Is This Texas Suburb the New ‘Ground Zero Mosque’?
It may just be an empty field, but for Republican politicians and right-wing media figures it’s a bona fide sharia crisis.
Texas Republicans Go Nuts Over Muslim Neighborhood
TOP TEXAS REPUBLICANS ARE falling over each other announcing investigations into a “Sharia city” set to be built outside of Dallas.
But, at least publicly, there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal about the planned construction. Instead, figures like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton just seem really mad that a group of Muslims are trying to develop some land.
Ground hasn’t even been broken on “EPIC City,” a 402-acre suburban development near Josephine, Texas. But it’s already attracted fury from both high-ranking government officials and grassroots activists.
The controversy, which has percolated up from TikTok and regional talk radio into Fox News segments in just a few weeks, recalls the “Ground Zero mosque” saga of 2010, when right-wing media personalities became convinced that a planned Islamic cultural center blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center was in truth a secret Muslim victory edifice celebrating 9/11.
Similarly, it’s not clear what specifically about the EPIC City plans, put forward by a development group associated with the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC) mosque, has inspired the outrage, aside from the group’s religion. The project is set to include a Muslim school and mosque, and the developers have said they’ll abide by fair-housing laws and not bar anyone because of their religion.
That’s all enough to garner EPIC City a sort of El Chapo–level investigative response from the Texas government. On March 31, Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to look into EPIC for “potential criminal activities.” In an X post, he claimed that “a dozen state agencies” are “investigating” the project. Abbott has repeatedly suggested EPIC City’s planners intend the community to be a “no-go zone” where law enforcement would be banned from enforcing American laws.
EPIC City has also become grist in the budding Republican Senate primary between Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn. Paxton has perhaps outdone even Abbott in his zeal to stop Muslims from building a neighborhood, announcing the first investigation into the project in March.
Not to be left out, Cornyn himself on Monday called for a Justice Department investigation.
Again, it’s not really clear what the case is here. A journalist for KERA, a North Texas media nonprofit, noticed the same thing, writing that for all the announced investigations, Abbott hasn’t explained “what laws may have been violated.”
In an appearance on Fox host Laura Ingraham’s show, Abbott offered some thin gruel—allegations that the EPIC mosque in Plano was conducting funeral services without a license, and that they had misled investors by describing the buildings they wanted to build on the Josephine property without having first obtained the building permits to build them. (Abbott considered this sufficient grounds for calling in the “elite Texas Rangers” to investigate.) The Texas Funeral Service Commission is set to bring the hammer down on the funeral thing, sending the Plano mosque a cease-and-desist.
But does conducting a few funerals really amount to securing a beachhead for the militant advance of sharia law in Texas? Representatives for Abbott and Paxton, as well as the developer and lawyer for EPIC City, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
LIKE ANY GOOD LEGAL CASE, this one appears to have been inspired by some viral shortform video. In mid-March, a clip of an unnamed woman saying she was worried EPIC City would be governed “under Sharia law” exploded on X, garnering more than 27,000 retweets.
Since then, EPIC City has been picked up by various right-wing talkers, from Glenn Beck to Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau. A guest on Mark Levin’s show speculated that people affiliated with the mosque appeared to have built “an observation post and possibly a shooting platform” near a police station to take on the cops. YouTuber Dave Rubin said EPIC City was going to be “a giant Islamic mega-city.”
This anger is being felt on the ground in Dallas, too. On March 31, a county commissioner’s hearing about EPIC stretched for more than four hours, as residents opposed to the project testified that the development would be a sharia-law compound filled with stonings and honor killings.
“It will be a gated, guarded compound, and our law enforcement would never be able to touch it,” one resident warned.
EPIC’s developers have hired Paxton’s own criminal defense lawyer, Dan Cogdell, a twist that hasn’t been lost on Cornyn’s campaign. Cogdell, a classic example of the “brash Texas attorney” type, called Abbott’s insinuations about EPIC being planned as a sovereign sharia zone “bullshit” and accused the governor of dispatching Texas Rangers to guard an empty field, since EPIC City construction hasn’t even begun.
“The idea that he’s got the Rangers involved to investigate a cow patty—come on,” Cogdell said. He went on to describe his clients as “suffering from, essentially, gubernatorial hate speech,” and he added that they have been antagonized and received death threats as a result of the campaign against the project.
Unlike the “Ground Zero mosque,” EPIC’s opponents have struggled to find a kind of geographic symbolism on the level of the World Trade Center. But one critic has come up with an interesting idea involving the television show Dallas.
Far-right activist Amy Mek, who has almost half a million followers on X, tried to key in on this story’s emotional resonance for opponents of the development in a post on Tuesday. The EPIC mosque group, she claims, once hosted an event at the Texas ranch where Dallas was filmed, and which now hosts an event center.
Yes, she said: The imagined mansion of oil baron J.R. Ewing had been repurposed for an Eid celebration. This had to be a deliberate, strategic choice.
“Dallas was ‘just a show,’ right?” Mek asked in her X post. “Wrong.”
Mek went on to claim that the EPIC City group has targeted Ewing’s fictional legacy to punish real-life Texans.
“It stood for ambition, power, Texas pride—and that’s exactly why it was targeted,” she wrote. “This isn’t coexistence. It’s conquest—one Texas symbol at a time.”
Apparently in Texas, only white Christians can overreach. Is there any talk of “reciprocal” investigations into sketchy mega churches, their wild claims and schemes for collections? Thought not.
This is positively dystopian. America is going to become a patchwork of no-go zones. Based on religion, creed, opinion about the 2020 election, etc. Why is the fictional moral panic outstripping the genuine panic about our collapsing rule of law?