a roll basket with: Mohammad Ali Choudhri, a Houston real estate developer worth at least nine figures. I told him I was with the media — I’m a talk radio host and half of the Walton and Johnson Show. He did not look delighted. Sitting next to a stranger at a wedding is always like spinning a roulette wheel, and they treated me like I was double-zero. Later I learned why Choudhri would be skeptical of chatting with someone who talks into a microphone for a living. Wayne Dolcefino, the former Channel 13 investigative reporter who now runs his own investigative firm, has been investigating Choudhri for years. He even sued Dolcefino over his reporting. Choudhri has been involved in all sorts of swirling scandals involving his businesses and, bizarrely, a relationship with former civil district judge Brittanye Morris. But here’s the part that involves Sharia: His divorce. Choudhri has lived in Houston since he was three. In 2008 he traveled to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. He was about 28. His wife-to-be, Hira Azhar, was 18. She joined him here in 2010. During the marriage they accumulated more than $100 million in community assets — Texas law’s way of saying what a couple builds together is not necessarily a solo prize. In 2012 he sent her back to Pakistan, ostensibly to deal with a visa. The Texas Supreme Court would later describe what happened as a “ruse.” In 2013, while she was still there, he divorced her without her knowledge. The mechanism was talaq, a form of unilateral divorce under Islamic law. That’s right: Sharia was afoot. Azhar was not served with the proceeding and did not participate in it. Notice appeared for five days in a Pakistani newspaper she never saw. She learned she had been divorced two years later. Azhar returned to Houston in 2015 and filed in Harris County. She wanted a divorce under Texas law and a fair division of the marital estate. A Houston trial court said no. Pakistan had already acted, and the court recognized that judgment under comity — the courtesy courts sometimes extend to foreign judgments. Think of it as like dying in the Matrix: If you get married or divorced anywhere else in the world, it happens in real life. Click the link in the comments to read the full story.