In February, feel-good coverage from local Texas outlets was celebrating Mohamad Altabaa, a third-year medical student at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, as some kind of interfaith visionary. The Syrian-American bought the long-abandoned Arnett Elementary School in January 2026 and, in a self-documented Instagram series that racked up tens of thousands of likes, turned the derelict building into The Unity Center, a gleaming new mosque and “community hub”, in just 45 days, right in time for Ramadan. It appeared to be a youthful, organic project that had sprung up out of nowhere. In reality, it was anything but organic. It is tied to one of the most aggressive Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks in America, which is leading the Islamization of the country.
RAIR Foundation previously sounded the alarm about this exact project. We exposed how The Unity Center occupies the entire former Arnett Elementary School campus, complete with classrooms, gym, cafeteria, library, administrative offices, and outdoor sports fields, all repurposed in record time with “global support” and foreign donors. A brand-new Islamic center sprang up in a former public school in just 45 days, with no apparent investigation by local or state Texas officials into its funding sources, ideological ties, or the individuals involved. This is part of the broader pattern of rapid Islamization across Texas that RAIR has sounded the alarm on for years.
No Public Documentation of Permits, Applications, or Zoning Oversight: How Did This Happen in 45 Days?
Despite the lightning-fast conversion of a former public school into a full-scale mosque and community hub, extensive searches of local news, city records, and public announcements found no documentation of building permits, zoning applications, conditional use permits, or planning commission reviews. Local media reported the project as a volunteer-driven miracle with no mention of city approvals, hearings, or inspections.
Arnett Elementary closed in 2011 and sat mostly vacant in a northeast Lubbock residential area. Converting a former school to a mosque typically requires zoning changes or special-use permits under Lubbock’s code, yet no controversies, public notices, or enforcement actions were reported. This raises serious questions: Was the project fast-tracked without standard oversight, or did private ownership allow it to slip through without town scrutiny?
Not Organic: Mohamad Altabaa Is Simply Following His Father’s Playbook
Behind the polished Instagram facade of “unity” and the feel-good hard-working immigrant success story lies the unvarnished truth: Mohamad Altabaa is simply following in his father’s footsteps, methodically expanding Islamic infrastructure deep in red-state Texas – turning public buildings into outposts for the ummah while the press swoons.
His father, Imam Samer Altabaa, is a Syrian immigrant who arrived in Lubbock around 2000 from his hometown of Zabadani. For years, he has led the Islamic Center of the South Plains (ICSP), positioning himself as the friendly face of the local Muslim community even as Texas absorbed wave after wave of Middle Eastern refugees and migrants. He is now the imam at his son’s mosque, The Unity Center.
The Institutional Backbone: Decades of ICSP “Interfaith” Camouflage
He boasts credentials from Abu Nour – an Islamic seminary in Damascus – as a student of Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the former Grand Mufti of Syria. Abu Nour, under Kuftaro’s leadership, became notorious for anti-Western rhetoric, including calls to boycott all European goods as an Islamic duty and fiery speeches framing the West as an existential threat to Islam.
While Kuftaro promoted interfaith cooperation on his English-language site, in Arabic, he accused the “Jewish lobby” of controlling world opinion and of being “the killers of prophets.” He also asserts that “all Muslims are obligated to do jihad upon the Zionists.”
Kuftaro himself maintained close ties to the Assad regime while pushing supremacist ideology that blended regime loyalty with calls for Muslim unity against non-believers. More damningly, Kuftaro issued a fatwa explicitly approving attacks on American forces in Iraq as legitimate jihad, and his legacy continued through his son Salah Kuftaro, who praised Hamas and Hezbollah as the “middle ground” for young Muslims and declared jihad the calling of all Muslims.
The ICSP itself has long hosted interfaith events — annual iftars, dinners with local non-Muslim leaders, and “Learn About Islam” pages that funnel visitors straight into dawah (Islamic proselytization) outfits like DiscoverIslam.com. RAIR Foundation has already exposed the ICSP’s dawah pipeline, which actively promotes scholars with disturbing histories of defending violence and anti-American rhetoric. The center’s “Learn About Islam” section directs visitors to Discover Islam’s “Featured Scholars,” where they prominently feature Hamza Yusuf (co-founder of Zaytuna College) and Yusuf Islam.
Hamza Yusuf has defended convicted cop-killer Jamil Al-Amin, expressed sympathy for the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), denounced America as “one of the most treacherous countries that ever existed,” and declared that “if Islam isn’t a threat to society, something’s wrong with your Islam.”
