On a rainy day in Dallas this May, Sabah Mooswi was driving on the highway when someone shot a bullet through her windshield. It was the time of day when Mooswi, a mother, a community organizer, and a Muslim, typically drove her son. She didn\u2019t pick him up that day, so he wasn\u2019t in the car seat when the bullet pierced the glass and bore into the leather seat where the child usually sits. Police haven\u2019t found the shooter and told her they didn\u2019t believe her faith, activism, or the fact that she wears a hijab motivated the incident. For her part, she maintained that it was a \u201ctargeted shooting\u201d when she later spoke to the press.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s one of the reasons that makes it so hard for other Muslims to come to the forefront, is the fear of what kind of retribution they will receive,\u201d says Shehla Faizi, a Muslim American running for Texas State Comptroller. \u201cIf nothing else, I can say for sure that I would presumably have a target on my back. And even with that, you have to keep pushing forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
From standing-room-only city council meetings debating the supposed \u201cIslamization of Texas\u201d to campaign ads warning of \u201cMuslim mass immigration,\u201d Islamophobia has become a fixture in Texas politics. Texas Republicans have claimed the state is at risk of an \u201cIslamic takeover\u201d and that Muslims are seeking to impose Sharia law, the moral and religious code drawn from the Qur\u2019an. During a recent city council meeting in McKinney, for instance, US Representative Keith Self went as far as to describe plans for a new mosque as the manifestation of \u201cpolitical Islam<\/a>.\u201d Self has also introduced legislation<\/a> in Congress to ban the implementation of the jizya, a religious tax on non-Muslims that no one has attempted to introduce in Texas or the rest of the country. At the same time, state Republicans have championed similar bills in the state legislature.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, data shows that anti-Muslim hate is increasing online<\/a> at the same time that discrimination and hate crimes are on the rise in the US and abroad. In 2025, the Council on American Islamic Relations received complaints of more than 8,600 Islamophobic incidents. That tally includes violence, workplace harassment, and hate speech \u2014 and it marks the highest the advocacy group has ever recorded in nearly three decades. The many Muslim Americans interviewed for this story worry about both the violence and the mental toll the hatred takes on their community as a contentious primary election draws closer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very disheartening and scary,\u201d says Naila Syed, who lives in Dallas. \u201cI have my two kids at public school, and then I have one son who goes to a private school at our mosque. It\u2019s very scary to drop him off there every day when I know that there have been protestors showing up there, as well.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, as anti-Muslim xenophobia creeps closer into everyday life, Texans worry that violence like the Mooswi shooting, the stabbing of an Austin man, or the attempted drowning of a three-year-old still isn\u2019t being taken seriously enough by people in power. In fact, many argue there is a clear, underdiscussed link between a rise in public hate and Israel\u2019s war in Gaza that many human rights organizations call a genocide<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAll forms of repression, all the hate crimes and the brutalization, these are not separate incidents, but rather they are connected,\u201d says Sarah Khalid, an organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Texas at Dallas. \u201cAnd the justification for these incidents are manufactured by the same system: the US empire.\u201d<\/p>\n Emad Salem, a board member and former president of the Muslim Democratic Caucus in Texas, vividly remembers the spike<\/a> in hate crimes that happened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. What we\u2019re seeing now, he says, is much worse. \u201cThe Republicans are trying to tell you there is a boogeyman,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is no boogeyman.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That spike in hate crimes \u2014 an increase of over 1,600%, by one measure \u2014 was deeply felt in Texas. Near Dallas, Mark Stroman, a self-described Aryan Brotherhood member, went on a shooting spree in the weeks after 9\/11. He killed two people and partially blinded Rais Bhuiyan, a 28-year-old and former pilot in the Bangladeshi air force.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re at war,\u201d Stroman told police when he was finally arrested. He later added that he was simply doing \u201cwhat every American wanted to do\u201d by attacking people he believed to be Muslim. (One of his victims was Hindu.)\u00a0<\/p>\n After Stroman was sentenced to death, Bhuiyan spent years advocating for the man who shot him in the face. He didn\u2019t want to see him die by lethal injection. When he learned all legal options were exhausted, he cried. Stroman was put to death in 2011.\u00a0<\/p>\n Earlier that same year, Leo Berman, a Republican lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, introduced House Bill 911. His intent was to make it illegal for courts to consider \u201cforeign law\u201d when making decisions related to the Texas Family Code of laws. When discussing his bill with colleagues in the state house, Berman warned of the incoming influence of Sharia law.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s starting in Europe because of a large population of Middle Easterners,\u201d he said, \u201cand it could spread through the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n Four years later, Jeff Leach, a Republican lawmaker from Collin County, north of Dallas, filed a bill that The Dallas Morning News called \u201cnearly identical\u201d to the law Berman tried to pass.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou will find there is starting to be an encroachment and a movement to chip away at the ability of judges to say no to certain foreign laws,\u201d Leach said at a rally around the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Berman and Leach\u2019s bills failed to become law, but in Salem\u2019s eyes, Texas Governor Greg Abbott picked up the mantle of Islamophobia when he entered office in 2015. Late last year, the governor issued a proclamation that dubbed the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group, a terrorist organization. At the same time, Attorney General and Senate hopeful Ken Paxton \u2014 whose campaign has aired the ads stoking fears of \u201cMuslim mass migration\u201d \u2014 has repeatedly filed suit against what was initially called EPIC City, a master-planned community in North Texas conceived by the East Plano Islamic Center. The community is now called The Meadow.<\/p>\n