The Children's Games

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I had never heard of the Islamic Games before. I’m not big on Muslim community events, and I am so out of shape these days that the last time I worked out was probably fifteen years ago. But once I started asking around, one man mentioned his father-in-law. Over sixty years old, made to enter the “iron-man” event by the younger men in the family, who then filmed the whole thing: jumping jacks, push-ups, burpees, and throwing weights. It took him around twenty minutes. He finished.

The Islamic Games are a Muslim sports festival that has run in cities around the country since 1989. Founded by an immigrant from Guyana, they are basically a weekend of sports tournaments and food trucks. The man I spoke to played in the over-thirty soccer tournament. His kids ran track and soccer as well. His team bought donuts and wiped them clean twenty minutes before kickoff, which may be the reason they went one and two and got knocked out. But at least they finished with more dignity than the guy on another team who got disqualified for calling the referee blind. When I asked if he remembers the sponsors he said he remembers them being local businesses: grocery stores, restaurants, and dessert shops.

Another woman told me about her daughter, who is under thirteen and plays on a girls’ team made up of kids from different schools. They had won the tournament two years running. The prize was a set of free arm sleeves and a medal. One year her team won by such a large margin that the score stopped mattering.

Her daughter had made friends there, and when she heard the event might be called off, she was upset. Then the organizers moved the tournament to a private facility and it was back on. “This brought joy to her,” her mother wrote. “Alhamdulillah.” She ended our conversation with a sentence I keep thinking about: “They are bringing dirty politics to innocent intentions and children who are only getting together for fun.”

The dirty politics in this case was my great State of Texas.

In November 2025, Governor Greg Abbott issued a proclamation designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations under state law. In January 2026, he wrote to a school district outside Houston, having learned that a high school there might allow the Islamic Games to use their facilities, to remind officials they could not lend public facilities to an event sponsored by a designated terror group. He threatened to direct the state's education agency to “seize and uncover” district communications. “Radical Islamic extremism is not welcome in Texas—and certainly not in our schools.”

A week later the attorney general, Ken Paxton, served two districts with demands for documents, part of an investigation into whether taxpayer dollars were “materially supporting activities by Islamist terrorists.”

The material support here turned out to be a set of drawstring bags.

CAIR's New Jersey chapter had, in early 2023, handed out free drawstring bags to athletes at an event in New Jersey. The Islamic Games' president later explained that the chapter “has never been, and is not currently, a sponsor,” that the bags were “a one-time, in-kind contribution,” and that CAIR had been left on a list of supporters on the website “in error over the years.” That was the connection. A few bags, and a line on a website that someone forgot to update. From there it ran upward, through the national organization, to the Muslim Brotherhood, and back down again to a girl in arm sleeves accepting a medal in a school gym.

One district folded. Grapevine-Colleyville had approved the use of a high school for the Dallas Games and then, under pressure, withdrew it. The mayor told a local paper he had been “surprised to hear that a controversial group labeled as a terrorist group by Governor Abbott was tied to a planned event at one of our school facilities,” and that he was “relieved” it had been stopped. A school board president had earlier described the event as if it was an occupation: “They're bringing in food trucks. They're using the basketball court, the tennis courts, the track and field, the soccer fields—they're taking over that entire area.”

I read the governor’s proclamation. It opens with Hassan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and his statement that jihad is “an obligation from Allah on every Muslim.” It moves to the network’s present leadership and the goal of Islam's “mastership of the world.” It arrives at Hamas, “the Palestinian branch,” and then at CAIR, which it calls the Muslim Brotherhood's “successor organization.”

There is a small tell in the document. The proclamation quotes CAIR's longtime director, Nihad Awad, saying that within fifteen years American Muslims will be “an army” of people who “run for public office” and “become lawmakers” — and then it adds four words, “to advance Sharia law in America.” According to his lawyers, Awad never said that last part. The actual quote is quite assimilationist — Muslims should vote and help legislate like everyone else. The menace was added later.

It would be easy to stop here and let the absurdity sit. But the state didn’t invent its Muslim out of nothing. In the same letter, the governor quoted CAIR's New Jersey chapter on the day of the October 7 attack: “This is not a war. It is an occupation… End the occupation. Free Palestine.” This quote is real, though now deleted. CAIR also says, in its own lawsuit, that it condemned the killing of civilians on October 7. I believe that too. What I don’t believe is that either fact gives you the whole story.

The CAIR lawsuit makes the opposite mistake. Where the governor says successor, the complaint says the chapters are not “members, chapters, offshoots, or affiliates of any foreign organization.” True, in the legal sense, but also a little too smooth.

