Interview with Dearborn Imam Who Loves Trump—And Lost His Moment

Sometime in the next few weeks, Husham Al-Husainy, the imam at the Karbala Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Michigan, might consider paying a visit to his fellow Michigander, Amer Ghalib, the mayor of nearby Hamtramck. The two men have plenty to commiserate over. Both rode waves of communal pride into national prominence, both benefited from their public support for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, and both learned the hard way that cheering for America’s enemies may play well before Muslim audiences in Michigan but is poison on the national stage.

For Ghalib, it was his praise for Saddam Hussein that very likely torpedoed his chances of becoming U.S. ambassador to Kuwait. For Al-Husainy, it was his open admiration for Hezbollah that deprived him of a coveted slot on the dais at the president’s 2025 inauguration—a gesture of interfaith inclusion.

The wheels fell off Al-Husainy’s trip to D.C. in early January 2025 when Daniel Greenfield, a frequent contributor to Frontpage Magazine—unearthed his support for Hezbollah and hostility toward Jews expressed numerous times during his tenure as an imam in Dearborn. Much of the material was collated by Fox News journalist Sean Hannity.

As summarized by Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, “Al-Husainy has a significant history of extremism. In 2015, he and his organization hosted a rally at the Karbala Islamic Educational Center, in which he wished death upon Saudi Arabia, and denounced Saudis as ‘agents of the Jews’ whose ‘Zionist’ planes ‘rain down’ death upon the people of Yemen.”

In 2006, Westrop reports, Al-Husainy “held the picture of Hezbollah leader [Hassan] Nasrallah aloft on the stage” at a pro-Hezbollah rally in Dearborn, Michigan. At the same rally, Al-Husainy reportedly offered praise for members of Neturei Karta, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization he had hosted at his mosque prior to the rally. Once this information came to light, it was a foregone conclusion that Al-Husainy would not be praying at Trump’s inauguration.

Trump’s gift to Al-Husainy—a spot on the dais during the inauguration—wasn’t nearly as lucrative as Ghalib’s ambassadorship would have been. Nevertheless, offering a prayer at a ceremony marking the peaceful transfer of power in a Western democracy is a huge source of credibility for a man of the cloth, regardless of his faith.

Despite the disappointment, Al-Husainy gave off an affable and friendly air during an interview with Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) in the worship space of the mosque he leads. During the interview, which took place in late September, Al-Husainy expressed undeniable gratitude for the safety he has enjoyed in the United States after fleeing Iraq in the 1970s when it was still under the control of Saddam Hussein, the murderous dictator who ruled the country with an iron fist until he was ousted by American soldiers in 2003. Al-Husainy, a prominent member of Iraq’s Shia community which was often targeted by the regime, was clearly in the dictator’s crosshairs before he fled the country.

“I have 10 people, friends of mine, killed,” he explained. “My brother—five times in prison, I have five sisters. Every one of them, a car from Saddam’s secret police [waited outside] from every night to the morning. They’re waiting for me [hoping that] maybe one day I will come and visit one of my family. They will capture me. If I [were] there, I’ll be killed.”

By the imam’s account, Trump invited Al-Husainy to pray during his inauguration after he publicly expressed support for the candidate’s campaign. The invitation came when Trump appeared at Huntington Place—formerly known as Cobo Hall—a major convention center in downtown Detroit, just weeks before the 2024 election.

“I told him two things made me support [him],” Al-Husainy explains. “His stand against same-sex marriage and his tendency to stop the war in the Middle East and in Ukraine, because I’m not pro-war, I’m just pro-peace. So, these two things made me support him, and I still support him.”

“I told him I would like to meet with the president with some rabbis, and priest and imams … to support the spiritual movement the president it was up to,” he said. Al-Husainy is clearly a huge fan of President Trump. The imam portrayed Trump as a man of peace surrounded by cynical manipulators. “They think he is a pro-war man,” Al-Husainy said. “I think he is a pro-peace man. But so many special interests … don’t like to have peace. Their business will be broke.”

(Dexter Van Zile)

He went on to praise Trump for allegedly standing up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing a press conference in which Trump said he would not allow Netanyahu to annex the West Bank. “He repeated it twice,” Al-Husainy said admiringly. “I would like the Arabs and Muslims to read that approach.”

In Al-Husainy’s view, Arab leaders failed to understand Trump’s intentions, mistaking him for a warmonger when he was, in fact, trying to balance competing powers. “The Muslims and Middle East people need a new beginning with the American administration,” he said. “They are misunderstanding him. They judge him according to the past.” Trump, he insisted, was attempting a nearly impossible task: “How to satisfy [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman, [Qatari Emir] Tamim bin Hamad, and Netanyahu—that’s not an easy job. I hope he will succeed.”

Husainy said it was his decision—not the president’s—to take his name off the program once the controversy erupted. Describing himself as a “peacemaker,” he explained that he did not want to provoke criticism of the president or “stir the water.” Al-Husainy expressed gratitude for the invitation, noting that his name remained on the program until the last minute. He said he “apologized for missing that opportunity” but felt it was best to preserve the “peacefulness of the inauguration.”

