A Texas-based Islamic sheikh has come under scrutiny in a new report published by the Middle East Forum.
Published Wednesday by MEF’s Dexter Van Zile, the report accuses Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy of “advocating for jihad, legitimizing violence against Israeli civilians, and the stoning of adulterers while receiving great acclaim from Muslim institutions in the United States.”
MEF’s Sam Westrop has called Al-Sawy “a profoundly influential figure in the American Muslim community,” a remark that is unsurprising given the sheikh’s current positions in various Islamic institutions.
Al-Sawy serves as president of Mishkah University, an online Islamic educational institution, and as president of the Medical Center Islamic Society, a mosque located in south Houston. He is also listed as secretary-general and co-founder of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, which states one of its goals is to issue “fatawa (religious formal opinions or rulings) pertaining to the cases and queries submitted to the Assembly according to the rulings of Shari’ah.”
Despite the Assembly’s commitment to a “moderate approach and a rejection of extremism,” MEF points to some of Al-Sawy’s previous fatawa as areas of concern.
In 2017, Al-Sawy called jihad “the peak of Islam” in response to an Egyptian man’s question about fighting in Syria. According to Van Zile, Al-Sawy urged against sending untrained volunteers out of concern that the battlefields would be labeled as a “meeting place for terrorist organizations.” Instead, he encouraged Muslims to contribute to the jihad in other ways, such as financially or politically.
In another 2017 ruling, in response to a questioner asking why Osama bin Laden had been praised when attacking the Soviets but denounced when attacking America, Al-Sawy noted that the disagreement was “not over the principle of jihad itself,” but rather over the “flawed calculations” and “recklessness in choosing the timing.”
Al-Sawy has also justified stoning as “an established part of Islamic law,” according to Van Zile, and said that Israelis occupying Palestine “are usurpers” who “all share in the crime of expelling the people of Palestine from their homes without right” when asked about Palestinian Muslims killing Israeli citizens.
Regarding slavery, Van Zile wrote that “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.’”
“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,” Van Zile added.
Al-Sawy has received praise from Dallas-based imam Omar Suleiman of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. Suleiman has said that he has “not seen anyone in the West who parallels [Al-Sawy’s] knowledge,” and that Al-Sawy is “a teacher for the teachers.”
Van Zile noted that “Suleiman and his circle have treated [the October 7 Hamas attacks] as an act of ‘resistance’ that could help unite the umma, the global community of Muslim believers.”
The report on Al-Sawy comes after multiple Texas congressmen recently asked U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to investigate several Islamic groups for potential abuse of taxpayer-funded grants and ties to terrorism.
Mishkah University, the Medical Center Islamic Society, and the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America have not responded to requests from Texas Scorecard for comment on the report.