The truth is that the governor is not making things up from thin air. He has taken pieces of a real history and arranged them into an accusation. I know that because I have been living within that history for years. The names in his proclamation belonged to institutions I have become familiar with. Some of them shaped me. So I decided to trace the history myself.

My grandfather came to America in 1964 on a Fulbright. The family was here six years and then went back to Egypt. When my grandparents talk about America, Islam is not part of the story. They were Muslim, but not in a way that organized much of their lives. They hung around other Egyptians, kept the language, and otherwise got on with things. They never ate pork, but when I ask if they ever went to a mosque my grandmother snickers and says, “we didn’t go to mosques in those days.”

My grandfather had a joke about Palestine that only works in Arabic, a pun on the syllables of the name: Palestine—it begins in bankruptcy and ends in mud (Filasṭīn, awwaluhā falas wa-ākhiruhā ṭīn). To him, the cause that would one day organize the moral life of the American Muslim community was mostly a setup. If you had asked my family what it meant to be Muslim, I don't think Palestine would have made the first several answers.

They were not unusual. The Muslims who came in those years, before and just after the 1965 law that opened the doors wider, mostly treated Islam as something they happened to be rather than something they did. A man named Jafar Siddiqui, who came in 1974, was interviewed decades later about what it had been like: “When I came here, there was only one mosque… And most Muslims were kind of casual Muslims. They didn't care much about the fact that they were Muslims. Yes, they were Muslims, but it was taken for granted. And we'd go every Eid to pray in congregation. But beyond that, it didn't matter. We were very easy and loose about it.”

Sabeeha Rehman arrived around the same time. In her memoir Threading My Prayer Rug, she describes her first Ramadan in America. Her son was around a week old, and neither she nor her husband fasted: “The communal sense that goes with fasting was not there… Islamic rituals had taken a seat in the last row on the bus journeying through child-rearing. We were adrift. Let's just say that the environment and the support system were not there. There was no flow to go along with... Unable to integrate our religious rituals into our new lifestyle, we put religion on hold. For now, I had folded my prayer rug and placed it deep down at the bottom of the pile.”

Not everyone came here like my grandparents. In 1963, at the University of Illinois, a handful of foreign students founded the Muslim Students Association. They were engineers and scientists too, but many of them came out of the Islamic movements that were reshaping politics back home — the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan. Some were members themselves. A handbook from the period says it plainly: among the early arrivals were men fleeing Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, and “most of them were members of the [Muslim Brotherhood].” By 1972, the Muslim Students Association's constitution described its mission: to help Muslims in the United States and Canada live according to “Islam as a complete way of life.”

These were the people who bothered. While the majority were folding their prayer rugs, this vocal minority founded institutions left and right. Out of the Muslim Student Association grew the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which still runs the big annual conventions, and in 1994 the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the civil-rights group that would handle complaints and lawsuits — the same CAIR the governor calls the Muslim Brotherhood's “successor organization.” The organizations the governor is attacking were built by exiles who thought Islam in America needed a plan.

When I first read Leila Ahmed's A Quiet Revolution and came across her argument that “Islamists” built much of organized American Islam, I was annoyed. It sounded like the kind of thing an Islamophobe says. Now I understand what she means.

The spiritual leader of this project was Ismail al-Faruqi. He was a Muslim Students Association leader who founded the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, co-founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and trained or worked alongside many of the founders of other Muslim organizations.

Immigrants like my grandfather, he wrote in The Hijrah (1979), were “beggars at the Western altar of knowledge.” He was careful to add that this was ”not a foreigner's judgement, but the way Muslim immigrants see themselves.” The doctors and the engineers had come to take, and it disgusted him.

For al-Faruqi, immigrants could only be here for one reason. “Whether temporary student or permanent resident, highly educated or merely enterprising,” he wrote, “the Muslim in America and Europe has but one justification—Islam! Without it, he is the most despicable of all. His material success avail him nothing.” An immigrant who only came for a degree or salary was simply a mercenary, living on “the crumbs which fall from the American table and which he devours without shame. For he gives nothing in return. He only receives.”

There was a way out of the contempt — calling others to Islam (daʿwah). A mercenary was useless. A person who “awakened to Islam through the fire of shock alienation and self-contempt,” and who spent his life in America as “a caller of men to God” was redeemed, and his comfortable American life became “one of the instruments he uses in his call.”

He was born in Jaffa, Palestine in 1921, the son of a judge. The British made him district governor of Galilee in 1945. In 1948 he lost everything and became a refugee. The loss seems to have done something permanent. He got degrees at Indiana and Harvard, spent four years at al-Azhar, and finally landed at Temple University in 1968.

