Texas Islamist Charter School Funded With $75 Million of State Monies

In March, the Texas Scorecard reported that the Texas Education Agency was investigating the Manara Academy District, a charter school system. An agency spokesman confirmed “an open investigation … examining district-level systems, practices and compliance related to allegations concerning prohibited use of instructional materials and classroom activities.”

The investigation is welcome. New research indicates that the Manara Academy system, which comprises three schools across the cities of Irving and Arlington, is the product of a significant Islamist network in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This charter school, its teachers and officials, openly collaborate with terror-aligned institutions and radical activists.

Such radicalism is made possible by the taxpayer. As a charter school system, the Manara Academy schools rely on public support. Federal data indicates $47,000 of direct grants, as well as $5.3 million of subawards routed through the Texas Education Agency and the Texas Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, a payee dataset maintained by the Texas Comptroller reports some $75 million of public funding to the Manara system, of which over $60 million was provided through the state’s Foundation School fund.

The Salafi Network that Built Manara

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, two activists involved with the Islamic Center of Irving established the Manara Academy in 2009, stating their intention to transfer their children from the mosque’s own Islamic school to this new charter school. The newspaper notes that “leaders from the Islamic Center of Irving mosque have promoted the school.”

The Islamic Center of Irving (ICI) has a long history of extremism, employing numerous imams from the radical Deobandi sect. In 2019, one ICI imam, Zia ul-Haque Sheikh, was ordered to pay $2.5 million to a Texas woman who accused him of sexual exploitation. The woman in question reportedly alerted another imam, Nouman Ali Khan, the president of the mosque board. However, Nouman Ali Khan reportedly discouraged the woman from reporting the behavior, stating it would harm his reputation as a “religious leader and family man.”

The ICI’s Nouman Ali Khan, who has seemingly justified sex slavery and sanctioned the beating of wives, was complicit in a sex scandal of his own. In 2017, leaked photos revealed apparent attempts by Khan to bribe and threaten different women online.

Minutes of Manara committee meetings in 2014 indicate that former mosque member and Manara president Ehap Sabri successfully nominated Nouman Ali Khan to join the charter school’s “Leadership Quality Board.”

Today, Sabri is a leader of another mosque, the Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Irving, where he serves as board chair. The Valley Ranch Islamic Center is one of the key mosques in the United States belonging to the modernist Salafi movement, a fast-growing Islamist force in the West.

As reported by Joe Kaufman, a counter-Islamist activist, Yaser Birjas, the imam of the mosque, is an open supporter of terror operatives Ali Tamimi, who “encouraged associates to join a militant group deemed by the U.S. to engage in terrorism,” as well as Aafia Siddiqui, a convicted Al-Qaeda operative whom the FBI found to be planning a “mass casualty attack” against targets across America.

Birjas is also an instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute, another Texas component of the modernist Salafi movement. Birjas’s colleagues have included Abdullah Hakim Quick, who once urged God to “purify” Al-Aqsa from the “filth of the Yahud [Jews],” and “clean Afghanistan and Iraq” from the “filth of the Kafiroun [unbelievers].”

Birjas lamented the collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, and declared the late Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi to be a “martyr” whose death he was “mourning.” Birjas seemingly declares criticism of the terror groups ISIS and Hamas to be an “attack” on Islam.

Videos published by the Manara Academy appear to show Yaser Birjas teaching children at this publicly funded school.

Radical imam Yaser Birjas appears in a Manara Academy video

Today, the Valley Ranch Islamic Center’s staff include former employees of Manara. And both the radical Valley Ranch mosque and the Islamic Center of Irving have continued to partner openly with Manara, as recently as April 2026.

The Manara Academy employs a chaplain, Sheikh Youssef Bakeer, who also works at the Valley Ranch mosque. Bakeer previously worked for Helping Hand for Relief and Development, the chief U.S. charitable arm of the violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami. In 2017, HHRD organized a conference at a government-run college in Pakistan in collaboration with the charitable and political wings of the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Other Radical Ties

In 2024, a “Run for Gaza” organized by Manara received sponsorship from some leading Islamist organizations, including the Muslim American Society, which was once described by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” The state of Texas designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in November 2025.

