A livestreamed fundraising event held at the Sufaraa Center in McKinney, Texas, last week has drawn attention after featured speaker Shaykh Uthman ibn Farooq told viewers that Muslims want “Islam for this country” and defended Sharia law as protected under the U.S. Constitution.
The event was hosted by Authentic Ilm Mission (AIM), a group led by Dr. Karim AbuZaid and Farooq that is raising money for a planned 40,000-square-foot Islamic school and community center near Plano, Texas. AIM’s website says the four-acre campus, to be built on the site of a former Christian church, will sit “in one of the most densely Muslim-populated areas between Richardson and Plano” and will house K-12 Islamic education, a seminary, and training in Da’wah, or Islamic proselytization.
“We love this country,” Farooq said during the livestream. “We want good for this country. And that’s why we want Islam for this country, ’cause we think that’s the best thing. And we’re not going to be ashamed of that.”
He argued that Muslims have a constitutional right to follow Sharia law, comparing it to other belief systems tolerated in the U.S.
“We’re Muslims. That’s our identity, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The Constitution of this country protects that. That’s our right to believe in the Sharia. Yes, I said it. That’s our right.”
Farooq continued by pointing to other ideologies present in American public life: “There’s communists that believe in communism and live in America. The current mayor of New York is a socialist. Bernie Sanders is open socialist. … Our president — I don’t know what the, what he is actually. I don’t think he knows what he is. … But he has that right according to the Constitution. … There are Satanists. There’s a church of Satan. I’ve debated them.”
Fundraising Goal and Project Details
According to AIM’s website, the group has raised $300,000 of the $800,000 it says is needed for the project, with contributions from roughly 1,500 individuals in 50 countries. The site includes a video depicting a mosque replacing a church building with a steeple and classical brick architecture, along with an interactive graphic allowing visitors to swipe an image of the existing church at the planned address and replace it with a rendering of the future mosque.
During the event, Farooq said the planned “Da’wah center” would train young Muslims to “refute Christian apologists and Islamophobes and hadith-rejectors and anybody else that’s trying to deviate Islam.”
He also invoked the history of Muslim rule in parts of medieval Europe as a lesson against religious compromise, referencing the roughly 700-year presence of Muslim rule in Portugal, Spain, and Sicily before Muslims were driven out beginning around the 1500s.
“Portugal and Spain, Sicily — these areas were under Muslim rule for around 700 years. … When the Muslims went there, one of the leaders of the Muslims … went with sword in hand, iman in heart … The Quran was on their tongues. It was in their hearts. It was in their actions. And Allah made them victorious. Victory after victory until, to the middle of Europe, they were victorious. Seven hundred years of compromise, of trying to accommodate ended with what? the Muslims losing.”
Background on the Speaker
Farooq works with the One Message Foundation and has a substantial online following, with 430,000 Instagram followers and 1.4 million YouTube subscribers. The One Message Foundation’s website states that it, along with other groups, converted nearly 1,500 people to Islam during the World Cup. In other social media content, Farooq has spoken of polygamy as legitimate and has speculated that President Donald Trump may be an evil spirit.
Farooq has previously drawn scrutiny abroad. Yvette Cooper, while serving as the United Kingdom’s home secretary, barred him from entering the country over comments justifying Muslims having sex with female captives, a position he tied to teachings in the Quran attributed to Muhammad. Farooq nonetheless traveled to Europe in April 2025 and, speaking at a mosque in Birmingham, said, “The future is ours. Every ideal nightmare of a Muslim Europe will come true.”
Regional Context
Texas has one of the largest Muslim populations of any U.S. state, with more than 300,000 residents, a substantial share of whom live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The proposed AIM facility sits roughly 20 minutes southwest of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), a mosque with about 10,000 members that has become the subject of a separate, ongoing legal dispute over its plans to build a complex of more than 450 housing plots. Nationally, the number of mosques in the United States has surpassed 3,000 in recent years.