There he built an Islamic studies program and became a prolific author. For years his cause had been Arabism — the secular nationalism of the postwar Arab world — and only later did he undergo a conversion. “Until a few months ago, I was a Palestinian, an Arab, and a Muslim,” he told a student. “Now I am a Muslim who happens to be an Arab from Palestine.” The order had reversed, and his philosophy followed from the new arrangement.

Most of his work circles the same question: what are Muslims supposed to do in the world? In Al-Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life (1982), he argued that the Muslim, as God's vicegerent on earth, “must interfere in the causal processes of space-time” to bend them back toward “the divine pattern.” This was Islam as a complete way of life, with something to say about knowledge, politics, economics, and everything else.

In Islam and the Problem of Israel (1980) he lays out the talking points that most American Muslim institutions still use. The thing facing the Muslim world, he wrote, was not simply another colonialism or a second Crusade but “both and more, much more” — a wound that could only be understood inside the larger civilizational struggle, and that made the whole ummah responsible for it. The book is a long, legal-theological argument about dismantling the Zionist state. Reading it now I’m surprised by how little has changed. The framing he worked out in the seventies is the framing I still hear today.

Yet al-Faruqi was no Muslim Brotherhood foot soldier. He thought the movement had failed. “It had a wonderful beginning but could not keep the pace,” he wrote. “The graver tragedy was its inability to crystalize the vision of Islam as relevant to every moment of human life, every shade of modern human activity. The vision was at its brightest in the mind of the late Hasan al-Banna; but it was somewhat confused and less clear in his followers… Thus the movement could grow in numbers but not in ideational depth.” He thought that the Muslim Brotherhood had begun something it didn’t know how to finish.

In Ramadan 1986, al-Faruqi broke his fast with his local chapter of the Muslim Students Association and went home around eleven. That night a man entered the house and stabbed him and his wife to death. Their daughter, eight months pregnant, survived with two hundred stitches.

The killer, who had taken the name Yusuf Ali, was caught by a thumbprint on a bloody surgical glove and testified that voices had ordered him to do it. While the police initially suspected a political assassination, Ali relied on an insanity defense. The institute al-Faruqi co-founded still says that he was killed “in circumstances that have never been resolved.”

By the time I had read this far, the drawstring bags had stopped looking absurd to me. Not because they proved what the governor was saying, but because I could finally see how a genealogy gets weaponized. However, I was giving the immigrant story too much credit.

I had been reading the history as though immigrant Muslims built American Islam out of nothing, which was convenient because it made the story mine. Sherman Jackson complicated that.

In Islam and the Blackamerican, he starts with the fact that there was already a deep Muslim tradition in America before the immigrants arrived — Black Islam. The immigrant institutions were real, but they were not the whole story.

Many immigrant Muslims arrived and treated their own Islam as the real thing and everyone else's as folklore. They took “a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America.” Their Islam carried a “critical posture” toward America and “the West” — which Jackson calls “an empty abstraction hovering somewhere over the Atlantic.” Black Religion was different. It was formed inside America, as a “holy protest against anti-black racism.” Its enemy was the legacy of slavery.

The cost of the immigrant monopoly fell on the people who had been here first. The new establishment had little to say to them, and almost none of them sat in its major organizations. Some concluded that “Blackamerican converts from Christianity had simply moved from the back of the bus to the back of the camel.”

Jackson also pointed out that by 1965 immigrant Muslims were, in legal terms, white. The old ethnic slurs meant little to them. There was only one American word they learned to fear and to keep a careful distance from — it starts with N.

Things looked different after the founding generation. Ingrid Mattson grew up Catholic in Kingston, Ontario. She left the church as a teenager, found Islam in her early twenties in Paris among West African students, converted at twenty-three, and spent more than a year working with Afghan women in the refugee camps of Pakistan, where she met her husband. At Hartford Seminary she built the first accredited program in North America for training Muslim chaplains. In 2006, she became president of the ISNA — the first woman and convert to hold the job.

If the governor's genealogy were the whole story, she should’t exist.

After September 11, she argued that American Muslims had a particular responsibility. “Because we have freedom and wealth,” she wrote, “we have a special obligation to help those Muslims who do not — by speaking out against the abuses of Muslim ‘leaders’ in other countries.”

She was equally suspicious of turning inward. She warned against retreating into “a self-contained, self-serving Muslim community that resembles an Islamic town in the Epcot global village.” A few years later, reflecting on the pressure Muslims felt to constantly explain themselves, she observed that one could stand “on the soapbox from morning to night” saying, “I condemn this, I condemn that,” and accomplish less than the “much slower, more patient work of building a well-functioning model American Muslim community.” I used to find that phase of American Islam easy to mock. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.