Manara Academy District Board members Dr. Ali Shaqlaih (left) and Dr. Ehap Sabri (right) with the $10,000 donation check for the Gaza Palestinian American Association (GPAA)

A press release published by Manara announced the race raised $10,000 for the Gaza Palestinian American Association. Leading GPAA official Nafez Abo-Elrich appears to be an open supporter of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, in which terrorists murdered over 1,000 people.

The Manara Academy’s charter school application expressed the charter school’s intention to segregate students by gender (a common feature of Islamist-controlled schools) and to hire full-time Arabic teachers.

The application also reveals that early financial backers of the Manara Academy included $10,000 from the Amoud Foundation, a leading Islamist charity in North Texas, whose head is closely involved with the radical East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), which is currently under investigation by state and federal authorities.

That the Amoud Foundation, a humanitarian aid charity ostensibly focused on providing welfare support to impoverished communities in East Africa, would also want to provide the seed money to a charter school system in wealthy North Texas is revealing.

Indeed, other local and national Muslim commentators patently regard Manara as a Muslim school. A 2009 article in the magazine of the Islamic Society of North America (which federal prosecutors listed as an unindicted coconspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case) includes Manara in a list of DFW “Islamic schools.” Other radical mosques in North Texas advertise Manara, and local Muslim bloggers have described the charter school as “basically” an Islamic school. Another parent’s blog in 2017, since removed, explained:

“Manara Academy was started by Muslims for this Muslim community. It is a charter school and is free. Every student has to take a second language, either Arabic or French. The school also provides a verified halal breakfast and lunch. The school has early release every Friday so kids can attend Juma [Friday prayer] with their parents. … The kids are allowed to pray at school if you sign a form. I’m not saying they can’t pray at public schools because I’ve never seen that be a problem. There is just more of an understanding at Manara.”

Later, it emerged, some of Manara’s Arabic instruction would be provided in coordination with the Qatar Foundation, a terror-linked arm of the Qatari regime. Manara appeared to be involved with the Qatar Foundation’s “Al-Masdar” curriculum, which includes lessons for children with titles such as “Express your loyalty to Qatar.”

Manara events include vendors selling Islamic headscarves, toy drives to mark Islamic holidays, involvement with local Muslim cultural events, and joint “outreach” programs with local Islamic activist organizations. Notwithstanding the previous radical underpinnings of the school, even these benign activities risk violating the constitutional limitations on the school’s promotion of religious ideology.

Extremism in the Classroom

One Manara event with the charter system’s local “outreach” partner, a group named American Islamic Diversity, was advertised in Arabic by the school and included, curiously, a lecture on how to “help newcomers navigate the system in the West.”

The speaker was the partner organization’s CEO Ruba Qewar, who has taught at Islamic schools across DFW. Elsewhere, Qewar has given anti-Semitic lectures in which she claims “the first people who are going to follow the Antichrist are the Jews because they are still waiting for him.”

Such extremism appears to spill into the classroom. Photos published by Manara’s Parent-Teacher Organization include displays at the school about Palestine, on which children have written: “In the Palestinian heart, at least, there is no Israel,” and “Red [of the Palestinian flag] is the blood spilled from no harmony.”

A teacher at Manara, Lien Sahloul, has disseminated, on her private social media, warnings against interfaith dialogue with Jews, promoted sermons by local Salafi imams (including one from the Valley Ranch Islamic Center) justifying the October 7 attacks by Hamas, and expressed support for convicted Al-Qaeda terrorist Aafia Siddiqui.

Sahloul has taught at both Manara and at the mosque school that first backed Manara’s establishment. Indeed, several of Manara’s teachers moved to Manara from radical Islamist-run schools across North Texas.

Laila Rumsey, before working at Manara, worked at the Texas-based Brighter Horizons Academy for over 10 years. Brighter Horizons was established and staffed by Hamas-aligned operatives involved in the Holy Land Foundation, since designated by the federal government over its terror activities. Its staff today includes the niece of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. Today, the Brighter Horizons curricula appear to teach children hatred of “disbelievers” and laud the work of banned terror charities. A principal at one of the Manara schools, Iram Shaikh-Jilani, also previously worked as “head of school” at Brighter Horizons.

This long list of extremist causes, operatives and organizations established and underpins the Manara Academy District and its schools. That over $75 million of Texas taxpayers’ money should have subsidized this enormous initiative illustrates the ease with which radical movements can exploit well-intended efforts to reform and improve public education. This is not an acceptable price to pay.