Yusuf Islam (also known as Cat Stevens), meanwhile, publicly supported the fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, stating, “He must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear – if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die,” and even expressed hope that protests against Rushdie would involve the “real thing” rather than an effigy.
This is classic soft-power infiltration: using feel-good bridge-building to lower defenses while steadily building parallel Islamic institutions that never truly integrate but instead demand accommodation and eventual dominance. Even Texas Tech University has been directly complicit in this infiltration – their then-president, Duane Nellis, and dean of their Health Sciences Center, Dr. Steven Berk, personally attended the ICSP’s interfaith dinner in 2013. Both Nellis and Berk spoke at the event, as Berk gushed, “Texas Tech Health Sciences Center gets its strength from diversity.” The following year’s interfaith dinner, featured Berk, Robert V. Duncan (Texas Tech’s vice president for research), along with council members Karen Gibson and Jeff Griffith.
A former imam and director at the very same center was Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Shinqiti. Al-Shinqiti has been tied to extremist positions, including a 2009 public call — during an online fatwa session on IslamOnline.net — urging Muslims worldwide to take up arms and join the “Gaza battlefield” against Israel. He has repeatedly praised Palestinian “resistance” as an “astonishing miracle,” defended armed jihad against occupation, and is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization which has issued fatwas declaring armed jihad obligatory.
Syrian Roots and Personal Comfort with Jihadist Territory
The Altabaa family’s Syrian roots provide the most chilling context. Samer hails from Zabadani, a Damascus suburb that became an infamous strategic rebel stronghold during the civil war, explicitly controlled by the Al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian branch, which fought to overthrow Assad and impose full Sharia (Islamic law). This is the same network that birthed Ahmed al-Julani (rebranded as Ahmed al-Sharaa), founder of Al-Nusra, later leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and current President of Syria.
This could explain why Mohamad Altabaa felt perfectly comfortable traveling to Syria last year, even as the U.S. State Department issued dire travel warnings. Social media posts show him casually riding around on a motorcycle, enjoying himself in the newly HTS-controlled territory — the same land his family’s hometown helped turn into a jihadist bastion. In 2021, he was also documented in Istanbul at the tomb of Ottoman conqueror Fatih Sultan Mehmet during a pro-Palestine protest where black jihadist flags bearing the shahada waved alongside signs calling for revenge against Jews.
Ties to Hassan Shibly, Longtime CAIR Operative, Hezbollah and Hamas Apologist
A recent Instagram post shows Hassan Shibly, controversial former CAIR-Florida director and documented Hezbollah apologist, posing with Mohamad Altabaa. Hassan Shibly served for a decade as Executive Director of CAIR’s Florida chapter, one of the organization’s most prominent outposts, where he positioned himself as a leading “civil rights” voice for Muslims while repeatedly defending Hezbollah and downplaying its terrorist designation.
Shibly has openly declared homosexuality “evil” and “a quick way to earn God’s wrath” in response to the Nashville Statement. Shibly is also vehemently anti-Israel, insists that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas is a terrorist organization, and has actively fought to bring an ISIS fighter back to America, yet he hypocritically claims he “can’t understand” why he ends up on the federal terror watchlist. CAIR, under his influence, even challenged the constitutionality of the entire watchlist in court.
Shibly’s tenure ended in scandal in January 2021 when he resigned amid explosive domestic abuse allegations from his wife, who filed for a protective injunction. Multiple women subsequently came forward accusing him of emotional abuse, sexual misconduct, bullying, workplace discrimination, and “tricking” them into secret Islamic “religious marriages” behind his legal wife’s back. Allegations Shibly has denied while admitting to multiple such contracts.
In October 2025, Shibly publicly melted down after ICE detained Muslim Brotherhood-linked operative Sami Hamdi at San Francisco International Airport as Hamdi traveled to serve as the keynote speaker and join Shibly at a CAIR Florida annual banquet in Tampa.
Hamdi had praised Hamas, celebrated the October 7 attacks as a “victory,” and served in overseas training programs with Muslim Brotherhood leaders banned in the United States – actions that align with grounds for removal under U.S. immigration law.
Shibly posted a furious video declaring the detainment “very disturbing news,” claiming Hamdi was “being deported for speaking truth” and dramatically stating, “this is how freedom dies.”
