In a May 2024 livestreamed sermon, Yasir Qadhi, arguably one of the most prominent Muslim scholars in North America, addressed the congregation at the East Plano Islamic Center, or EPIC. Wearing a suit jacket with a purple kurta, he extolled the virtues of this mosque: its gymnasium, eight-hundred-plus parking spots, a school, and perhaps most significantly, the density of Muslims living within five miles.
“Allah has blessed us with a number of factors,” said Qadhi. “Alhamdulillah, this masjid is not just a masjid isolated from community; it is a masjid and a community combined in one. We are surrounded by more than a hundred houses [and] an apartment complex; within a five mile radius [we have] a thousand Muslims.”
To build on the achievements of his congregation, Qadhi argued, the community must expand this model: “Not a hundred houses, a thousand houses!”
This was his pitch for EPIC City, a 402-acre siloed real estate project promising a faith-based school, assisted living, clinics, retail, and Hill Country–style suburban housing near Josephine, Texas, about forty miles from downtown Dallas.
EPIC City was sold out within days of its original announcement in 2024. Buyers made initial investments of 500 lots—at $80,000 per lot.
Qadhi’s version of Muslim community building resembles another version of religious community nearby: megachurches and their associated enclaves. Dallas is one of the global epicenters of the megachurch movement—Protestant, mostly Evangelical, churches with large congregations and massive campuses that primarily align themselves with conservative politics.
Indeed, the issue of gender identity has pushed American Muslims to the right in recent years, forming previously unlikely alliances with conservative political movements long characterized by rampant Islamophobia. Muslim parents have become the face of anti-LGBTQ book bans in local school districts like Dearborn, Michigan. And Qadhi, EPIC’s resident scholar, was one of the coauthors of the Navigating Differences letter that attempted to unify Muslim anti-LGBTQ politics. EPIC City represents the culmination of the megachurch enclave for Muslims: a fully planned model city attached to a religious institution that allows families a milieu of social conservatism and an all-inclusive luxury community.
But on February 24 this year, EPIC City publicly came under scrutiny from the state and conservative media when Texas Governor Greg Abbott directly addressed the plans in a tweet: “To be clear, Sharia law is not allowed in Texas. Nor are Sharia cities … Bottom line. The project as proposed in the video is not allowed in Texas.” Abbott launched multiple investigations into EPIC City, while the federal Department of Justice initiated its own probe. But these attacks are not new. The Dallas suburbs, representing the racist legacy of white flight, have become notorious for anti-Muslim rallies, fearmongering around creeping Sharia, and Qur’an defilements. Though the DOJ withdrew its investigation in June, the damage has already been done: except Qadhi, not one person who bought shares in EPIC’s new ventures agreed to or responded to requests for comment for this article, fearing repercussions. Some have even backed out of their plots. Imran Chaudhry, the president of the for-profit entity created to manage EPIC City, declined repeated requests for comment.
The Dallas suburbs thus represent both opportunity and peril for Muslim communities. These communities, mostly wealthy South Asian and Arab professionals, are disconnected from and at times blind to the heightened political challenges of our times: soaring costs of living, unaffordable health care, climate change, and recently, the American-sponsored genocide in Gaza. But alternatively, EPIC City offers citadel-like comfort and security, an alternative to social structures that Muslims have found themselves excluded from. Does it come at the cost of investing in the collective tissue that the current political moment demands?
A TALE OF TWO MOSQUES
Away from the northern suburbs, a different history of Muslim Dallas unfolds. In a small urban community in South Dallas, Masjid Al-Islam broke ground on a new building in March 2024. Founded in 1968 by the Nation of Islam (it later transitioned to Sunnism), it is the oldest mosque in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex and has long carried the struggles of Black Dallas, the inheritance of Jim Crow and economic disinvestment. It bears the scars too—the mosque’s current home, in use since 1979, is derelict, suffering from failing scaffolding and burst pipes.
When deciding on their new mosque’s location, the community chose to stay in the neighborhood, where they had long been known for organizing, outreach, and social services.