The way Al-Husainy explained it, the push to have him removed from the program came from people angry at his conservative stance regarding homosexuality, Jewish newspapers, and Saudi Arabian newspapers.

“But later on, they kind of apologized,” Al-Husainy said. “They felt sorry for not supporting me, because it was an event for the first time in the history of United States to have an imam give a speech in the inauguration of United States of American President.”

Al-Husainy indicated that if he had been allowed to talk at the inauguration, he would have spoken about the prospects of peace between the three Abrahamic faiths.

“I always go along with Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Abraham,” he said. “This is my approach. I’m specialized on that. When I met with the President, I told him, ‘The reason I voted for you because I found you close to the Bible, and Qur’an and the Torah, and you are close to Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.’ That’s what I told him face-to-face.”

But for all his talk about loving the adherents of the Abrahamic faiths, Al-Husainy would not affirm the right of the Jewish people to a sovereign state of their own—only the right to live where they want as individuals. Pinning him down on this issue was tough, but when asked directly and repeatedly whether the Jewish people are entitled to a state of their own, Al-Husainy offered a series of theological evasions. First he affirmed that Jews “have a right to live anywhere in the world,” calling them “people of God” with a “holy book” and a “holy messenger.” But after affirming the Jews as a people, he said their state must not come “on the account of the others” and rejecting the very idea of national borders: “I don’t believe in [a] geographical state.”

When pressed, Al-Husainy acknowledged the existence of the Jewish people in religious and spiritual terms worthy of admiration and respect, but not as a physical group of people entitled to a state of their own, declaring that he supports “Israel—not of today—Israel of God.”

“Forget about Israel—Jewish,” he said. “You are a legitimate religion of God. I’m not better than them, they are not better than me. Now, if they would like to buy a house in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in America, in Palestine, they are free. This is the land of God.”

“You kick me and take the land—that’s a no,” he said.

Al-Husainy was loath to condemn Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. citizens.

“Hezbollah, Qur’anically, means the party of God. People of God are not only Muslim—Christian and Jewish people of God too,” he said, adding that he would never belong to a political party. “Politically, that’s a party organization,” he said, “but spiritually, if you really want to belong to the party of God, serve His people.”

It’s a tough issue for Al-Husainy. A few hours before the interview with the imam, a member of the mosque he leads told this reporter that 90 percent of the 400-500 people who pray at the institution support the organization even if they have stopped saying so publicly since Trump’s 2024 election.

“If you wanted to take the extreme size of the political side of the party of God, you should respect the law of the country, the land where you’re living at,” Al-Husainy said. The upshot is that while Al-Husainy was careful to affirm the law of the land in the United States regarding Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization, he appeared reluctant to condemn it in ideological terms.

When asked about a demonstration in Dearborn during which protesters shouted “Death to America,” Al-Husainy tried to exonerate the local Muslim population by insisting that a white American convert who had “been in prison a couple of times”—was responsible for the chant. “We all didn’t agree with him,” Al-Husainy said. “He’s killed, by the way.” Pressed on how the man died, the imam added cryptically: “I don’t know much about that, but I think just like he said, ‘Death to America,’ some people told him, ‘Death to you.’” He refused to provide a name, saying only, “Well, let it go. He’s a convert.”

Al-Husainy portrayed the episode as an aberration caused by a troubled outsider to Dearborn’s Muslim community rather than evidence of local support for Hezbollah or anti-American sentiment. “None of the Muslims, Middle East people, would do that,” he insisted, as if Muslims and Arabs haven’t been chanting “Death to America” for the past few decades. “You cannot do that. You have no right to do that.” At most, he allowed, some protesters may have “went with the crowd” or been reacting to “anti-Eastern policy toward Muslims.”

The imam did admit that the chant against the U.S. which had given so many Muslims a refuge from dictators in the Middle East was “a sin,” declaring that “When somebody takes care of you, you don’t condemn him.” Yet even as he condemned the chant, his tone suggested the problem lay less in the ideology behind it than in the bad optics it created for the community: “When the media focus on it and I keep watching that, I said, that’s a no, no. Whoever does that, he’s not helping the Muslims.”

Things got pretty weird when FWI asked Al-Husainy what it was like to be a Shia Muslim in America when the U.S. attacked Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities in July. Instead of answering the question, Al-Husainy offered a rambling chronology of events in the Middle East laced with conspiracy theories and Tehran-friendly talking points.

He described the U.S. strike as “a whitewash,” designed more for show than substance, and predicted Washington and Tehran would one day reconcile because “they used to be friends.” The imam went further, claiming that Israel secretly suffered catastrophic damage from Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes but hid it from the public “so as not to put the Jewish people in a very depressed situation.” He asserted that “a third of Israel was destroyed,” though “America didn’t get hit at all,” and credited Iran with turning the tide in what he described as a “twelve-day war.” “The first four days of the war, Israel win,” he said. “The last four days I think Iran was winning. I think that’s why Israel urged the U.S. to interfere.” (To buttress this assertion, Al-Husainy cited the partial destruction of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.)

