In 2022, law enforcement arrived at the Islamic Association of North Texas’s Qu’ran Academy, a private school in the Dallas suburbs, looking for the principal, Matthew Moes. Manar, an English teacher at the well-regarded institution, was blindsided. “We just knew that somebody wanted to talk to him,” Manar recalls, three years later. “It was startling.” Then, the principal stopped responding to messages and emails, and teachers were told that he had resigned effective immediately. Within the week, at an emergency all staff meeting, the school’s board of directors dropped a bombshell.
Moes had been arrested for possession of child pornography. “There was a horrified gasp. Some people started crying. Some people were asking questions: ‘Are you sure? Is this real?’” Manar says.
She barely had time to process the news as she and other staff members scrambled to address the situation with their students at the pre-K to 12 school. Internet-savvy students had already found the principal’s mug shot online.
Eventually, a full investigation found that the principal had never harmed a student at the school. “It’s an awful, disgusting crime,” Manar says. “But I did feel a lot of relief that the crime was not inappropriate relations with any students. My reaction was, ‘Thank God it wasn’t worse.’”
In her eyes, the Islamic school, and the masjid on shared premises, navigated the difficult task of notifying parents and the community as well as they could amid the chaos. The school decided to immediately notify parents about the allegations, and soon after, the imam held a community session following Isha prayers. “There was pushback from members of the community who were like, ‘You shouldn’t have announced this, [he’s] innocent until proven guilty,’” Manar says. “I think [the school] really did the responsible thing, to say, ‘Obviously we hope he’s not guilty, but this is the kind of serious accusation that people need to be notified about right away for the safety of our students and our community.’”
According to court records, Moes pleaded guilty to the charges in 2024. Rumors swirled that the principal must have been framed, Manar says. There was a sense that this should never have happened at an Islamic school, within a well-established masjid, she says.
But Islamic institutions aren’t immune to the types of abuse and misconduct that have plagued other religious communities. The Catholic Church is perhaps the most prominent and well-documented example: for decades, leaders knew of hundreds of cases of priests who were abusing children in their care. Children were sometimes manipulated into performing sexual acts and shamed into silence. The Church shuffled priests around to different parishes in the hopes that they wouldn’t commit the same crimes in a different community—or that no one would catch on.
In 2019, nearly 40 percent of Catholics in the United States reported that the prevalence of spiritual abuse in religious institutions, and the clear attempts to cover it up, had led them to question whether they would remain in the Church.
Across the country, a growing number of high-profile Muslim leaders have been accused of sexual abuse and misconduct in recent years. But it’s unclear just how widespread the problem is, as, unlike the Catholic Church, the Islamic community in the West is dispersed and decentralized, with no governing administration or record-keeping system.
In November 2024, the global Muslim community was shaken when Wisam Sharieff, a popular Qur’an teacher affiliated with the Houston-based AlMaghrib Institute, was arrested and charged by the FBI with sexually exploiting a child, and creating and possessing graphic child pornography. Sharieff allegedly convinced one of his students to film her child, who was under the age of twelve, using sex toys and watching porn.
It’s unclear how he developed a relationship with the mother outside the virtual Qur’an classes, but he held a position of authority and respect that he allegedly used to manipulate the victims. According to court documents, Sharieff told the mother that sending him explicit videos would bring both her and her child closer to God, and coached them on their “progress” over messages and videos.
Sharieff’s wife found the explicit messages and videos on his phone and turned the evidence in to law enforcement. The child’s mother was also arrested.
For Manar, the case triggered memories of her experiences at the Islamic school in Dallas just a few years earlier. She and her family had performed Umrah on a trip led by Sharieff. “He was the fun one,” she recalls. Now she can’t think about the experience without wondering: Was this going on back then? Was there somebody on the trip that he was trying to target?
“It makes me look back on [the experience] with suspicion, and maybe even a sense of dread.”
Experts say that within Muslim communities broadly, there’s a failure to recognize that sexual abuse can occur at all, especially by esteemed scholars or community leaders. But if bad actors are given both power over and access to vulnerable community members, the conditions may be ripe for abuse.
“If you make the big mistake of thinking, It can’t happen here, that thinking literally opens you up to it happening here, because it means you’re turning a blind eye,” says Angelica Lindsey-Ali, a certified sexual health educator who runs a social media and educational platform called The Village Auntie. “I was on hajj, and there was a woman who was assaulted—on hajj. If a person can do that on hajj, why wouldn’t they do it in the masjid?”
Typically, abuse starts with small violations of boundaries, says Alia Salem, the founder of Facing Abuse in Community Environments, a nonprofit that independently investigates claims of Muslim leaders committing abuse, and advocates for survivors.
Sexual abuse and misconduct can start off with something as mundane as a compliment on the physical appearance of a colleague of the opposite gender, when the complimenter knows the person isn’t comfortable with such comments. That could escalate into something more harmful if a person feels emboldened to persist in such behavior. “It’s whether or not the culture [of the institution] allows them to perpetuate the boundary violations,” Salem says.
