Muslim megacity sparks fury across America

Daily Mail​

17-06-2025

The Islamic group that's building a 'Muslim city' in eastern Texas says its 402-acre megaproject will be a 'diverse, and open community' for Americans of all stripes. But pull the curtain back a little, and it becomes clear gay people, Jewish people, and others might not be as welcome as the marketing brochures suggest. The Daily Mail can reveal the cleric behind EPIC City, Yasir Qadhi, has a decades-old record of preaching hatred, homophobia and holocaust-denial to his followers.
Audio files show Qadhi openly calling in the 2000s for the execution of gay people and adulterers - as well as calling the Holocaust a 'hoax.' In one of his chilling diatribes, Qadhi even advances a wild theory Jewish people have infiltrated religious departments of American universities in a bid to 'destroy' Muslims. These damning revelations are the latest blow to EPIC City, a project of the East Plano Islamic Community (EPIC), a busy mosque in the suburbs of northeast Dallas.
The group and their landmark development are already under investigation by federal and state officials over alleged racial discrimination and other concerns. Meanwhile, residents of Josephine and other nearby towns say they're worried about ultra-conservative 'Sharia' laws being rolled out in EPIC City and its surroundings. The organizers of EPIC City did not answer a request for comment. On social media, they decry the 'misinformation' spread against them and say they're a law-abiding non-profit.
Qadhi, 50, a Pakistani-American who was born in Texas and studied in Saudi Arabia and Yale University, and ranks among the most influential conservative Muslim scholars in the US, has reportedly said he's changed his ways. The case raises tough questions about Texas' fast-growing Muslim population, Islamophobia, and whether the hardline views of clerics put the faith at odds with modern US values. Sam Westrop, a counter-extremism analyst at the Middle East Forum, says Qadhi and his followers are dangerous fundamentalists who want to turn the clock back to the 7th Century.
The group has since 2015 run a mosque in East Plano, in Dallas, but was strained by the area's growing Muslim population and decided to build their own community outside the city from scratch . They're planning a neighborhood some 40 miles northeast of Dallas, with 1,000 homes, a mosque, Islamic schools, clinics, stores, parks, and a nursing home on a site across Collin and Hunt Counties. Organizers say the properties sold out fast and have since announced 'ranches' of bigger homes nearby. Construction is set to begin in 2026 or 2027.
The group brands itself a 'multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multilingual, non-sectarian, diverse, and open community' with opportunities for men and women that's open to non-Muslims. But when he's behind closed doors and addressing his followers, Qadhi's private comments over previous decades cannot be further from the liberal values espoused by his organization. In one recording, which appears to be of Qadhi preaching in the US in about the early 2000s, about the wide array of vices that mandate executions under Islam. 'This is a part of our religion, to stone the adulterer … and to kill, by the way, the homosexual. This is also our religion,' he says in the recording.
His comments recall the atrocities of the Islamic State, which imposed harsh Sharia law in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s and flung gay men off buildings to their deaths. In a particularly revelatory comment, Qadhi tells his followers that his austere version of Islamic law was not suitable in the West. 'This doesn't mean we go do this in America,' he says. 'No, we're not allowed to do this in America, you know? But I'm saying if we had an Islamic State, we would do this now.' In another recording, Qadhi shares his bizarre views about how most Jewish people today are of European descent and have few ties to the Middle Easterners in the Old Testament.
'Look at them: white, crooked nose, blonde hairs. This is not the descendants of Jacob,' he says. Nazi Germany's genocide of six million Jewish people is 'false propaganda,' he adds, and 'Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews.' He urges his listeners to read 'The Hoax of the Holocaust.' He then shares a wilder theory that Jewish people make up 95 percent of the students of Islamic Studies courses in the US — a dastardly plan to spread 'disunity' among Muslims and to 'destroy us.' EPIC did not answer our request for comment about the historic comments, which were reported on in the 2000s by The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper, and The New York Times .
Qadhi has since described them as an 'error' and a 'one-time mistake,' saying he fell down a 'slippery slope' into extremism when he was 'young and naïve.' He nowadays offers in public a gentler, more polished and tolerant version of the religion of some 2 billion people globally. In recent years, however, Qadhi has spoken out in defense of Afghanistan's ultraconservative Taliban rulers, the Hamas October 7 attacks on southern Israel, and convicted al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui. Revelations about Qadhi's past comments throw further doubt on the Epic City project, amid a glut of investigations aimed at the organizers by federal and state authorities. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn has said the housing development is being probed by the Department of Justice, adding: 'Religious discrimination and Sharia Law have no home in Texas.'
Texas Gov Greg Abbott, another Republican, has accused the planners of seeking to create an exclusively Muslim community with Sharia law and has directed several state agencies to investigate the group. Abbot suggested it may have violated fair housing and financial laws, and that the Islamic center had conducted illegal funerals in its mosque. Attorney general, Ken Paxton has also initiated a criminal investigation.