“As Muslims, we were combating homelessness, we were combating drug addiction, we were combating the school-to-prison pipeline that primarily Black children are put upon. We were able to create programs designed to fight this, being on the front lines,” Amir Makin, a community member who is also a member of Masjid Al-Islam’s Shura board, told me.
“Given the fact that we knew Islam flourished primarily among the downtrodden—first and foremost those were the ones that resonated with the message—we chose to stay here,” Makin said. Many of the worshippers at Masjid Al-Islam now live outside the area, but their commitment has been to improve the material conditions of South Dallas’s mostly Black community by continuing to run anti-poverty programs.
For a time, the many threads of Dallas Islam congregated at least once a year. In 1977, Muslim immigrants who had settled in Dallas suburbs combined their Eid al-Fitr with the Muslims of Masjid Al-Islam in a backyard. The practice of observing Eid in a single public space, also known as an Eidgah, was a tradition that lasted many years in Dallas’s Fair Park. With the ascendance of mega mosques and associated complexes, each location now holds separate congregational Eid prayer across the DFW area, a trend in line with general suburban fragmentation.
Now Dallas has become a veritable Medina for American Muslims, particularly the well-to-do.
“Dallas is known for their celebrity speakers—the Muslim televangelists,” R. Mohammed, a Muslim law student from Dallas, told me. Muslims even fly from other states and countries to experience Ramadan in Dallas among leaders like Omar Suleiman and AbdelRahman Murphy.
Qadhi is one of the most influential of these celebrity imams, and has served as resident scholar of EPIC since 2019. As one of the largest mosques in the area, EPIC has been central to the growth of Dallas into a Muslim hot spot. EPIC’s current building opened in 2015, surrounded by dozens of upscale houses bedazzled with crystal “MashAllahs” owned by Muslims, a semi-enclave locally known as EPIC 1.0. Their well-produced YouTube channel, which broadcasts each Jummah lecture, also features a bird’s-eye tour of EPIC’s 33,000-square-foot facility.
“In the Muslim community [outside Dallas], Dallas is known for its wealth and celebrity,” Mohammed told me. “People don’t necessarily think about … why, where, how, why this place of all places.”
Wealth and status have not protected EPIC from controversy. In 2022, EPIC was one of the first mosques in the area to welcome back the disgraced preacher Nouman Ali Khan, who allegedly exploited his position to manipulate women into sexual relationships. Several of these women spoke out in 2017, and a number of mosques have since cut ties with Khan. In 2020, EPIC hosted the local police chief for a webinar weeks after the murder of George Floyd despite widespread community backlash.
But when EPIC City was first announced, the response among many in the Muslim community was positive. Given the limited availability and high prices of properties in EPIC 1.0, the original enclave around EPIC, the planned development responded to a demand for more housing. The history of Islamophobia added a feeling of safety in EPIC City, especially for the elder generation.
“[There is] an idealism of being in a utopian community where you’re not judged for being a Muslim,” said Fari Saleh, a community organizer in Dallas. “Combined with the fact that that generation [still believes] in the American dream. Those two things together can [make EPIC City feel like] an attainable vision for the average American Muslim.”
EPIC City, and its wealth consolidation, also offers economic sanctuary during a time when many Muslims are being targeted for political speech.
“There’s nothing wrong with wealth and prosperity in a community … it does give room for people to speak up,” said Mohammed. She mentioned how people fear professional retaliation after advocating for Palestine. A community of people who share similar values and are in a position to hire creates a safe space for mutual support.
Dr. Nimr Ikram, an orthopedic surgeon and an involved congregant at EPIC who lives in the original semi-enclave next to the mosque, talked about the benefits of living within a lively Muslim community. “I always tell my kids, you guys are spoiled [living in Dallas],” he told me.
Ikram mentioned the various Muslim-friendly amenities close to home and the spirit of cooperation present among the Islamic leadership in Dallas. He also noted the heavy involvement of EPIC in the Plano community, citing weekly food distribution events.
“The idea with EPIC 2.0 [EPIC City] is the same thing, inshallah, but to make it bigger and better.”
Others have had reservations about EPIC City, particularly related to its affordability and class composition—that this was an exclusive project that catered to the needs of only the wealthiest Muslims. To purchase units, EPIC City requires potential buyers to qualify for SEC-accredited investor status, with proof of a net worth of at least $1 million excluding primary residence and an income of at least $200,000 a year.