Abuse thrives in a culture that encourages silence, and more often than not, Muslim communities are rife with shame, guilt, and secrecy when it comes to discussing sexual abuse.
When abuse does happen, these cultural stigmas can prevent survivors, particularly children, from even recognizing that their boundaries or bodies were violated, says Omar Shareef, a psychiatrist and community educator at the Family and Youth Institute. Topics like sexual education, consent, and coercion are usually off-limits in religious spaces. Parents, friends, and colleagues may not know how to recognize the signs of abuse and may fail to intervene. And more often than not, survivors of abuse who come forward must grapple with victim-blaming from the community.
“One of the biggest reasons people don’t come forward is because they will lose in the long run,” Salem says. Even if a survivor of abuse speaks up and has the grounds for legal action, they will likely be ostracized from the community.
From age thirteen to eighteen, a teenage girl in the Dallas suburbs who had been abused at a young age was sent to Zia ul-Haque Sheikh, the imam of a local masjid, for counseling. Instead, a nightmare unfolded. When she turned eighteen, Sheikh began pressuring her into a sexual relationship, saying he would marry her as a third wife.
She went to the director of the mosque, Nouman Ali Khan, who asked her to stay silent, fearing the ruin of the imam’s reputation. Khan would later become embroiled in his own sexual misconduct scandal.
Eventually, the woman took Sheikh to court and won a $2.5 million legal settlement after he was found responsible for sexual exploitation and clergy misconduct. Salem worked on the investigation, which publicized Sheikh’s conduct and the masjid’s response. The legal win is largely symbolic, she says. “It’s two million dollars he doesn’t have. The victim is not going to see any compensation.”
Throughout the Sheikh case, and almost any case she’s worked on, Salem says that Muslim institutions and leaders have prioritized their own reputations over justice for their community. After Khan told her to remain silent to protect the imam, Sheikh’s victim went to other board members of the mosque, who confronted the imam. He denied the allegations, but when he resigned the next day, the board did not publicly comment on the reason for his resignation. Instead, they thanked him for his years of service.
“Reputation is priority number one,” Salem says. “Sometimes, they think they’re doing something just by responding. And it leaves people feeling like, ‘This was a whole bunch of nothing.’”
In the case of AlMaghrib, the institution first distanced itself from Sharieff, specifying in a statement that the child who experienced abuse wasn’t a student. “Allah’s religion is not reliant on any one individual, and the Qur’an Revolution program will continue with our students as scheduled,” the statement read. Far from allaying concerns, the statement instead prompted widespread criticism online and speculation about what the institution knew before Sharieff was arrested. AlMaghrib did not respond to a request for comment.
When cases are reported publicly, survivors face pushback for speaking up at all and exposing leaders. Advocates say that they will often hear people cite a hadith of the Prophet (PBUH): “Whoever conceals (the faults of) a Muslim, Allah will conceal (his faults) in this world and the Day of Resurrection.”
Citing that hadith to protect the reputations of abusers misinterprets the Sunnah, as well as centuries of Islamic jurisprudence. The full hadith, for example, begins with the Prophet (PBUH) advising Muslims to “neither oppress [another Muslim] nor hand him over to an oppressor.”
“In the beginning of me doing this [work], I got called imam hunter,” Salem says. “People have constructed this idea that they are doing God’s work by covering sin—but it’s not sin, it’s abuse.”
Islamic legal scholars have generally established a hierarchy of public and private sins, and considerations like the influence and religious authority of the perpetrator, that define how justice should be pursued. Islamic law deals differently with an imam who commits any degree of sin, versus a private citizen without a position of power or influence.
For example, an 11th-century jurist wrote that a respected authority in the community who “comes to know of the evil traits of hadith scholars or other scholars who are taken as authorities must reveal them. This is the case so that one is not deceived by them, nor take as an authority one whom it is not obliged to take as an authority.” And when a community leader knows of sins that violate the rights of other individuals—such as sexual assault—they are in fact required to take action.
“Islam is very clear about our ethical responsibility,” Lindsey-Ali says. “If I see someone having a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, that’s a personal sin, that’s between them and Allah. [But] if someone is abusing a child, or using their religious authority to abuse people in that community, we have a duty to warn.”
Drawing on scripture and the life of the Prophet (PBUH), Muslim communities have a powerful framework for victim-centered approaches to justice.
Shareef of the Family and Youth Institute points to a verse from the Qur’an that has driven his work, despite the challenges: “O believers! Stand firm for justice as witnesses for Allah even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or close relatives.”
Advocates like Shareef and Lindsey-Ali take a multipronged approach to prevent abuse and misconduct in religious spaces: the community must address individual and familial responsibilities, institutional and communal responsibilities, and professional responsibilities.
