So what if a Muslim wins an election in America and becomes a congressman or senator? Why is that any different from a Buddhist winning an election? Because Buddhism is a religion. Islam is a state. Islam has a population: the ummah. It has a constitution: Sharia. It has courts, criminal law, family law, taxation, rules for minorities, doctrines of war and peace, and a foreign-policy framework governing relations between the land of Islam and the lands outside it. The ummah is not tied to Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or any other modern country. It crosses all of them. Islam's population "Muslims" belong to one political-religious community. That is fundamentally different from Buddhism. A Buddhist American may practice Buddhism faithfully, but Buddhism does not give him a second universal political order with its own law, sovereignty, territorial doctrine, and theory of government. Islam does. This is why reducing Islam to “just another religion” misses the point. Muslim officeholders are literally citizens of another existing country, and their loyalties can never be American first, because the two projects are contradictory.