Texas Faces a Far Broader Islamist Threat Than Just the Muslim Brotherhood

The intended implications of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and leading American Islamist group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as “foreign terrorist organizations” are not yet entirely clear. But there is certainly opportunity.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a familiar name to counter-extremism researchers, given its long history of ties to a variety of Islamist movements and its founders’ roots in (and officials’ continued involvement with) America’s Hamas networks.

But it is vital that state policymakers recognize the variety and extent of the Islamist threat in the state. Groups such as CAIR are small components of a far larger problem.

While the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has little known presence in Texas (and in the Middle East today, it is a ruptured, broken organization), there are multiple Islamist organizations—the product of past Muslim Brotherhood influence and today still inspired by Brotherhood ideology—to which the state government’s scrutiny can and should be extended.

But legacy institutions of past Brotherhood influence and extant Hamas networks are not Texas’s sole or even leading concern. Islamism in Texas is dominated by institutions from other Islamist movements, especially the Deobandi and Salafi sects. And some of these movements’ top institutions enjoy local and state public funding. There is a broader Islamist threat at work in the state – it is vital that all of them are dismantled.

Since the 2008 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a top Islamist charity based just outside Dallas found to be financing Hamas terrorism, the persons and organizations that built and supported that Hamas charity have continued to operate with impunity.

For instance, the former executive director of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, Khalil Meek, is also the former vice president of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR-DFW’s founder, meanwhile, was convicted Holy Land Foundation terrorist financier Ghassan Elashi.

In 2024, the Muslim American Society in Dallas hosted an event with another convicted Holy Land Foundation official, Abdulrahman Odeh, attended by Khalil Meek and Mustafaa Carroll, head of CAIR-DFW.

Odeh’s time in prison did not cure him of his pro-terror and anti-Jewish ideas. On Facebook, Odeh shares AI-generated video of Israelis as vermin, while posting text describing the October 7 attacks as the work of “heroes … the glorious day when the elite forces” of Hamas “crossed the lines” for a “chance to fight the Jews.”

Dallas-Fort Worth groups such as the Muslim Legal Fund of America and the Muslim American Society are committed participants in radical activism and Hamas-aligned extremism. In North Texas, both offered succor to local student pro-Hamas and anti-Israel student encampments throughout 2024.

Further south in the state, MAS Katy, the Muslim American Society’s branch in Katy, near Houston, has received at least $91,862 of public funding through Greg Abbott’s office. Also known as Masjid Ar-Rahman, MAS Katy’s founder is Main Alqudah, who declares in rulings published by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America that women may not engage in public speaking, and insists that girls must be taught to wear the hijab from the age of seven.

In one of several published “Beautiful Recitations” on MAS Katy’s social media page, imam Ahmad Elhadad states: “O Believers! Take neither Jews nor Christians as guardians[,] they are guardians of each other. Whoever does so will be counted as one of them. Surely Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people … with sickness in their hearts.”

Other mosques with links to Brotherhood legacy organizations around the state include the Islamic Center of Round Rock. Just weeks after the October 7 massacre, a mosque sermon argued that the Jews kill prophets because “this is their attributes.” Christians, the speaker claims, support Israel because they fear “how powerful the Islamic state could become if there’s no force that will stop them.” The preacher encourages the mosque’s congregants to support American Muslims for Palestine, which members of Congress allege has “ties to Hamas.”

In a previous 2021 sermon, a preacher insisted Palestine will be “purified” from the “filth” of the “Zionist” presence. Zionists, he claimed, are “torturing and killing the children.” Because “Zionist influence” is everywhere, including within America’s “political system,” he argues that when “we, the Muslims in the 21st century, get rid of the Zionist regime in that area, we will bring freedom to the entire world.”

In 2023, the state of Texas provided grants worth $130,000 to the Islamic Center of Round Rock.

Baitulmaal, an important Islamist charity in Irving, Texas, is closely involved in the remnants of the Holy Land Foundation’s network. Baitulmaal works closely with Hamas proxies in Gaza, and its U.S. head, Mazen Mokhtar, is a former fundraiser for the Taliban and other jihadist groups. Baitulmaal official Yousef Abdallah faced denunciations in the media several years ago after the Middle East Forum uncovered his praise for the killing of Jews.