In the same post where Mohamad Altabaa can be seen posing with Hassan Shibly, Hassan’s father, Othman, is also present, posing for a photo with his son.
Othman, an oral surgeon originally from Syria, studied at the Abu Nour seminary under Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, like Mohamad’s father Samer Altabaa. Their shared time at the seminary under Kuftaro could suggest how the families remain connected decades later.
National Dawah Network: Ties to Yasir Qadhi, AlMaghrib “Jihad U,” and the Texas Muslim Brothers Road Trip
Mohamad and his father are also tightly woven into a national network of influential Islamic figures, most notably Yasir Qadhi, who RAIR Foundation USA believes to be one of the most influential architects of the Islamization of the United States and across the West. Qadhi has become a nationally known name after RAIR Foundation USA’s in-depth reporting exposed his massive EPIC City project, a proposed separate Islamic mini-city being built in Texas that has come under state and federal investigation following RAIR’s reporting.
RAIR has extensively documented Qadhi’s radical record: he has called Jews and Christians “the most evil of all evils,” hosted events advocating the release of convicted al-Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui, admitted membership in the Hamas-tied International Union of Muslim Scholars, compared Israel to Nazi Germany while claiming the Jewish state is “more evil than the Nazis,” refused to condemn the October 7 Hamas massacre. Qadhi has openly declared the Islamization of America “unstoppable” and pushed for Muslims to infiltrate U.S. institutions like the FBI and CIA.
Qadhi is also notorious for conducting youth ideological training programs in Turkey with Dr. Tareq Al-Suwaidan, a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader banned from entering the United States. It makes one wonder if Mohamad Altabaa has ever attended one of these sessions.
We already know he took part in one of Qadhi’s ideological training events right here on U.S. soil. In early August 2022, the family participated in the “Texas Muslim Brothers” da’wah road trip, part of an Almaghrib Institute conference: two full buses of Muslim teenage boys from Texas, organized as an intimate “journey of a lifetime” for barrier-free Islamic instruction. The buses included participants from the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) — the same Sharia-focused hub now tied to Qadhi’s controversial EPIC City project.
The trip launched from the controversial Clear Lake Islamic Center in Houston. RAIR has repeatedly documented how the Clear Lake Islamic Center, led by imams like Shaykh Waleed Basyouni and Kamal el-Mekki, functions as a Sharia enforcement hub where leaders openly teach that women must submit, justify child marriage, excuse honor killings, condemn homosexuality as a “mental illness,” and defend brutal punishments like stoning for adultery.
Waleed Basyouni called for “victory over those who reject Your truth and deny Your existence.” He has openly preached that Hamas is not a terrorist group, and has publicly mourned the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The 2022 trip made a key rest stop at the Islamic Center of Little Rock, Arkansas — a mosque RAIR Foundation has previously exposed as leading the physical conquest of the city through aggressive mosque expansions and political pandering. The Islamic Center of Little Rock purchased the former Parkview Church next door and acquired 9–10 acres in West Little Rock for a massive new campus featuring the Al-Huda Academy Islamic school (set to open 2026–2027 with gym, mosque, banquet hall, soccer fields, playgrounds, and indoor pool), all while hosting voter registration drives targeting Muslim crowds and drawing Mayor Scott to iftars, Eid prayers, and fundraisers.
The trip culminated at the Memphis Islamic Center, Yasir Qadhi’s longtime base, with Yasir Birjas (AlMaghrib Institute instructor and imam at Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Texas), along with AlMaghrib President Waleed Basyouni, providing personal teaching sessions.
Mohamad Altabaa pictured directly in front of Yasir Qadhi at the Memphis Islamic Center
The entire “Texas Muslim Brothers” da’wah road trip was steeped in the radical ideology of the notorious AlMaghrib Institute, the so-called “Jihad U” that has been repeatedly exposed as a pipeline radicalizing American Muslim youth into the global jihadist mindset. AlMaghrib has trained multiple convicted terrorists, while AlMaghrib instructors like Basyouni, Birjas, and Qadhi use intensive seminars and road trips to indoctrinate young men from Texas mosques into a worldview that prioritizes Sharia supremacy over American values. This 2022 bus tour was no innocent spiritual getaway; it was a coordinated AlMaghrib-style operation to forge the next generation of dawah warriors ready to advance Islamization from Houston to Lubbock and beyond.
In yet another glaring example of the tight-knit network binding Texas’s most controversial Islamic institutions, Ustadh Mohamad Baajour, Director of Tarbiyyah (Education) and Community Development at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), has appeared on camera in Unity Center events, including reels and posts documenting his direct involvement with the congregation.
