Aminah Knight had an idea two years ago to mark a major Islamic holiday by throwing an unusual party for Muslim families in the suburbs of Dallas — at an indoor water park.
The mosque she originally wanted to partner with turned her down, opposed to the idea of a swimming party to celebrate Eid al-Adha that May.
But Ms. Knight, a former public-school teacher from New York City, was determined. She wanted something for families — and especially for young women and girls who, like her, enjoyed swimming but disliked the attention that full-body swimwear, common in the Middle East, often drew at American pools.
“We swim too,” Ms. Knight thought. She refused to settle for another bounce house party.
She traveled from mosque to mosque across North Texas’ booming Muslim community, talking up her event. She made her own website and flyer. And her efforts worked. Hundreds attended.
The water park that hosted the party worked with Ms. Knight to plan the event again last year, allowing her to rent out the entire venue. Even more people came.
So this year, as Eid approached, Ms. Knight prepared for a third installment of what was becoming an annual tradition for Dallas-area Muslims.
What she did not comprehend — until it was too late — was just how fraught Texas had become for Muslims over the last year.
Ms. Knight, a 43-year-old mother of six who runs a preschool and day care outside Fort Worth, had heard about rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Texas. But she had not been paying close attention to the politics. She didn’t realize that politicians — including the governor, attorney general and Republican state legislators — as well as members of the conservative media rarely missed an opportunity to present Muslims as different and potentially dangerous.
Ms. Knight did not consider that her event was exactly the type to attract attention on the right. Instead she focused on throwing another successful party. She had a flyer ready, which she shared widely on social media last year, when more than 500 people turned out. She changed a few words, adding that the event would be “family-friendly.”
And she kept the part that said: “Muslims Only.”
She didn’t think twice about it. After all, the event celebrated a Muslim holiday. There would be halal meat, Islamic music, a private prayer area and a dress code of modest swimwear.
She wanted observant families to feel comfortable. She never thought anyone would mind.
**
Ms. Knight grew up in a large family squeezed into a small apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East Flatbush. Her father, who immigrated from Trinidad, converted to Islam after discovering the religion in the U.S. Her mother, from nearby Guyana, converted after Ms. Knight was born — the fourth of six children, all girls.
Growing up, Ms. Knight stood out among her Black peers because of the hijab she wore starting in middle school, but she blended in on the city sidewalks.
She went out without her head scarf only once, on Sept. 11, 2001. Then 18, she feared that people would associate her with the attacks. But without it, she felt immediately uncomfortable, as if the sun were burning her hair. She never left home without a hijab again.
By the time she had her own family, Ms. Knight worried more often about discrimination based on race than on religion. She and her husband, also born in Brooklyn to Muslim converts, lived for several years in the United Arab Emirates — an “amazing fantasy” that she pursued after seeing “Sex and the City 2.” But racism lurked under the surface there. Her son faced racial taunts at school.
Her husband, Muhammad Abdullah, suggested that they move to Texas to be closer to his oil field work. At first, she was horrified, worried that her family would face bigotry there. But in 2018, they moved to the Fort Worth suburbs.
It was not what she expected.
“I’d be at Walmart or Target or wherever in a hijab,” Ms. Knight said, “and people were just complimenting me all the time, especially little white ladies. I feel like, This is great. I love Texas!”
After the move, Ms. Knight, who has a doctorate in education from Vanderbilt University, opened the day care and preschool in the suburb of Hurst.
Everything felt amazing and safe. Until last month.
**
Mr. Abdullah was the first to notice the attention his wife’s party was getting — and not in a good way.
As an imam at one of Texas’ oldest mosques, a historically Black congregation in South Dallas, Mr. Abdullah has an active presence on social media.
That’s where he saw a local podcast host talking about Ms. Knight’s flyer.
“It says right here: ‘For Muslims only,’” Nicholas Rice, a local conservative podcaster, told his audience on “Nick’s Right Podcast.” “Can you imagine the backlash that Christians would get if we had an event and we said: ‘For Christians only’?”
Mr. Abdullah told his wife immediately. “They have a thing about you,” he said, describing the clip he recalled seeing on May 3.
Then a reporter from The New York Post contacted her.