In Gaza, Baitulmaal works with Hamas proxies such as the Unlimited Friends Association, which has promised to “free Al-Aqsa Al-Sharif from the filth of the most dirty Jews”; the Yazour Charitable Association, which Hamas media has confirmed is “affiliated” with the terrorist group; and the Generosity Without Limit Association, whose officials include members of Hamas’s various “Popular Resistance Committees.”

That the federal government both dropped its prosecution of Baitulmaal’s terror-supporting head Mazen Mokhtar and has failed to prosecute Baitulmaal’s Hamas activities in Gaza suggests a deliberate refusal to act.

Indeed, in 2008, the incoming Obama administration made some explicit decisions to stop prosecuting members of certain Islamist movements, despite their terror finance activities. Since then, Hamas networks have flourished. Will Texas now step up?

Texas is the home for a powerful new modernist strain of Deobandism, a South Asian Islamist sect founded in the 19th century whose most famous offshoot is the Taliban. One leading Deobandi seminary in America, the Qalam Institute, is based in the Texas city of Carrolton. The Qalam Institute has trained hundreds of new Deobandi imams now teaching at radical institutions across America.

Qalam’s two leading officials, Hussain Kamani and Abdul Nasir Jangda, both trained at traditional Deobandi seminaries. Both preach hatred. In a talk titled “Sex, Masturbation and Islam,” Kamani explains that Muslim men may fulfill any sexual desires “with a female slave that belongs to him.” Those who commit adultery or have sex outside of marriage, Kamani explains, must be “stoned to death.” And when Muslim husbands are learning to “train their wives,” beating them, Kamani concedes, should only be a “last measure.” Kamani cites Quranic commentary to advise parents: “Order your children to pray at the age of seven. And beat them (lightly) if they do not do so by the age of ten.”

Western society, Kamani declares, is “filth. … We are surrounded by filth … our environment is full of this filth, everywhere we turn.”

Fellow Qalam founder Abdur Nasir Jangda, meanwhile, has reportedly defended the use of female sex slaves within Islam, advocated the killing of apostates and adulterers, and appears to sanction marital rape: “The thing to understand is that the husband has his set of divinely given rights one of which is the right to have his physical desires satisfied.”

Deobandi imams, many trained through Qalam, can be found at mosques throughout Texas. At the Nueces Mosque, a student mosque at the University of Texas at Austin, the imam is Anwer Imam, who studied under both Kamani and Jangda at Qalam. The mosque’s parent organization, is the Islamic Center of Greater Austin, which the Texas government has handed $150,000 in grants.

Another Deobandi offshoot is Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary movement described by analysts as a “driving force of Islamic extremism and a major recruiting agency for terrorist causes worldwide.” Tablighi Jamaat seeks to insulate Muslims from the perceived wickedness and corruption of the West, with one leader declaring the aim of the movement is to “rescue the ummah [global Muslim community] from the culture and civilisation of the Jews, the Christians and enemies of Islam” and to “create such hatred for their ways as human beings have for urine and excreta.”

Tablighi Jamaat operates a series of mosques across Texas, with one, Masjid Yaseen, in the city of Garland, serving as one of Tablighi’s main bases of operations in North America. Tablighi-trained imams can be found at mosques across Texas.

For instance, at the Islamic Center of Greater Austin, the mosque’s imam, Dawood Yasin, is a former Tablighi recruit.

And at the Islamic Association of Collin County, also known as the Plano Masjid, the former imam, Azhar Subedar, trained in the United Kingdom with Tablighi. The current imam, Arsalan Haque, is a leading advocate of sharia in the Dallas area. In a sermon given at the IACC, Haque permits husbands to hit their wives, so long as such abuse is conducted in the proper “context” and only “to bring her back to her senses.”

In 2017 and 2020, the Texas city of Plano seemingly handed over twelve grants totaling $1 million to benefit the IACC.

In another sermon given at another Dallas-Fort Worth mosque, Haque warns that men may not beat their wives “to the extent that they die.” Haque also contrasts the benefits of an Islamic system of slavery to historical Western models He praises the “rights” afforded to slaves under Islam, conceding that it is sometimes necessary to “discipline” slaves, just as it is a “duty to discipline my wife if she rebels.”

