A floor-to-ceiling image of President Trump watched over the prayer hall at Iman Academy, an Islamic private school in Houston, in the same space where students also recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
School leaders hoped such examples of patriotism, along with students’ academic success, would prove the Iman Academy was fit to participate in a new Texas program that will provide public funds for private schools later this year.
But they also worried that their school, and others featuring Islamic religious instruction, would not be included.
That’s because the rollout of Texas’ private school voucher program, among the largest in the nation, landed this year in the middle of a sharp escalation in anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right. The voucher program has set off bitter political and legal fights in Texas, inflaming rivalries among top Republicans and drawing Islamic schools to federal court over what they contend is religious discrimination.
Republican politicians in a number of states have recently voiced anti-Muslim sentiment reminiscent of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The rhetoric has been particularly direct in the 2026 midterm campaigns in Texas, where the Muslim population has grown in recent decades.
“No more Muslims. No more criminals. No more marxists. No more corporatists,” wrote Representative Chip Roy, a Republican running for Texas attorney general, on social media last week. “#SaveTexas.”
In recent months, the possibility of state funding going to Islamic private schools has emerged as a new front in what conservative activists and Republican officials described as a fight against “radical Islam.”
This has complicated the initial phase of the $1 billion school choice program, a signature policy achievement of Gov. Greg Abbott. Muslim civil rights advocates are concerned the attacks could spread to Republican-led states with more established school choice programs. The Florida legislature passed a bill last month that would exclude schools with connections to designated terror groups from the state voucher program, a move critics said was aimed at Islamic schools.
For months, Islamic schools in Texas waited for an invitation to participate in the new program. No such invitation arrived.
“How much more American we can get?” said Noor Mobeen, the director of Iman Academy’s main campus, during a February visit. “The only thing we have to change is our faith, and then there is no point in having it.”
The question of funding private schools that include some Islamic religious instruction has scrambled the usual politics around school vouchers. Democratic lawmakers in Texas who strongly opposed the program’s creation last year now argue in favor of inclusion.
Two of the state’s top Republicans, Ken Paxton and Kelly Hancock, have accused each other of not doing enough to investigate Islamic private schools that might otherwise be eligible for state funds.
“Texas cannot be asleep at the wheel as radical Islam spreads,” wrote Mr. Hancock, the state comptroller, who oversees the school voucher program, in a March 24 letter to Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general.
Mr. Paxton responded by calling Mr. Hancock a “Never Trumper and an incompetent loser.”
The attorney general said his office would no longer represent the comptroller in a federal lawsuit filed by several Muslim schools that claimed their exclusion violated the constitution. The comptroller’s office has sought private representation in the case.
Invitations to join the program have been sent to more than 2,200 schools across Texas over the last few months, including many with a Christian educational focus. But those with Islamic instruction were not initially included. As a result, parents seeking those schools could not select them when applying for the program on the state’s website.
Mr. Abbott has suggested it was no oversight. “We don’t want school choice funds going to radical Islamic indoctrination,” the governor wrote on social media last month.
Some schools, like the Iman Academy, hoped the state would eventually allow them to take part in the program, which provides more than $10,000 per student for most families enrolling in approved private schools.
Others went to federal court in Houston.
“Something had to be done about it,” said Mehdi Cherkaoui, a lawyer and the father of two elementary school students at the Houston Quran Academy in the suburb of Spring, who filed a federal suit last month. “I’ve been in Texas 31 years. It’s never been like this.”
Several Islamic schools also sued, arguing they qualified for the voucher program but faced exclusion because of their religion. The state argued that the schools were still under consideration. (The two cases were consolidated into one.)
As deadlines approached, a federal judge ordered Texas to extend the deadline and allow the schools to apply. The state began inviting Islamic private schools to the voucher program at the end of last month, and nearly all had received invites, according to lawyers involved in the case.
Despite this legal victory, the path forward for Islamic schools remained uncertain.
Mr. Hancock said in his letter to the attorney general that the schools were only “temporarily allowed to participate” by the court. Lawyers in the case worried that parents seeking to enroll their children in the Islamic schools would not receive state funding without further court intervention.
In his letter, Mr. Hancock urged further investigation of the schools and said the principal of the Houston Quran Academy of Katy had documented ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1990s. He also urged Mr. Paxton to consider blocking the school from the voucher program and possibly revoking its charter.
“It’s pretty clear from the comptroller’s own letter that the intent to discriminate is still there,” said Maha Ghyas, a lawyer for the schools in the case.
Conservative activists commended Mr. Abbott and Mr. Hancock, who was appointed by the governor last year.
“This has nothing to do with religion,” said Mandy Drogin, a prominent school choice proponent at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “No one is implicating any America-loving citizens.”
She hopes state leaders “will take another look at who is allowed to access funds,” she said.
But Democratic lawmakers said the state had opened itself up to claims of discrimination.
“By selectively filtering participants based on religious affiliation or lawful associations, the state risks violating the First Amendment,” read a letter signed by more than 50 Democrats in the Texas Legislature.
A spokesman for Mr. Hancock said Tuesday that the state would “protect the integrity of the program” and ensure that “no taxpayer funding flows to organizations affiliated with foreign adversaries or terrorist organizations.”
Muslims represent around 2 percent of the Texas population, according to estimates from the Pew Research Center, up from less than 1 percent two decades ago. As a result, the number of mosques has increased, and private schools that feature Islamic education have expanded.
During the recent visit to the Iman Academy, children in prekindergarten identified sight words at a lunchtime presentation for their parents. Families at the school represent more than 40 different nationalities, many from Muslim countries in the Middle East and Africa who live in the Houston area, school officials said.
At the middle school, a seventh-grade science class listened as a student presented a small structure he had built to withstand shaking. A math class went over geometric shapes. In a fourth-grade class on the Quran, students practiced reciting religious aphorisms in Arabic and English.
The school has grown to 1,500 students on two campuses, up from a few dozen when it was founded in the mid-1990s. Its main campus occupies a converted strip mall, with the middle and high schools housed in a two-story former Chase Bank building.
“You have here a good school that believes in American values,” said the school’s president, Ahmed Zaqoot, who immigrated to the United States from Gaza. “If you are not going to help them to fulfill their faith and to do their education for this world, where those kids will go?”
For months, the school tried to make its case to state officials, sending emails but receiving little reply, said Mr. Mobeen, the main campus director. Last week, Mr. Mobeen traveled to Austin, hoping to meet with the comptroller’s office. He did not have an appointment.
“When I was escorted upstairs, I had tears,” he said. He said he eventually met for 30 minutes with Mary Katherine Stout, the director of the voucher program, and was told in the meeting that the school would be invited to participate.
He said he was given a banner to display at the school that declared, “We proudly accept Texas Education Freedom Accounts.”
Around 350 families at the school have since applied to the program, Mr. Mobeen said. “This is the country that they know,” he said. “They are not going anywhere.”
J. David Goodman is the Texas bureau chief for The Times, based in Houston.
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