News24’s headline — “They kill so others pay: Joburg ‘Sharia Court’ terror mounts as 4 Ethiopian businessmen hit” — is misleading and prejudicial, and folds Islamophobia and xenophobia into the framing of what is plainly an organised crime extortion and protection racket.

On its content, the article could be about any number of criminal gangs, here or abroad.

A dog whistle

“Sharia” has become a dog whistle for Islamophobic hate, deployed globally by people with little understanding of what it is or how it works, in pursuit of political and ideological advantage.

Sharia is a structured legal system that long predates the Roman-Dutch law of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and scholars have traced elements of European legal development — in jurisprudence and in procedure — to contact with Ottoman, Andalusian and North African systems founded on Islamic jurisprudence.

The tell is in the last line

The only “Sharia” in this case is the name — much as with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The article itself says so, in its final line: the syndicate operated under the guise of enforcing Sharia law while using intimidation and coercion to control vulnerable immigrant communities.

What needs addressing is how media continue to frame headlines to sensationalise and inflame — as clickbait for social media — while the actual story sits behind a paywall. This is a report about a criminal gang. Putting “Sharia” in the headline is what makes it travel, and the inverted commas are what keep it inside the lines.

Criminal organisations have always borrowed religious names

• Lord’s Resistance Army — the Ugandan group known for brutality, child soldiers and abductions.
• Terceiro Comando Puro — a Rio de Janeiro group that branded its product with the Star of David and called its territory the “Israel Complex”.
• Seven Angels Ministry — a South African church that parliamentary investigators described as a religious mafia, using a church in the Eastern Cape as cover for organised crime, including the killing of police officers.
• Peoples Temple — described as a criminal enterprise masquerading as a church, engaged in fraud and coerced violence before Jonestown.

The question actually worth asking

Many communities operate parallel personal-law structures grounded in cultural, tribal or religious values — our own traditional courts among them. That is a constitutionally protected right, so long as it does not conflict with the Constitution, rights and laws of South Africa.

What we should be asking is why communities that lose confidence in the police and the legal system — given the levels of corruption and incompetence — look for alternatives outside it. That creates a different problem, and it exposes individuals to abuse. For immigrant communities the vulnerability multiplies many times over.

This is not a story about Sharia courts. It is, in part, a consequence of the state’s failure to protect citizens, legal immigrants, refugees, undocumented migrants and marginalised people. Rather than being played by a headline, we should be educating the public and challenging the media, the authorities and legislators on the underlying issue — and ensuring that criminal activity is not used to incite hatred against immigrants and religious minorities, as it is here against both Muslims and Ethiopians.

The article in question — News24, 3 May 2026. See also how organised crime has exploited religious status to run front businesses — El Clip.

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Shared by the South African Muslim Network (SAMNET) in the interest of fighting Islamophobia and hate, and challenging media and political complicity in spreading it through clickbait.