Saleh said no one familiar with EPIC was surprised when they launched EPIC City as an exclusive, luxury enclave. “They’re selling a very specific aesthetic and image of the Muslim community,” she said.
Qadhi acknowledged the affordability issue but characterized it as a symptom of “modern, suburban America” that they are operating within.
“What do you expect us to do?” Qadhi told me. “We cannot solve the problems of middle and upper-class America. … This is a valid criticism, but this should not just apply to our project.” He added that a portion of the project involves rental units, which might help those who can’t afford to buy.
He admitted, however, that at first only people of “certain demographics” will be able to afford living in EPIC City, though the leadership is looking into working with Islamic institutions to ease the burden for lower-income clients. There are currently no plans to build affordable housing in EPIC City.
These barriers to entry have a tendency to produce insular communities with a warped sense of religious practice, out of touch with both core tenets of faith and the material realities of less-wealthy Muslim communities.
Saleh explained that much of the dialogue within DFW mosques echoes prosperity gospel—a Christian belief that God blesses the most pious with material wealth.
“Dallas Muslims appeal to Muslim capitalism,” she said. “They’ll say: ‘Look at what [Islam has] done for me. I drive a Bentley.’”
This type of rhetoric has exposed deep fractures and disparities in the Dallas Muslim community.
“[EPIC City] is not something in our community that we see as an ideal, because we’re largely trying to grow Islam among the people,” said Imam Muhammad Abdul-Jami at Masjid Al-Islam.
Amir Makin pointed to the racialized history of the suburbs and how immigrant Muslim communities are encouraged to assimilate into the American “racial-caste” system. According to Makin, Muslim communities in Dallas are splintered, unaware they are affected by the racial history of the United States. Makin said that the swift development of EPIC City and massive Muslim suburban growth demonstrates a sense of abandonment of Masjid Al-Islam, which as of this writing, is still just short of its $3,000,000 fundraising goal after eight years.
“When you have not placed resources in the foundation that actually gave birth to Islam in North Texas, to me, it’s a little bit hypocritical, and it’s a little shortsighted,” Makin said.
Imam Abdul-Jami credited many of the suburban mosques and the big-name scholars for contributing to the fundraiser in some way. This summer, Yasir Qadhi visited Masjid Al-Islam for the first time. But it is not enough, particularly in proportion to the resources in the suburbs and the level of need at Masjid Al-Islam.
“Muslim communities here can raise a million dollars in one night, but it’ll take (Masjid Al-Islam) like a year or two to raise a million dollars,” said Imam Abdul-Jami. He quickly corrected himself. “Actually, we’ve never raised a million in a year.”
In The Shadow of Dallas History
Dallas has long had a reputation as a city of hate. Following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Dallas leaders had to figure out a way to shed the city’s infamy. In The Dallas Myth, the cultural historian Harvey J. Graff argues that Dallas has long been shaped by a carefully constructed myth emphasizing progress, prosperity, and civic unity while vacating the history of racial, economic, and social inequality. Cultural amnesia gives way to the suburban growth-at-all-costs mindset. Dallas’s suburban expansion reinforced racial and economic segregation, weakened urban infrastructure, and perpetuated the city’s myth of harmonious progress.
Racial divides were reinforced by school district boundaries, zoning laws, and policing. Much of the white flight retreated to the exact northern suburbs where some of the prominent mosques of north Dallas, like EPIC, are now located. Even as Dallas diversified, newer suburbs like Plano and Frisco replicated patterns of economic and racial exclusion.
Early oil money, vast swaths of land, and Dallas’s own roots in fundamentalist Christianity allowed the megachurch movement to thrive along with enclaves that popped up next to them. Dallas’s affluent, pro-business environment attracted wealthy donors who supported evangelical causes, while Texas’s lax regulation of churches made it easy for megachurches to expand financially.
“They made a big deal that we’re going to keep taxes low and regulations low,” said Michael Phillips, a retired professor of history who wrote White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001. “These conservative ministers embraced conservative politics, which kept the wealth of the powerful intact.”
