Everything about the project known as EPIC City points to Sharia law, a religious law based on the Qur’an and hadith, Krista Schild, director of Defending Our Republic, said on Washington Watch Friday. The proposed Muslim community would center around a mosque, one of the largest in Texas, which opened near the town of Josephine, 25 miles east of Plano, a Dallas suburb.
Schild told show host Jody Hice that what’s being proposed is a Hamas sanctuary city. “We have mounds of evidence, including my own personal investigations, that show their alignment with Hamas,” she said. According to Schild, videos and other open-source material are available in which Yasir Qadhi, a Texas-born Muslim scholar, theologian and EPIC City spokesperson, aligns himself with Hamas.
The proposed Epic City community would include an Islamic school, a community college, retail shops, a sports complex, elderly assisted living and more than 1,000 residential units.
Qadhi says EPIC City residents will be good Texans and good neighbors.
“EPIC City is going to be a role model community of thousands of Muslims living well-integrated. We are not forming a cult. We’re not forming big barriers between the rest of society,” he said, via The Dallas Morning News. “We’re going to be giving back to this state and this country, and we’re going to be showing what it means to be a Muslim neighborhood.”
The prospect of Sharia law in his state has lit a fire under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
“Sharia law is outlawed in Texas under a law I signed in 2017. Texas is investigating EPIC City for many allegations, attempts to circumvent that law,” Abbott said when announcing on April 1 that EPIC City developers may not begin construction.
The previous week Abbott announced that a dozen state agencies, including the Texas Rangers, were investigating potential illegal activities conducted by EPIC and affiliated entities.
“They talk about doing all this building, but they don’t have building permits to actually do any building, and they have challenges even getting those building permits,” Abbott explained on Fox News earlier this month. “We’ve even received information that they may have been conducting a funeral home without legal authority.”
Late on the draw for ‘no Sharia law’
While the governor says there will be no Sharia law in Texas, Amy Mek of Rise Align Ignite Reclaim, a grassroots organization promoting the Constitution and Judeo-Christan values, says Sharia is already in place.
“For years, entire neighborhoods around the EPIC Mosque in Plano and the Islamic Center of Irving have transformed into Islamic-only enclaves – where non-Muslims are not welcome. Now, they are openly planning to build an entire Islamic city,” she wrote on X.
She listed at least five Muslim neighborhoods around Plano and Irving, another Dallas suburb, right now. Some of the neighborhoods have their own schools that stress Qur’an memorization and reject Western education, Mek said.
“These areas aren’t just diverse neighborhoods – they are Islamic-only zones where non-Muslims are pushed out and Sharia law dominates daily life,” she wrote.
Concerns about Muslim neighborhoods whose citizens fail to integrate into their U.S. communities are valid, Dr. Hormoz Shariat of Iran Alive Ministries, told Hice. “It’s not hype. It's not a theory. If you want to know where this ends up, just look at England and maybe France,” he said.
Both of those countries have seen decades of growth among Muslim-dominant neighborhoods and have dealt with the subject of assimilation differently: France through political initiatives, England through efforts toward community cohesion and dialogue.
“You see in London and other cities, you see thousands of Muslims blocking the streets praying to Allah …. EPIC [is] the first step towards that kind of presence in the U.S.,” Shariat said.
Qadhi doesn’t call for peace in his teachings, according to Schild. Through months of listening to videos, she’s found Qadhi teach his people about boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. He can be heard “saying things like Jews and Christians are filthy, and it’s incumbent upon us in jihad to take their lives and their property,” Schild shared.
Qadhi holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Houston with a doctorate in extensive Islamic studies from Yale. Born to Pakistani parents, Qadhi spent 10 years in study at the Islamic University in Madinah.
His name regularly appears on The 500 Most Influential Muslims List, he states in his bio on his personal website. And he is dedicated to guiding Muslims in applying Islamic jurisprudence within modern context, he writes.
Campaigning for a terrorist’s release
Qadhi has joined with the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to call for the release of an al-Qaeda operative, Dr. Afia Siddiqui, from Carswell Federal Prison in Fort Worth. It is "for very good reason" Siddiqui is in federal prison, says Schild.
"She was shooting at our troops in Afghanistan and building bombs to take out our officers, as well as planting dirty bombs here in the United States. She was found with a whole list of places [where] she was going to plant these bombs. That's just a little bit of that alignment that we've been showing our elected officials and why we're calling this what it is,” Schild explained.
And according to Schild, Qadhi’s EPIC followers are continuing the Muslim tradition of hate for Israel.
“We have videographic evidence of their school at EPIC with their second-grade girls in the school to fundraiser chanting ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ They’re holding up a map of Palestine, and Israel's wiped off the face of the map. I don't know how you get any clearer who these people are and what their intentions are for these developments.”
