Texas Governor Greg Abbott has launched investigations into mosques, “banned” shariah law, and labelled the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a “terrorist” organization.

Texas is home to over 600,000 Muslims, one of the largest, wealthiest Muslim populations in the US, with Houston hosting the state’s largest community. A 2023 Houston Muslim study found that 86% hold college degrees, more than half earn over $100K annually, and 16% earn 250K or more.

Despite this the community remains politically weak amid intensifying attacks. Existing political organising is often a shell, shaped more by elite capture priorities than grassroots needs.

Texas also has the fifth-largest Muslim population in the US and has more mosques than three states that rank above it.

In the 1980s, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) led a surge in mosque construction to meet internal community needs nationally. But by 1990, an ICNA article lamented that most American Muslims did not attend mosques regularly.

Yet, 35 years later, the focus remains much the same.

But while few Muslims question the need for more mosques, almost no one asks whether the community needs political infrastructure; which political strategist Richard Healey defines  as “a strategic system to win political, economic, and ideological power.”

The Grassroots Policy Project outlines three dimensions of power: direct political involvement, organizational infrastructure, and ideological influence. Texas Muslims have fragments of the first, almost none of the second, and on the third, identity politics works against them.

What does exist is often structurally misaligned.

Where’s the power? The absence of coordinated political strategy

Money in politics is controversial, but it remains one of the most effective tools for influence. When used strategically, political action committees (PACs) offer a path to collective leverage. But in Texas, Muslims have built few PACs, and even fewer with independent agendas.

Since Oct. 7th, the genocide in Gaza catalysed political energy across Muslim communities. My research identified only a handful of small Muslim PACs in Texas, most founded in the last two years.

Irving Muslims PAC, launched in April 2025, after early voting started, is a work in progress that offers clear proof of concept. Irving, home to nearly half of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex’s 80,000 Muslims, illustrates that  potential.

In its first campaign for Place 2 on the city council, Irving Muslims PAC spent no money but mobilized the Muslim vote. They partnered with Families for Irving (FFI) PAC, a Catholic-led group, to oppose the Lone Star Conservative Action Fund—a casino-backed PAC tied to Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, a major donor pushing to legalize gambling statewide.

For both Catholics and Muslims, the concern was gambling’s social harms; for Muslims, Adelson’s funding of Israeli settler groups linked to West Bank ethnic cleansing of........

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