The demographic homogeneity of these congregations reflect specific material conditions. Megachurch enclaves typically arise in upper-middle-class suburbs like Dallas’s, serving as sites of class formation. Property values in surrounding neighborhoods effectively filter membership through economic means; cultural capital is expressed through particular forms of dress, speech, and behavior; and social networks facilitate professional advancement.
It is this same infrastructure that has allowed for the massive growth of a wealthy professional Muslim class in the area, along with the ascendance of prominent Muslim institutions.
“In a lot of ways, EPIC [City] does parallel the history of evangelical Christianity and its involvement in politics,” said Phillips.
The regulations that led to suburban sprawl and exclusionary megacurches, he explained, created a paradox.
“They drew international businesses. And so, lo and behold, with all these corporate headquarters moving here, these corporations have people from sub-Saharan Africa, from the broadly defined Middle East, from the subcontinent, et cetera. And so all of a sudden, you had a big Muslim population.”
The parallels extend to structure as well. Megachurches operate according to an internal logic that mirrors a corporate structure, particularly in their use of professional management hierarchies, sophisticated marketing strategies, and real estate development. EPIC City is headed in a similar direction. On September 28, 2024, the same day as the land acquisition was signed, a “surprise announcement” publicized that Yasir Qadhi, a theologian with no real estate background, had joined the EPIC City team as “head of strategy and vision.”
His title is emblematic of the issue at heart. The megachurch-mosque becomes a point of articulation between spiritual practice and market imperatives, transforming religious experience into a commodity form that can be produced, consumed, and exchanged.
Additionally, the geographical organization of megachurch enclaves reveals their role in social control and class segregation. The same is true for EPIC City; positioned at the periphery of a metropolitan area, in the same way as a megachurch enclave, this siloed space can: separate its congregation from urban populations; control access through transportation requirements (car ownership); allow the wealthy to build capital through investment; maintain cultural and racial homogeneity; and create self-contained social worlds that minimize exposure to class antagonism.
But Islamic enclaves in North America, like EPIC City, represent a distinct form of religious-cultural space shaped by specific historical and material conditions. Unlike megachurch communities that always reinforce dominant social relations, these spaces serve as sites of alternative practices while their congregants navigate complex relationships with broader society. Certainly, EPIC City could represent a triumphant assertion of identity and economic power—a defensible citadel constructed in response to the persistent specter of Islamophobia, which has now, predictably, mobilized to oppose it.
But because of the large-scale investigations that have interrupted progress, the future of EPIC City, and its implications for Muslim community-building, hangs in the balance.
The Defensive Citadel
The Dallas Muslim community has long been a target of anti-Muslim rhetoric. In 2015, hate-fueled targeting flared after then mayor Beth Van Duyne stoked fears of an alleged Sharia court at the Islamic Center of Irving. An armed group appeared repeatedly outside the mosque, intimidating and doxing worshippers. Van Duyne would go on to receive a federal appointment during Trump’s first administration and was eventually elected to Congress in 2020.
In American and Texas politics, Islamophobia has become a reliable path to establishing conservative bona fides. While EPIC’s organizers were prepared for some pushback, the specific storm of conservative fearmongering and legal intimidation was stultifying.
“We didn’t expect the swiftness and viciousness of what happened,” Qadhi told me.
The state government launched several investigations, including criminal, into EPIC and EPIC City after Qadhi’s announcement of the EPIC City extension was flooded with spam and hate comments tagging Governor Greg Abbot. The state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, claimed that EPIC was committing fraud, engaging in housing discrimination, and illegally carrying out funerals. The federal Department of Justice began its own probe.
“It really shows what public pressure can do,” said Qadhi.
In March of 2025, Collin County Judge Chris Hill held a public hearing on EPIC City. County commissioners heard hours of unsubstantiated speculations and Islamophobic rhetoric from residents in a standing-room-only courtroom, fueled by online misinformation. The vast majority of attendees opposed the project—a project that had broken no ground.