In Al-Husainy’s telling, Iran with its population of 100 million, is too powerful to be defeated. “Maybe Israel hits more, but they [Iran] are a bigger country and a bigger land,” he said. “They can handle, they can absorb that.”

Al-Husainy framed the 2020 U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani not as a matter of American policy but as the result of Israeli deception and hidden maneuvering. In his telling, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “tricked” President Trump into ordering the strike and then withdrew support at the last moment to avoid blame. “Trump blamed Netanyahu for killing Qassem Suleimani,” Al-Husainy said. “Netanyahu tricked him.”

(Wikipedia)

Given his pro-Iran proclivities, it should come as no surprise that Al-Husainy downplayed the mistreatment of women in the Islamic Republic when asked about the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that erupted in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in police custody following her arrest for violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law.

Rather than acknowledge the brutality of the regime’s morality police, Al-Husainy insisted that “women in Iran have a lot more authority than in many Arab countries,” portraying the country as socially progressive and misunderstood. He argued that the international outcry reflected media bias, claiming “the eyes and the camera are concentrated on Iran more than the others,” and even suggested that Iranian women enjoy elevated status in the home declaring, “the woman is the one who prepare the house, and the husband comes like a king.”

Nevertheless, Al-Husainy declared that the authorities in Iran should ultimately accede to the demands of the people they govern. “They should satisfy their people one way or another,” he said.

When asked about slavery—specifically in response to Islamist commentator Daniel Haqiqatjou’s defense of it—Al-Husainy made clear that he regarded the practice as a moral wrong. While he drew on scripture to explain the historical context in which slavery existed, he rejected efforts to justify or revive it, calling it an “evilness” incompatible with the spirit of faith and human dignity. Al-Husainy’s comments distinguished him from hardline apologists who treat slavery as divinely sanctioned, reflecting instead a belief that genuine religiosity should elevate human freedom rather than diminish it.

Along these lines, Al-Husainy described the practice of polygamy as scripturally sanctioned, often misunderstood, and not something he wants his congregants to practice. Citing the Qur’an, he said that men are allowed multiple wives only if they can treat them “with justice and fairness,” quickly adding that “God said you can’t—because you don’t have two hearts in one chest.”

He framed polygamy not as male privilege but as a compassionate accommodation for hardship, invoking the biblical story of Sarah and Hagar as precedent. “If your wife has cancer and you love her but she can’t make a kid, don’t divorce her—just like Sarah and Hagar,” he explained. “It’s not a sin.”

Al-Husainy also mocked literalist interpretations of the afterlife that promise Muslim men “72 virgins,” calling such thinking “backward.” “What are you, a horse or a human being?” he said. “You barely can make it with one these days.”

On the question of religious minorities in Muslim-majority environments, Al-Husainy affirmed that Jews and Christians are “people of God” who should be free to live “anywhere in the world.” Nevertheless this concept of equality remained theological, not civic, and was applicable only to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. On this score, Al-Husainy seemed to exclude groups such as the Bahá’í and atheists from this inner sanctum of acceptance. “Bahá’í … I have to read more about them,” he said, before adding that those who “oppose the children of Abraham … should be stopped.”

He contended that Muslims are “more democratic than the others” because they acknowledge Moses and Jesus as prophets, while Christians and Jews reject Muhammad. When pressed on whether nonbelievers or dissenters should have equal rights, Al-Husainy retreated to scripture: “Atheists will be judged by God, but don’t hurt the children of Abraham.”

In closing, Imam Husham Al-Husainy returned to his recurring theme of peace, urging reconciliation among followers of the Abrahamic faiths. He spoke of Jews, Christians, and Muslims as “one family under God” and called for spiritual unity in a world he described as fractured by politics and misunderstanding. Yet in the broader context of the interview—and his record—his appeal for harmony rang hollow. Having spent much of the conversation defending Iran, equivocating on Hezbollah, and denying Jewish nationhood, Al-Husainy’s call for peace came across less as a moral principle than as a rhetorical flourish meant to obscure the contradictions in his message.

In the end, Al-Husainy’s story is a familiar one in the annals of Western outreach to self-styled Muslim moderates: a man feted as a bridge-builder who, upon closer examination, turns out to be more apologist than reformer. While his genuine gratitude over the refuge he and his followers enjoy in the United States is reassuring, his easy praise for Iran’s rulers, his evasions on Hezbollah, and his theologically coded rejection of Jewish sovereignty reveal a cleric fluent in the language of interfaith harmony but unwilling to confront the ideological currents that divide his own community from the country that gave him refuge.

Like Hamtramck’s Amer Ghalib, Al-Husainy tried to straddle two worlds—playing the role of peacemaker in America while excusing the very forces that make peace impossible abroad.