Texas is also a key network for the modernist Salafi movement, home to world-famous radical imams such as Omar Suleiman, based out of Dallas’s radical Valley Ranch Islamic Center, and Yasir Qadhi, head of the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis, Qadhi refused to condemn the attacks, stating he had “the luxury of bluntly saying I am not going to condemn the fight of an oppressed people.”

Qadhi has openly expressed hatred for Jews and advanced Holocaust denial ideas, and also advocated the killing of homosexuals.

Suleiman and Qadhi came to prominence through the AlMaghrib Institute, a Texas-based organization whose late founder, Muhammad Alshareef, once wrote a paper titled “Why the Jews Were Cursed,” in which he claims Jews control the media and murder prophets. Other leading AlMaghrib clerics have included Abdullah Hakim Quick, who calls for the killing of homosexuals, urges God to “purify” Al-Aqsa from the “filth of the Yahud [Jews],” and “clean Afghanistan and Iraq” from the “filth of the Kafiroun [unbelievers].”

Since 2023, the Clear Lake Islamic Center (CLIC), a Salafi-run mosque south-east of Houston, has received over $86,000 through the Texas state. Following the October 7 attacks, CLIC’s imam, Waleed Basyouni, called for “victory over the disbelieving people.” A year later, he publicly mourned the death of Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the designated terrorist organization Hamas.

The Islamic Center of Brushy Creek, northeast of Austin, employs Salafi imam Jawad Rasul, another graduate of AlMaghrib Institute. While serving as imam, Rasul has shared specious claims that no civilians were targeted in the Hamas pogroms of October 7, posted a video about the “true face of Judaism,” and shared conspiracy theories that Israel created ISIS. The state of Texas has handed the mosque over $99,000.

In Houston, violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami operates a powerful and extensive network that operates in close coordination with elements of the Pakistani regime and a number of Kashmiri terror operatives.

Friends of Kashmir, for instance, is led by an activist named Ghazala Habib, an appointed U.S. representative of both the late jihadist leader Syed Ali Geelani and Asiya Andrabi, founder of the jihadist organization Dukhtaran-e-Millat. Friends of Kashmir has organized events with terrorist operatives Yasin Malik and Shabir Shah, both of whom were arrested by Indian police in 2019 because of alleged ties to designated terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The Iranian regime also operates several mosques in Texas, as well as a series of pro-terror activist groups involved in the recent student encampments.

These groups are based out of the Islamic Education Center in Houston, a leading Shia Islamic center, at which the imam is ostensibly “directly appointed by the office of [Iran’s] Supreme Leader.”

In 2022, the mosque organized the filming and performance of a song by children at the mosque, pledging allegiance to Ayatollah Khamenei. The song’s lyrics, first documented by MEMRI, state that “[Khamenei] is calling on his children, his soldiers... In spite of my age, I will be your army’s commander...May my father and mother be sacrificed for you, I will sacrifice everything for you…”

The Islamic Education Center in Houston has received almost half a million dollars of grants through the Texas state government.

Islamists associated with the Turkish regime have also established schools, mosques and a sharia court in North Texas, which have operated in close coordination with the Muslim Brotherhood-founded organizations in Dallas. The founding figure, Yusuf Ziya Kavakçi, has called on the Islamic world to ensure the “Islamization of America,” declaring: “there’s only one thing America needs, and that’s Islam.”

South Asia’s Barelvi Islamist movement also operates several mosques in Texas. Members of one Barelvi organization named Dawat-e-Islami have carried out acts of terror across the globe, including a stabbing attack outside the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo in September 2020, and the 2016 murder of an Ahmadiyyah Muslim in Glasgow, Scotland. Dawat-e-Islami’s official U.S. presence began in Houston, where it still operates a prominent mosque.

The designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood by the Abbott administration was unexpected but not unwelcome. Organizations founded by supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas remain particularly active in North Texas, and certainly deserve close scrutiny; and in some cases, prosecution.

It is not yet clear, however, what means and interest the Abbott administration has in investigating and pursuing these organizations.

Texas has a broader Islamist problem than just the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood. Worst of all, a substantial proportion of this problem is subsidized by public funding. If Texas conservatives are indeed serious about tackling the growing theocratic dangers in Texas, officials must first stop funding these Islamists, and second, understand the full array of Islamist forces at work across the state.