She was attacked from every direction at once. The anti-Muslim right called her organization “a key component of the Wahhabi lobby.” Conservative Muslims objected to a woman leading at all. Secular feminists found her insufficiently loud. She tended to brush these attacks off: “When you grow up with four brothers, you get a thick skin.”

In January 2009, Mattson stood in the National Cathedral and prayed at Barack Obama's inauguration. At the time, the same system that would later come for the Islamic Games went after her, digging up an old terrorism-financing case in which ISNA had been named, along with hundreds of others, as an unindicted co-conspirator. The ACLU's response at the time sounds familiar today. There was “absolutely no direct evidence,” the ACLU said, and “after the government made its original public smear, it admitted to ISNA's lawyers in private that the government has no evidence of wrongdoing.”

My mother took me to a couple of ISNA conventions as a kid. I spent most of the time playing around the hotel. One of the few lectures I actually went to was called “Making Progress with the Progressives,” where I was impressed by a young scholar named Yasir Qadhi. When my mom dragged me to another conference during college, I skipped the lectures and spent an afternoon discussing weed grinders with a family friend in a corner of the convention center.

The whole thing felt like a culture being assembled and handed to the American Muslim community: multiethnic, a little corporate, booths for Islamic mortgages and matrimonial services in a dull, fluorescent hall. It was more like a member’s club for a particular type of Muslim than a grand conspiracy.

October 7 activated the underlying hyper-focus on Palestine and civilizational frame that came with al-Faruqi.

I have written elsewhere about how the news reached me that week. What I will do here is illustrate the community’s zeitgeist at the time.

The more I read and listened, the more the arguments about condemnation felt beside the point. The real disagreement was about where the story began. For some people it began on October 7. For others it began decades earlier. Once I understood that, I could see where a lot of the arguments were coming from.

Omar Suleiman was born in New Orleans in 1986 — the year al-Faruqi was murdered — to Palestinian parents who came in the sixties. He founded an institute that is now one of the largest English-language producers of Islamic content, gave an invocation on the floor of the House of Representatives, and in 2023 helped mediate a hostage crisis at a synagogue in Colleyville — the same Colleyville that would later cancel the Islamic Games — for which the Texas House honored him.

He is about as American a leader as the community has produced. Unlike the original immigrants, his Palestine comes from the center of American Muslim life. Leading a Friday prayer on the National Mall between the White House and the Capitol two weeks after the attack, he told the crowd: “You are alive in this moment of Palestinian catastrophe. You are witnessing a genocide of Gaza. With that witnessing comes a great responsibility.” In his hands, a sermon and a protest speech become the same thing.

Then there is Nihad Awad, the CAIR director the governor misquoted. On October 10, three days after the attack, he said: “Targeting civilians is wrong, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli... Just as our nation condemned the violent targeting of Israeli civilians last weekend, our nation must condemn—and stop sanctioning—the violent targeting of Palestinian civilians now.”

Six weeks later, at a Palestine conference outside Chicago, he was reported to have said: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7... And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not free to walk in.” Then he added the line that made the White House disavow him: “The people of Gaza have the right to self-defense,” but “Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”

When the criticism came, Awad tried to contextualize. Palestinians and other occupied people, he wrote, have the right “to defend themselves and escape occupation by just and legal means,” but “targeting civilians is never an acceptable means of doing so.” He said that the people he had meant to praise were the “average Palestinians who briefly walked out of Gaza” without violence; “the extremists who went on to attack civilians in southern Israel were not.” Then he said it again: “Targeting civilians is unacceptable, no matter whether they are Israeli or Palestinian or any other nationality.”

The governor cherry picked from these statements to paint the picture he wanted. What is harder to say is that even with all three statements in front of me, I’m not sure I can tell you what Awad actually thinks. I have my own questions about the word civilian — about who counts as innocent — and I don’t think both sides are saying the same thing. But that is not really what I come away with.

Instead, I see a man revising himself in real time under enormous pressure, each statement built to survive the attack on the last one, until it is almost impossible to find the person underneath. Many in the community feel under the microscope like this. It’s the reason so many people I speak to say things in private and then ask me to not write them down.

I went looking for a part of the community that saw things differently. In Congress, some of the Muslim politicians found language closer to what I had been looking for. Ilhan Omar condemned “the horrific acts” against “children, women, the elderly, and the unarmed” who were killed or taken hostage by Hamas. André Carson, was also vocal: he condemned “Hamas’ attacks against civilians” and called for the release of the hostages; he also condemned the Israeli government’s “cruel response on civilians,” called for a ceasefire, and called for an end to the occupation.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is where I actually live. I distrust the totalizing story that reached me after October 7 from both sides. I also find the performance of Muslims condemning on command a bit annoying. Some things really do need to be condemned, though. I can see how Palestine became the organizing cause of American Muslim institutions. I can also see how it flattens whatever it touches. I don't want to blindly accept someone else's narrative. I also don’t want to retell my grandfather's joke, upgraded with footnotes.