It was clear that excluding people based on their religion was a problem. Ms. Knight said later that there were no plans to ask about attendees’ religion — that the language was only to ensure a Muslim-observant dress code for swimmers at an event celebrating a Muslim holiday. She had not considered that anyone outside the local Muslim community would even see the flyer.
She replaced the offending words on the flyer, highlighting the requirement for “modest dress.”
The change did little to stop the uproar. “The event organizer is trying to cover their tracks,” wrote Sara Gonzales, a host for BlazeTV, a conservative platform. She saw the event as part of the “Islamification” of Texas.
Most who objected focused on the words “Muslims Only,” arguing that the privately-run water park, Epic Waters, which is owned by the City of Grand Prairie, should not be able to exclude anyone on the basis of religion. Some in the Muslim community were also upset at Ms. Knight for drawing negative attention.
On May 5, Ms. Knight updated the event’s website to explain that no one would be excluded, so long as they followed the dress code. “If you are a friend of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code,” she wrote on the website, “this event is FOR YOU TOO!”
The City of Grand Prairie appeared to be on her side, issuing a statement that day saying that the water park was allowed to be rented out for private events.
Ms. Knight hoped it would blow over. Then Gov. Greg Abbott weighed in.
**
The Texas governor has been increasingly willing to use his control over state funds for public safety as a way to force changes from local governments. He did so in April in a showdown over immigration enforcement in Houston. And on May 6, he did so again to stop the water park party.
In a letter, Mr. Abbott’s public safety office told the mayor of Grand Prairie that Ms. Knight’s party was “discriminatory,” and warned that the city would lose $530,000 from the state, if the event were allowed to go on. By then Ms. Knight had posted that the event was open to all, but in the letter the governor’s office pointed to a “frequently asked questions” portion of the event website where it still said the park had been “exclusively reserved for Muslims.”
The governor left no doubt of what he wanted to see.
“The City must cancel the event and commit to never allowing something like it again,” Mr. Abbott wrote on social media.
Hours later, the city said it had canceled the party. A spokeswoman for Grand Prairie said the move was “in the best interest” of the city.
A spokesman for Mr. Abbott said the governor had called for Ms. Knight’s party to be canceled because local governments may “not facilitate discrimination at taxpayer expense.” He did not explain why canceling the party was necessary even after Ms. Knight said it would be open to all.
For Ms. Knight, whose personal cellphone was listed on the event flyer, the letter spurred an onslaught of calls, texts and online messages. At first, she answered a few of the anonymous calls, including one from a woman who identified herself as a Baptist and started off wanting to know “what you Muslims are up to.”
Ms. Knight, who was driving at the time, stayed on the line for about an hour, mostly listening. The woman later softened and expressed some empathy.
“I just appreciate that you’re talking to me,” the woman said. “In Christianity, we get mocked too. The atheists are constantly taking us down.”
Ms. Knight talked with reporters as well, looking to explain herself, maintaining the hope that, somehow, her event could still go on, now that the flyer said that anyone could attend.
“I changed it,” she recalled thinking. “Aren’t revisions allowed?”
Ms. Knight agreed to a video interview with Ms. Gonzales, who had warned about “Islamification” in Texas.
The conversation, held a day after the governor’s letter, quickly went south.
Ms. Gonzales attacked Ms. Knight’s intelligence for a typo in the name of her day care on its website — “Learing Center” rather than “Learning Center” — and questioned whether it was in good standing to operate. Ms. Knight appeared stunned, incredulous to find herself in a kind of rhetorical cage match.
“What is your name actually?” Ms. Knight asked at one point.
Ms. Gonzales, for her part, appeared equally stunned at her guilelessness. “You agreed to do an interview with someone whose name you didn’t know?”
That night, Ms. Knight sat in the bath and called her parents. She felt numb.
The angry calls and text messages sometimes came as early as 6:30 a.m., continuing for days after. Racial slurs. Attacks on Islam. Often both in the same call.
“Aminah Knight will die tonight!” one caller shouted on a message left on voice mail, attacking Islam with epithets, saying that it was “not going to last in my America.”
For several days, Mr. Abdullah sat in his car outside the day care to provide a measure of security.
