At the direction of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has ordered the Texas American Muslim University at Dallas (TexAM) to halt its operations, stating that the organization is not a recognized university and thus “prohibited by law from granting or offering to grant degrees.”

But there are other reasons for state agencies to be concerned: TexAM directors maintain ties to domestic radicals and foreign extremists. One of its founders is an overt supporter of foreign terror operatives, while seemingly accused of stalking and distributing “revenge porn” against a former mistress.

Terror-Aligned Extremism

Despite four different aliases and name-changes, TexAM is a recent operation, having first established itself in 2023. Listed as an inactive non-profit in state corporation records, TexAM does not appear to have a current federal 501(c) registration.

Consequently, at fundraising events, TexAM processed donations through a third-party intermediary: the Kansas-based Mercy Without Limits (MWL), a Islamist-run humanitarian aid charity.

TexAM’s fiscal sponsor has long been closely involved with supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, an international franchise of Islamist movements, whose branches the state of Texas and the federal government have designated as terrorist organizations.

MWL chairman Mohamad Albadawi is chairman of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-established Muslim American Society, described by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America,” and with which MWL has a long-standing partnership.

Albadawi was also previously a leader and registered agent of the Muslim Arab Youth Association, which, in 1989, hosted Osama Bin Laden’s mentor, the jihadist leader Abdullah Azzam. The MWL chairman once praised Azzam on his own social media accounts, as noted by the Causing Fitna blog.

In 1995, Hamas leader Sheikh Muhammad Siyam was invited to address a Muslim Arab Youth Association conference, where he told the crowd: “Finish off the Israelis. Kill them all. Exterminate them. No peace ever.”

Speakers at TexAM’s fundraising events with MWL have included Mohamed AlGebaly, an imam at a North Texas sharia court currently under state investigation; as well as Ayman Aishat, an official at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The state of Texas has designated CAIR as a terrorist organization.

Aishat was once denied U.S. citizenship because of his financial contributions to the Holy Land Foundation, a designated Hamas financier once based in North Texas. Unsurprisingly, Aishat appears openly antisemitic, sharing conspiracy theories on social media about the “Rothschild Zionism Secret Regime in America” as well as posts warning about “the Jew, Charles Darwin.”

The Muslim Brotherhood are not the only Islamists in town, however. TexAM’s founders and officers are also involved with fronts for Jamaat-e-Islami, a violent South Asian Islamist movement responsible for mass-killings during the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, and today involved with terrorist activity across Kashmir.

Three of TexAM’s five directors, Shahid Bajwa, Bilal Paracha, and Arsalan Shahzad, have worked with the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the chief U.S. proxy of Jamaat-e-Islami in the United States. In 2018, ICNA’s sister organization partnered in Pakistan with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a designated terrorist organization responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 166 were murdered, including six Americans.

Chief TexAM luminary Shahid Bajwa appears to have been closely involved with Jamaat-e-Islami operations in the United States, serving as director of ICNA’s Dallas-Fort Worth branch for almost seven years.

Another TexAM director, Syed Mohammed Bilal, is an overt supporter of terror. His social media is replete with expressions of admiration and praise for the late terror leader Yahya Sinwar, the chief architect of the October 7 terror attacks, as well as other leaders of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, such as Ismail Haniyeh.

Bilal even composed poetry to mourn Haniyeh’s assassination, published in both English and Urdu. Lines include praise for the Hamas leader, who arranged for the murder of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, as a “beacon of hope and resilience … a spirit unbroken … leading with love and justice. … a hero forever remembered.”

Bilal has also used his social media to post dozens of expressions of support for Aafia Siddiqui, an Al-Qaeda operative arrested after planning a “mass casualty attack” against targets across America.

Bilal Syed with Richardson, TX mayor Amir Omar, a supporter of TexAM.

Foreign Influence Operations

As well as the involvement of TexAM’s founders with the South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami, both the “university” and its directors also appear to operate in close coordination with Pakistani backers and politicians.

TexAM explicitly prioritizes the recruitment of Pakistani students, and has hosted events with PakLaunch, a Pakistani government-backed initiative to expand Pakistani economic influence.

TexAM founder Syed Bilal is an active member of “PTI Texas,” an overseas branch of Pakistan’s Islamist-aligned political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. Syed shares warnings with the group that the U.S. is “ruled by evangelical and zionist pedophile politicians.”

To fight the ostensible threat from “Indian and Israeli hegemony,” Syed advocates a “RISE Doctrine” for Pakistan in which he and other Pakistani political operatives in the United States work in “GOP red states starting from Texas” to “build coalitions” with “US mainstream media and US elected officials.”