Prevention starts at home, Lindsey-Ali says. Parents can empower their children by setting boundaries and making sure their bodies are respected. “It’s not just, Don’t touch boys, don’t kiss girls … These are your body parts; if someone touches you in these places, please come tell Mom, tell Dad,” she says. Parents should also validate their children’s experiences: if a child doesn’t feel comfortable sitting on someone’s lap, or a teenager expresses hesitance at spending the night at a particular friend’s house, “that should be a space to invite a conversation as to why,” Ali says.
Shareef says parents should also learn to recognize signs of emotional disturbance: if a child becomes irritable, angry, sad, or withdrawn.
Imams and community leaders have a responsibility to speak about abuse and prevention proactively. Shareef says he and other experts have made themselves available to come in and have conversations on the subject, but they’re rarely invited to do so before a crisis occurs.
According to Shareef, institutional prevention looks like Islamic schools developing clear guidelines delineating the types of interactions that are out of bounds, whether that’s making comments about a student’s appearance or closing doors during one-on-one meetings; background checks for staff and volunteers; and mandatory trainings about misconduct and abuse for anyone working in positions of authority or care, regardless of a person’s reputation in the community.
He also stresses the importance of involving professionals to handle the fallout of abuse cases. In some situations, that may mean reporting abuse to the police or child protective services. Survivors need professional counselors and advocates, and schools and masjids should have counselors on staff. Encouraging people to seek counseling after they’ve experienced abuse can be transformative, Shareef says, but it often proves difficult to provide mental health resources in the long run.
“It breaks my heart to say this, but usually, we are at the tail end of putting out a fire. Most Muslim communities don’t really have a functioning model for this,” Shareef says. Without these layers of prevention, abuse is more likely to occur and cause lasting harm.
The lack of guardrails is magnified in the digital world, where imams have large social media followings of eager, devoted fans. “Boundaries become very porous on social media, and some people will use their popularity to manipulate,” Lindsey-Ali says. “You should not be engaging with anyone in silence and secrecy. If [an imam] requires that of you in a student-teacher relationship, that’s a huge red flag.”
Preventing abuse will require a larger cultural shift in Muslim communities—one that prioritizes transparency over shame; one that allows survivors to come forward without fear of being vilified. “Accountability requires that there are people who call [abuse] out when they see it,” Lindsey-Ali says. “We need to believe survivors, even when the abuser is someone we like, or somebody who is popular.”
In the absence of that shift, naming and shaming prominent abusers can only go so far. New cases of spiritual abuse continue to occur as bad actors are given platforms and access. And even those who are exposed as abusers don’t often face long-term consequences.
In 2017, a few years after the Dallas imam Nouman Ali Khan encouraged Zia ul-Haque Sheikh’s victim to remain silent, several women came forward, accusing the popular online preacher of engaging in a series of affairs. The women asserted that Khan, who was married and a father of seven children, used his platform and reputation as a religious leader to groom them, sending inappropriate messages, pictures, and promises of secret marriages.
Khan maintained his innocence, attacking the Muslim clerics and scholars who had been asked to independently investigate the allegations. While the broader Muslim community debated the veracity of the accusations, he continued to preach online, even traveling abroad to lecture. But for the most part, Khan was blacklisted from local Dallas mosques in the aftermath of the allegations.
Now, ten years after the spiritual abuse allegations against Khan, he is once again a regular speaker at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), a mega-mosque helmed by Yasir Qadhi, another so-called celebrity imam. Maryam, a community organizer who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy, was involved in advocating against Khan’s return to Muslim spaces in Dallas. She describes the “step-by-step” process in which EPIC accepted Khan back. He started by attending events like Eid festivals or basketball tournaments hosted by men’s groups, which normalized his presence at various masjids in the area.
EPIC and Khan did not respond to requests for comment.
“There’s a certain generation, maybe the immigrant population, they say, ‘Well that’s his personal life. Guys will be guys … He’s not doing anything wrong, he’s married to her, he got divorced and he got married again,’” Maryam says. Once he began speaking at EPIC, other large congregations allowed him back in, too, she says.
A small segment of women in the community enthusiastically supported Khan’s return to public life, Maryam says. But for the most part, it was women’s groups that successfully organized to keep him out of their communities, creating a grassroots form of protection and accountability, since none existed formally.
She recalls one conversation with a masjid board, in which the members—all men—were asked, Would you ever want your high school daughter to sit and learn from Khan one-on-one?
It proved to be an effective question. “Two of the board members pushing for [Khan’s return] are both girl dads, and now they’re not inviting him back.” At another masjid, the mostly female team of volunteers who ran youth programs, senior programs, and recreational events all threatened to leave their positions if Khan was allowed back, and demanded a town hall meeting.
The board responded with hostility, Maryam says, leaving many of the women feeling disrespected. “What we decided in that case was that the board was not going to change. So in the next election, we helped get two women elected to the board for the first time in that masjid.” With voting power on the masjid’s board, the grassroots group was finally able to prevent Khan from speaking at the masjid. The struggle to deplatform spiritual abusers is far from over, but these victories are foundational to building more transparent institutions that won’t normalize spiritual abuse. “That’s the power of collective [action],” Maryam says. “Everyone has a part to play.”
