A Texas sheikh has been advocating for jihad, legitimizing violence against Israeli civilians, and the stoning of adulterers while receiving great acclaim from Muslim institutions in the United States. The sheikh in question, Salah Al-Sawy, is no small-time extremist, but the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, a body of Islamic legal scholars that issues religious rulings for Muslims living in the United States. He also serves as president of the Islamic University of North America (also known as Mishkah University) and president of the Medical Center Islamic Society in Houston.
The messages Al-Sawy is promoting can be seen on his Arabic-language fatwa website, Mawsu’at Fatawa al-Sawy (the al-Sawy Fatwa Encyclopedia), which promotes jihad and the stoning of adulterers to his supporters. The rulings, which appear to be published only in Arabic, are not stray remarks. Four of these rulings, posted in 2017 and 2025, indicate that Al-Sawy refuses to condemn violence on principle, including violence against civilians. Two other fatwas indicate that he regards slavery not as a moral wrong that infringes on people’s human rights, but as a practice that brings Muslims into disrepute.
“Al-Sawy is a profoundly influential figure in the American Muslim community,” warns Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project. “His influence is derived from his ability to influence the beliefs and practices of Muslims through his fatwas and from his role at Mishkah University, where he trains the next generation of imams in America.”
Pro-Jihad Rulings
In one of two rulings dated December 26, 2017, an Egyptian asked whether he was religiously obliged to go and fight in Syria. Al-Sawy praised the man’s “religious zeal” and called jihad “the peak of Islam.” He affirmed that when an enemy attacks Muslim land, the duty to fight spreads “in gradually widening circles” until it covers “the entire land of Islam.” He advised against sending untrained volunteers, but only because they would burden the fighters and give the world grounds to label the battlefields a “meeting place for terrorist organizations.” He called that label a smear used against “anyone who holds firmly to his religion.” Instead, he urged Muslims to give financial, political, legal and media support, as “the field commanders of the jihad” request.
I have not seen anyone in the West who parallels his knowledge.
In the other ruling posted on his website on December 26, 2017, a questioner asked why scholars had blessed Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the Soviets but turned on him when he took the fight to America. “Isn’t America like the Russians?” the questioner asked. Al-Sawy did not dispute it. He left bin Laden’s “reckoning” to God and said he hoped for God’s “mercy and pardon” for every Muslim. He then explained that the disagreement with bin Laden “is not over the principle of jihad itself.” It was over errors in judging the conditions, “flawed calculations” and “recklessness in choosing the timing.”
Al-Sawy took a similar position in January 2025, when an Arab citizen of Israel asked him about Palestinians who run over or stab Jews in Israeli neighborhoods. The questioner, a woman, pointed out that the victims “may be innocent” and called the attacks suicidal.
He also declared that “the occupying Jews in Palestine are usurpers,” whether or not they themselves had done anything, since all of them had taken part in “the crime” of expelling Palestinians and therefore need to be punished. “And jihad, my daughter, is not merely a martyrdom operation; for jihad has aims and objectives. If jihad leads to the realization of these objectives, then it is a legitimate jihad,” he ruled. “But if it leads to the opposite—that is, if it brings satisfaction to the hearts of the disbelievers, torments the believers, and enrages their hearts—then it is not a legitimate jihad, and the obligation shifts to preparing for war.”
Stoning Adulterers
In March 2025, Al-Sawy posted a ruling on stoning married adulterers, written in response to young Muslims disturbed by an ISIS video of a woman being stoned. Al-Sawy affirmed that stoning is an established part of Islamic law and said that rejection of it is “known only from the Kharijites,” an early sect most Muslims regard as heretical. His only objection to the ISIS execution was procedural: the group lacked the power of an “established state” needed to carry out such punishments. “Their affair is with God,” he wrote.
Discounts Reports of Mistreatment of Yazidis, Slavery as a Reality in Islam
In 2021 and 2025, Al-Sawy was queried about the mistreatment of Yazidi women by ISIS. It was a sensitive subject, for in 2016, the United Nations reported that the organization was “committing genocide against Yazidis,” in Syria with officials declaring in a report that
ISIS has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community.
Slavery—First Fatwa
In a January 31, 2021, fatwa responding to ISIS’s announcement in its magazine, Dabiq, that it had begun taking Yazidi women captive in Mosul, Al-Sawy outlined classical rules on war captives. He stated that Islam has no aspiration toward enslavement but rather toward manumission, that it “dried up” the sources of slavery so that only the captivity arising from legitimate jihad remained, that the sole Qur’anic verse on captives mentions only release as a favor or for ransom, and that the Prophet’s practice included frequent releases without ransom or for ransom.