Notwithstanding persistent instances of Islamophobia from the right, however, Muslim leaders have repeatedly allied with them on social issues. In 2023, Qadhi suggested proving anti-Muslim bigots wrong by appealing to shared “values” like opposing LGBTQ presence around families. Notably, EPIC’s lawyer in the current case, Dan Cogdell, previously represented Attorney General Paxton during his 2023 impeachment proceedings.
And despite the seemingly cloistered plans for EPIC City, Qadhi has repeatedly claimed that Muslims cannot sequester themselves.
“[EPIC City] has never meant to be isolationist. There’s not supposed to be big walls between us and the surrounding neighborhood, between us and the [County Commission], between us and the schools there,” Qadhi told me.
Yet Qadhi’s vision maps neatly onto the kinds of alliances he has tried to broker with the right: Muslims successfully integrating with institutional apparatuses like local government and the school board to strengthen right-wing social values. This model of assimilation, however, is fundamentally suburban—and its megachurch structure is inherently isolating.
“One of the biggest things that keeps Dallas away from really tapping into organizing movements is the suburbanization of DFW,” claims Saleh, who struggles with turnout at protests and sustained Palestine advocacy as an organizer.
According to Amir Makin at Masjid Al-Islam, the lack of Muslim cohesion in addressing the genocide is downstream of suburban fragmentation. “Everyone is rightfully concerned about stopping [the genocide], but because you have the splintering of these communities, there is no centralized methodology that DFW Muslims can generate for this [issue],” Makin said.
He argues that nurturing social services programs for the economically disadvantaged, like Masjid Al-Islam does in its South Dallas neighborhood, should be at the “heart” of Muslim community-building in Dallas, rather than consolidating wealth. He pointed out that the same racist forces that decimated Black communities in the United States were now uniting to target EPIC City. Without addressing the most oppressed among them, Muslims cannot consolidate their power. “Black American Muslims and the immigrant Muslims have not fully connected and united. We are not operating as an ummah at our full potential,” added Imam Abdul-Jami.
“White supremacy is like our Fir’aun (Pharaoh),” he said. “And it did not drown yet, it’s still here. It’s an ideology that persists, and it has its subsidiaries in xenophobia and Zionism. And so for us to be trying to fight it separately, in my view, indicates that we’re not fully understanding that we’re up against the same thing. Let’s fight this same thing together.”
The vision of EPIC City thus exists at a profound and unsettling crossroads. It is both a logical culmination of a specific model of American Muslim prosperity and a stark testament to its inherent contradictions.
Before the first foundation is poured, EPIC City stands as the apotheosis of a suburban dream sold to a generation of wealthy Muslim professionals: a chance to replicate the megachurch enclave’s formula of spiritual comfort, social conservatism, and economic consolidation, all within the familiar boundaries of a faith-based community.
Yet, this very model of success is fraught with internal contradictions that the project cannot easily resolve. By architecturally enshrining economic barriers along with social isolation, EPIC City risks amplifying the very suburban fragmentation that has already frayed the broader Muslim community. By prioritizing exclusivity and capital accumulation, it mirrors the same patterns of racial and economic segregation that built the Dallas suburbs. By aligning with right-wing social and cultural conservatives, it jeopardizes political clarity.
The project reveals a central, unresolved tension: can a community built on suburban exclusion and a prosperity-gospel ethos truly foster the radical solidarity that this political moment demands?
In stark contrast to the legacy of a place like Masjid Al-Islam, whose power derives from its deep, material engagement with the struggles of its impoverished immediate neighborhood, EPIC City’s inward-focused vision and promise of safety through isolation stands in tense opposition to the imperative for solidarity demanded by the urgent concerns facing Muslims today. From the genocide in Gaza to repression at home, these crises are interlinked and require not siloed retreat but broad-based coalition building.
The investigations into EPIC City, fueled by the same old bigotry, ironically force a moment of reckoning. The path forward is not merely about defeating external Islamophobia, but about confronting an internal dilemma—whether the future of American Muslim community-building lies in fortifying luxurious enclaves or in reinvesting in the connective tissue that once gathered all of Dallas’s Muslims, from South Dallas to the northern suburbs, in a shared Eidgah.
The answer will not only determine the fate of a single real estate venture but will also define the moral and political contours of American Muslim life for generations to come.