He said he slept only an hour or two a night that week, consumed by the idea that someone could try to harm Ms. Knight or their children. He began making videos on Instagram, arguing that the objections by Ms. Gonzales and Mr. Abbott to the event were based on a belief that Muslims “do not belong in America.”
The sparring seemed to give Mr. Abdullah new purpose. He began thinking about running for local political office.
For Ms. Knight, a reflective and not a reactive person, the backlash proved to be a struggle. She felt pained by those who questioned whether she should be running a day care.
Her family and friends tried to reassure her across their various group chats.
“My sister tries to be very loving and inclusive, nonjudgmental,” her sister Nsenga Knight said. “I think it’s kind of a wake-up call for her.”
Ms. Knight imagined organizing a new event, a Fourth of July interfaith barbecue to foster mutual understanding. At the same time, she was wary of being public again at all.
But others, including some in Dallas’s politically active Black community, wanted Ms. Knight to make a stand.
**
Soft piano music played and toddlers napped at Ms. Knight’s day care last month, the day after her water park party was to have taken place. She sorted through toys, steeling herself before stepping in front of the news cameras at Grand Prairie City Hall.
Mr. Abdullah had connected with a local civil rights group, which proposed holding a news conference. Together, they would demand that the city explain why the event was canceled, even after the offending language was changed, and seek an apology for singling out Muslim families. Others joined in, including a Unitarian church and the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a national rights group that Mr. Abbott has declared a foreign terrorist organization. (The group has filed suit challenging the designation.)
Ms. Knight went home to pray for guidance. The night before, she wrote what she would say in the Notes app of her phone. “I never set out to be involved in a public fight over religious liberties,” she wrote. “I refuse to accept that I should receive threats because I organized a holiday gathering.”
Then, hours before the event, she decided not to say anything. She was tired of being a target. Instead, she would stand in solidarity as Mr. Abdullah took the lead.
He left their townhouse in Dallas first, to help set up. Ms. Knight stayed behind, cleaning up, readying herself, praying.
By 5 p.m., when the news conference was set to start, Ms. Knight was still at home. Mr. Abdullah began speaking in the lobby of City Hall. Police officers stood watch nearby.
“For the past two years, Muslim families across North Texas have gathered at Epic Waters to celebrate,” he said. “What began as a simple family event was ——”
A man emerged from near the cameras and began shouting.
“Get it out of this country! This is America, this is a Christian country!” the man shouted as the officers stepped between him and the lectern. “Shame on you, you wicked devil!”
The man kept yelling. Mr. Abdullah recognized him as someone who had also come by the mosque.
Some of the speakers struggled to be heard. Others tried turning the heckler into a foil, speaking loudly until the room echoed with competing men’s voices.
“You are the hate that we must drive out of America!” shouted Dominique Alexander, the president of the local civil rights group.
About 45 minutes into the chaotic scene, Ms. Knight arrived to what looked like something out of a movie. Flashing police lights. Pouring rain and thunder. Men pointing at each other and yelling.
She walked through the glass doors with three of her children and instantly regretted bringing them. They stood silently watching, behind the cameras.
The news conference ended. Ms. Knight prayed in a hallway. Then she went to watch the City Council hearing. She saw her husband and several supporters defend her and ask the mayor and Council members to explain their decision to cancel the water party.
Was it because of Islam? The governor? None would say.
The last public speaker was the protesting man, Chris Svochak, who took his time at the podium to tell the Council that Muslims would burn in hell for not believing in Jesus. (“I do this all the time,” Mr. Svochak, a perennial heckler of Muslim events, said later.)
Ms. Knight called out from her seat in the gallery, “We love Jesus,” referring to the Islamic view of him as a prophet of God. Mr. Svochak did not respond.
She left City Hall shaken, glad to be done with it.
In the days that followed, Ms. Knight resumed her daily routine at the day care. Only now the world appeared different, more hostile. The politics she wanted to ignore had become unavoidable.
She felt the need to do something more, and wondered about trying for a bigger position in education, maybe eventually running for the school board. “I’ve wanted to just go back to my quiet life. It’s so much more cozy there. But is it really?” Ms. Knight said.
“Now that all these people have released this energy, that they had maybe been wanting to release, we have to talk about it,” she said. “We still have to live together.”
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