Syed claims to have discussed this entryism plan with Pakistani officials. Certainly, in North Texas, he and TexAM officials seem keen to involve themselves in local and state politics. Syed boasts of events with “dozens of judges, mayor[s] and city [council members],” and is involved with local Democratic Party movements.

TexAM founder Shahid Bajwa with Texas state representative Salman Bhojani and radical imam Omar Suleiman.

Pakistan may not be TexAM’s only foreign partner. The “university” is based in the same building as a branch of Diyanet Center of America, a Turkish government-funded and -run institution that serves to advance Turkish Islamist ideology. Interestingly, TexAM’s fiscal sponsor, Mercy Without Limits, is also closely involved with the Turkish regime.

We asked TexAM founder Shahid Bajwa about his involvement with Jamaat-e-Islami, and whether his organization had been in contact with the Turkish or Pakistani regimes. Bajwa denied the allegations. He further explained that TexAM is “actively engaging” with government bodies to “clarify any misunderstandings.”

‘Revenge Porn’

In 2021 and 2022, a man matching the name, age, location and appearance of TexAM founder Syed Bilal was arrested on stalking charges.

The victim, the man’s former mistress, later filed a lawsuit, alleging he “hacked her phone and sent pornographic images and videos of her with another man to her mother” among other threatening and manipulative actions.

According to the plaintiff, “He already had two wives … but wanted her as his third.”

The jury awarded her $150,000 in damages.

During the man’s depositions before the trial, he listed his office as 555 Republic Drive, Plano, Texas: the same address declared in TexAM’s state incorporation papers.

Radicalizing the Next Generation

As reported by the Texas Scorecard, TexAM’s own website claims its mission is to combine “modern technology with Islamic services,” preparing graduates for fields such as Islamic finance, digital services, and religious education while “preserving Islamic values.”

This is familiar language to ideologues of Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which pioneered the concept of tarbiyah, an educational system, popular in Western Islamist-run private schools, in which “Islamic” ideas are infused into every subject of study and applied to every aspect of a student’s personal life.

Indeed, other Texas Islamist educational institutions embrace similar Islamist concepts, while also working to radicalize and miseducate Texas Muslim youth and young adults.

In the same building as TexAM, in fact, the Islamic Seminary of America, a radical Salafi organization, is training scores of imams. The seminary’s head, Yasir Qadhi, not only runs the controversial EPIC mosque, but once advocated the killing of homosexuals and has supported efforts to free Aafia Siddiqui, an Al-Qaeda operative whom the FBI found to be planning a “mass casualty attack” against targets across America.

In Houston, prominent supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood run the “Guidance College,” which employs a mix of hardline Islamists to award bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The head of this Texas college, Main AlQudah, a self-admitted Muslim Brotherhood supporter, challenged a federal government effort to deport him in 2013 by arguing that he faced “past and future harm” if he returned to his homeland, because he “advocated [the] imposition of Islamic law instead of secular law in Jordan.”

Another Houston institution, Mishkah University (formerly known as the Sharia Academy of America), is run by Salah Al-Sawy, whom, analyst Ryan Mauro reports, once called on Muslims to “revive the obligation of jihad” and “revive the call to Sharia rule.” Another of his rulings laments that, “The Ummah does not currently possess the capacity for jihad al-talab [offensive and expansionary jihad].”

Mishkah University also admits to being unaccredited, but claims it is “allowed” by the state of Texas to “officially grant post-secondary degrees to programs that are of a religious basis.”

Meanwhile, South Asian Islamist seminaries named “Darul Ulooms” operate across Texas, all aligned with the hardline Deobandi movement, to which Afghanistan’s brutal Taliban belongs.

Some of these madrassas impose their dogmas on both children and adults, running schools while training imams.

Another seminary, Jamia-Tul-Madina in Sugar Land, TX, is the leading mosque of Dawat-e-Islami, another South Asian Islamist movement criticized by the U.K. government for its involvement in violent extremism. In recent years, Dawat-e-Islami members have conducted multiple terrorist attacks, including a stabbing attack in Paris in September 2020, and the 2016 murder of an Ahmadiyyah Muslim in Glasgow.

An event at the extremist Pakistani institution Jamia-Tul-Madina in Sugar Land, Texas.

The Dawat-e-Islami seminary outside Houston openly describes itself as an “Islamic University.” As with TexAM, it is not a legitimate university.

There is much work to be done. The decision to investigate TexAM’s misrepresentation is certainly welcome, but additional state and federal investigations and action against the growing number of seminaries and madrassas across Texas, which represent a broad and terrifying range of Western Islamist movements, is urgently required.