This is hardly surprising. Mohamad Altabaa absorbed his ideological training directly from Yasir Qadhi and other AlMaghrib instructors at the Memphis conference. Having mastered those lessons, he launched the Unity Center as a powerful new platform for the same dawah model. EPIC — where Yasir Qadhi serves as the spiritual authority and relies on Baajour as one of its lead imams and Tarbiyyah directors — simply sends its own top imam to reinforce the message for the next generation of congregants.
Baajour’s record makes his regular appearances at the Unity Center especially alarming. In a November 4, 2023, sermon at EPIC, delivered less than a month after the October 7 Hamas massacre, Baajour openly glorified the attackers, declaring that “every true Muslim would love to die” as a martyr like the people of Gaza, praised them for having “thrown horror” into the hearts of Jews, and called upon Allah to “defeat their enemy.”
He has also been captured on video participating in EPIC’s high-profile Eid celebration at the iconic Southfork Ranch alongside Yasir Qadhi – a symbolic Islamic conquest of a quintessential piece of Texas heritage.
When Muslim American Society (MAS) Dallas leader Marwan Marouf – a figure tied to the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing network – was detained by ICE, Baajour rushed to the defense. Speaking at a MAS Dallas “Spiritual Night” rally in support of Marouf, the EPIC imam framed the arrest as a divine “test,” elevated Marouf to near-martyr status, quoted Quranic verses to assure the crowd the detention was Allah’s decree, and promised his swift return.
Baajour has further promoted classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, warning in lectures that “Zionists want to put their nose in and ruin [South Africa], just like they ruined every other country,” and repeatedly claiming that “Zionists ruin every country” as part of a global Jewish conspiracy.
In a December 2025 sermon at EPIC, Baajour preached that “The one who’s a kaffir and died as kaffir, they have the curse of Allah, the curse of the angels and the curse of every human being,” while declaring that Muslims should not pray for the welfare of non-believers upon their death and urging the faithful to “die with your anger, die with your hatred” toward Jews and Christians.
He has openly endorsed Sharia’s violent corporal punishments, insisting that Muslims who object to amputating the hands of thieves are effectively outside the faith and speaking approvingly of stoning for adultery.
Even the United Kingdom recognized the danger. In January 2026, Baajour was set to embark on a three-city UK speaking tour in London, Manchester (at Didsbury Mosque, the former worship site of Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi’s family), and Leicester, sponsored by the UK charity Muslim Aid in partnership with Al-Khaleel Institute and Tours. Anger erupted across British media and Parliament as details of his Hamas-glorifying sermons and antisemitic rants surfaced. Conservative MP Nick Timothy wrote directly to the Home Secretary demanding Baajour’s visa be revoked, warning that “Baajour has openly and proudly praised horrific violence” and that allowing him in would let extremists to “remake Britain.”
The Home Office ultimately confirmed Baajour had no permission to enter the UK and would have been turned away at the border, forcing him to cancel the tour. British officials stated plainly: “There is no place in the UK for foreign nationals who spread hate or push extremist ideas.”
Baajour’s influence extends far beyond EPIC: he served as keynote speaker at the Islamic Center of Quad Cities (ICQC) fundraiser on February 1, 2025, and is a regular at mega-mosque fundraisers across Texas, helping advance coordinated efforts to build self-sustaining Sharia-governed enclaves – including EPIC’s own EPIC City project.
The pattern is clear: Altabaa’s Unity Center is not some neutral community space. It is the natural extension of the same ideological pipeline that runs through EPIC, AlMaghrib, Yasir Qadhi, and now brings EPIC’s own imam straight to the pulpit. Even countries like the UK have slammed the door on this hate preacher – yet in Texas, he continues to be platformed.
Campus Radicalization: Mohamad’s Role as Texas Tech MSA President
This same network’s priorities move into open activism. As former president of Texas Tech’s Muslim Student Association (MSA), the Muslim Brotherhood’s “youth wing“, Mohamad has been front and center in pro-Palestine events on campus. These gatherings with the militant Islamic organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) routinely feature Islamic rituals like the janazah funeral prayer (led by his father, Imam Samer, for Gaza casualties), chants, poetry, and aggressive divestment demands against Israel. The political-religious theater normalizes supremacist ideology on taxpayer-funded grounds while the family’s ICSP hub provides the institutional backbone, all while Texas Tech University turns a blind eye or worse, lends its prestige to the very Islamic Center network driving the Islamification of the region.