The sheikh added that if the world has agreed to abandon enslavement and Islamic lands have entered corresponding treaties, then siyasa shar‘iyya (“Sharia-based governance’) requires abandoning the practice, treating captives well, and considering the harmful consequences of continuing it.
Turning to ISIS, he wrote that what is attributed to the group is either fabricated media exaggeration or, if true, “must not be attributed to the religion or the Sharia; Allah and His Messenger are free of it,” and he framed the episode as part of a broader media campaign demonizing Islam. Without using the word, Al-Sawy seeks to discredit numerous irrefutable reports of ISIS’s violence against the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria as expressions of “Islamophobia.”
Slavery—Second Fatwa
In a January 24, 2025, fatwa responding to a detailed critique of ISIS’s claims of sexual access to Yazidi women on the grounds that they were captives, Al-Sawy again began with the same abstract classical discussion. He reiterated that Islam preferred freeing captives, that enslavement was never a permanent objective or obligation, that modern international agreements against slavery should be upheld as consistent with the Sharia’s objectives, and that outcomes and consequences must be weighed.
The questioner had argued that Yazidis are not “People of the Book” (so even classical rules did not permit concubinage with them according to the majority view), that the acts violated treaties, and that they amounted to kidnapping free women and zina (the Islamic legal term for sexual intercourse outside marriage or lawful concubinage) rather than tasarri (lawful concubinage with an enslaved woman under classical Islamic law).
Al-Sawy argued that Muslims should abandon slavery in light of treaties and the damage done to Islam’s reputation.This is the establishment of a bad precedent—I ask Allah to extinguish it in its cradle—namely the return of enslavement, and it opens the door for warring non-believers to expand in claiming sexual access to Muslim women and enslaving them on the basis of reciprocity.
In his responses, the sheikh distorted the history of slavery as practiced in Islamic-ruled areas throughout history, falsely asserting that Islam aimed at abolition of slavery when, in fact, it treated slavery as a stable and permanent institution that started to lose its force in the face of the Abolitionist movement, which began in England.
As Harron Bashir reports, “It is often stated in contemporary discussions on slavery and Islam, almost to the point of ubiquity, that Islam always aimed to abolish slavery. Yet, the first explicit articulation of this claim emerged only in the late nineteenth century, advanced by the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh (d. 1323/1905).” Bashir, the author of Slavery, Abolition and Islam (Oxford University Press, 2025), adds: “No prior Muslim religious scholar had ever called for the abolition of slavery.”
Al-Sawy does not say that enslaving captives is wrong. He says it should be set aside because the world has agreed to abandon it and because it has become “a cause for launching attacks on the religion.” The furthest he goes is that it is “not far-fetched” to say a return to enslavement is now forbidden. Even that rests on a treaty obligation introduced by the League of Nations, not a moral objection rooted in religious belief. By this reasoning, the ban on slavery is not rooted in human rights or a divinely inspired belief in human equality, but in slavery’s impact on the reputation of Islam and Muslims.
Suleiman Praises
Despite his retrograde ideas, Al-Sawy’s influence extends deep into America’s Islamist community. For example, the sheikh has a long-standing relationship with another Texas-based extremist, Omar Suleiman, founder and president of the Dallas-area Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. In a promotional video published on April 30, 2013, by Mishkah University, Suleiman endorsed Al-Sawy as a leading teacher, describing him as “ranking at the top” of those who inspired him and calling him a “mujaddid of our times.”
“I have not seen anyone in the West who parallels his knowledge,” Suleiman said, adding that “he’s a teacher for the teachers.” Suleiman’s shows the same willingness to excuse violence that runs through Al-Sawy’s rulings. Rather than condemning the October 7 massacre, Suleiman and his circle have treated it as an act of “resistance” that could help unite the umma, the global community of Muslim believers.
Jalal Tagreeb, a former Sunni apologist who has written for the Middle East Forum, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) the concept of jihad has no place in the modern world. “After nearly 20 years of preparing to become a Muslim scholar and devoting enormous effort to da’wah and jihad of the word, I have concluded that the concept of jihad is futile,” he said. “I urge Muslims to abandon it entirely. In today’s civilized world, there is no place for such ideas.”
FWI has contacted the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, the Islamic University of North America (Mishkah University), and the Medical Center Islamic Society in Houston but has received no responses. It has also contacted the three candidates in the upcoming election for Texas Attorney General, who oversees the enforcement of laws regarding non-profits in the state. It has also submitted an inquiry to the AG himself but has not yet received a comment.