There was one corner of my religious life that had nothing to do with any of this. When I lived in Pennsylvania for a few years, I used to drive out to a small mosque in the countryside. It was a neo-traditionalist community built around the slow work of becoming a less terrible person. The first time I went they struck me as Muslim hippies. They stayed out of politics on principle. On Thursday nights they would gather and sing devotional poems, and I would sit there — quietly jamming out. I love politics, and participate as a Muslim, but in that room I also felt an enjoyment that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else.

I bring it up because refusing the civilizational frame is not the same as replacing Islam with some thin liberal identity. But I moved back to Houston a few months before October 7.

There, what reached me was the other inheritance. In London, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign called the police to register a national march on the afternoon of October 7 itself, while the attack was still going. By October 8, there were rallies in Times Square and a dozen American cities, organized by coalitions that had existed for years. By Friday prayer time, advocacy groups had circulated guidance for imams — talking points, suggested verses, a reminder that “the timeline for this tragedy did not begin on October 7th.” When I asked if people actually use these templates, the answer was yes.

None of it had to be invented that week. The sermon I heard, the frame that reached me — all of it was waiting, already built. This was al-Faruqi's inheritance, arriving so fast and so complete that it felt like the only possibility.

Today, the community has partially moved on from the latest round of Palestine advocacy.

The Islamic Games are still scheduled to take place near Dallas. Meanwhile, Florida joined Texas in designating CAIR as a terrorist organization. Both designations are being challenged in court.

Northeast of Dallas, the East Plano Islamic Center announced a master-planned community with homes, a school, a mosque, and sports facilities. The governor vowed it would “never see the light of day.” Investigations followed. Yasir Qadhi — the young speaker who had impressed me at an ISNA convention years earlier — offered an almost comically ordinary explanation: the mosque was out of room, so “why not build a purpose-built community where all the amenities people want are within walking distance.” In Texas, this might be a crime.

In New York, a Muslim was elected mayor, which was either the high point of American Islam or the opening of the Islamophobic floodgates. Either way, he always manages to be in the news. A senator posted his picture beside an image of the towers falling: “the enemy is inside the gates.”

I have my own complaints about my community. We don’t know our own history well enough to meet the moment. There is a great deal of energy for social justice, but very little appetite for someone else's narrative, least of all the Israeli one. The opposing position usually shows up as a straw man, knocked down in advance.

The outside pressure makes it worse. A frightened community closes ranks and keeps people silent. I keep running into fearful people. The paranoia is not baseless, which is what makes it so hard to argue with. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that posts by Republican officials targeting Muslims had risen by more than fourteen hundred percent in the past year.

Then, while I was researching this history, two teenagers walked up to a mosque in San Diego on a Monday morning in May and started shooting. There were a hundred and forty children inside with their teachers, having a normal day. The gunmen left a manifesto full of hatred for Muslims, Jews, and gay people.

A security guard named Amin Abdullah saw them and radioed the building to lock down, which helped save the children. He died as he was engaging the shooters. Two other men went out to distract the shooters and were killed: Nadir Awad, a teacher who lived across the street and prayed there every day, and Mansour Kaziha, who had looked after the building since it went up in the eighties.

The gunmen didn’t care what kind of Muslims these people were. They didn’t care whether they had ever heard of the Muslim Brotherhood, or CAIR, or the Islamic Games. They didn’t care about their position on Israel-Palestine. They were Muslim, and to the two boys with guns that was enough.

Return to the Islamic Games. The other district the state targeted didn’t fold. While Colleyville backed away, Cypress-Fairbanks, outside Houston, answered with a lawyerly shrug. The district noted that it hosts fifteen churches of various denominations on its campuses every week. The Supreme Court has already settled the principle: a school can’t open its facilities to Baptists and close them to Muslims. Cy-Fair would proceed according to the law, officials wrote, “including the laws that prohibit discrimination.”

I wrote to the district myself to ask what they would do if the Islamic Games applied again. The reply was dry. They said the rental window had not opened. No application had been submitted, so there was nothing to report. And then: “CFISD will review the request neutrally and in full compliance with state and federal laws if/when they apply.” Business as usual.

The children at the Islamic Games haven’t inherited any of this history yet. Neither have the children in San Diego. For now, they are still just playing.