Muslim Brotherhood’s Stealth Jihad: Professionals With a Smile Build Parallel Sharia Societies While Infiltrating American Institutions
The Unity Center is not organic “unity” – it mirrors the Muslim Brotherhood’s calculated two-front war, spelled out in their own documents. While one front penetrates Western institutions from within, the other quietly builds self-contained parallel societies that will one day operate completely outside non-Muslim systems. The 1982 “Project” and the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum both demand exactly this: infiltrate every sector of American life while simultaneously constructing an Islamic “civilizational” enclave that rejects assimilation and keeps money, loyalty, and authority locked inside the ummah.
RAIR Foundation exposed this exact strategy playing out in Florida through the Islamic Tampa Area Muslim Professional Association (iTAMPA), a physician-led network that functions as a Muslim-only referral system. Speakers at iTAMPA events openly declared the goal: create “a referral pattern… for Muslims to refer to other Muslim providers,” treat healthcare as “the most trusted and durable entry point for deeper institutional control,” and ensure “everything we do is Sharia compliant” under an Amir and shura council. One board member admitted he was actively switching “all the providers I’m going to as much as possible… I want to go to a Muslim… preferentially over non-Muslims.” The endgame is crystal clear: never need the non-Muslim, never give money back to the non-Muslim, and build enough economic and professional power so the community can live cradle-to-grave under its own parallel Islamic system.
Lubbock is now mirroring this exact playbook through the Altabaa family and ICSP network. Imam Samer Altabaa, trained under Kuftaro, leads the ideological core while his son Mohamad trains as a medical professional — perfectly positioned to one day serve the parallel healthcare enclave. Both Othman Shibly (Hassan Shibly’s father) and Samer Altabaa studied under Grand Mufti Kuftaro; now their sons and networks are deployed across the country to replicate the model— keeping everything within Muslim communities. Hassan Shibly himself operates as the legal arm, running Muslim Legal, a boutique firm explicitly marketed to American Muslims seeking “faith-based solutions” to their legal needs.
The registered agent for HNA International LLC, the entity that owns The Unity Center property, is Hosam N. Attaya, an Interventional Radiologist. The Islamic Center of the South Plains board, where Samer Altabaa served as imam for many years, is also stacked with high-powered medical professionals who embed this parallel system locally: Mohammed M. Bakdash, MD, an endocrinologist; Zuhair M. Shihab, MD, board-certified ophthalmologist, glaucoma specialist, and a Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center professor; Timothy T. (Tamim) Khater, MD, PhD, cornea and refractive surgery expert who founded West Texas Eye Associates and is married into the Shoukfeh family; and the late Fawwaz M. Shoukfeh, MD, interventional cardiologist, founder of Lubbock Heart Hospital, and original ICSP founder. These are not fringe figures; they are respected doctors with decades inside Texas hospitals, universities, and clinics.
It is no surprise that physicians – highly educated, respected, and in positions of trust – are now leading the charge in the Islamization of America. While Americans have been conditioned to picture the threat as bomb-vest jihadists or extremist imams, the real danger unfolding across the country is a sophisticated professional-class civilization jihad.
This is not the work of “extremist factions” – it is Muslim Brotherhood proxies and other groups helping to carry out their civilization jihad mission. They infiltrate professions, build parallel Islamic systems, while routing money, influence and power away from Western institutions straight to Islamic ones.
Strategic Expansion in Red-State Texas: Why the Unity Center Matters
While Mohamad Altabaa is carefully packaged in glowing profiles as a charming, hardworking medical student and “bridge-builder,” the generational pattern is unmistakable: from the father’s decades-long imam leadership at the Islamic Center of the South Plains and ICSP interfaith camouflage (cheered on by Texas Tech’s own president), to the son’s lightning-fast conversion of a public elementary school into the Unity Center mosque. Mainstream media wants you to see harmless integration and “unity.” Patriots see the strategic advance — abandoned public buildings repurposed for mosques, universities hosting Sharia-infused protests, foreign-funded dawah networks, and polite language masking the steady demographic conquest of the Bible Belt.
The Unity Center is not about genuine American integration; it is another beachhead for the ummah in the heart of Texas. Local officials and Texans must demand full transparency on funding, foreign influences, and ideological ties before more public assets are surrendered to this expansion.
