Ibn Firnas Flies Under the Radar in Wisconsin

The Altoona Library’s Muslim Heritage Display Was Not Just About History

A recent Wisconsin NBC affiliate report described backlash over a Muslim American Heritage Month display at the Altoona Public Library in Wisconsin.

The display, according to library director Olivia Morris, began when the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Foundation contacted the library.

“We were approached by the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Foundation,” Morris told WEAU. “They had reached out to us and let us know that in July they were celebrating Muslim American Heritage Month and they wanted to know if we could do a display in the library.”

Morris defended the display as part of the library’s mission of sharing new ideas. After the library posted about it on Facebook, the response was larger than expected.

“I didn’t think it was going to be quite that dark or negative,” she said. “And it made me sad that we still live in a world that people see things that way.”

The library later said it stood against Islamophobia and asked that public comments remain respectful.

That is the story viewers were given: a public library display, online backlash, and a saddened librarian standing up for inclusion.

But the display deserves closer scrutiny than that.

The problem is not that a library marked Muslim American Heritage Month. Public libraries can host displays on religious, ethnic, and cultural communities. The problem is what this particular display appears to have smuggled in under the harmless language of “heritage.”

The display reportedly included a list of Muslim inventions that repeats claims associated with the long-running “1001 Inventions” campaign — including the familiar assertion that Abbas ibn Firnas was a pioneer of manned flight. Such claims have been criticized for years as inflated, selective, or historically misleading. Ibn Firnas may have jumped off a tower in ninth-century Cordoba, but there is really no evidence that he even existed, and even if he did do this, that is not the same thing as inventing powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight. The Wright brothers still occupy that place in aviation history.

This matters because the display was not simply celebrating Wisconsin Muslims. It was presenting a civilizational story — one in which Islamic history is used to revise the modern public’s understanding of science, invention, and Western achievement.

That alone would be worth questioning.

But the story does not end with Ibn Firnas.

The Wisconsin Muslim Civic Foundation is connected to the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance. Fauzia Qureshi leads both. The Foundation presents itself as a cultural and civic organization; the Alliance is openly political, describing its mission in terms of civil rights, civic participation, voter education, turnout, and leadership development among Wisconsin Muslims.

Advocacy groups have every right to organize, lobby, educate voters, and encourage political participation.

But when such a network supplies educational material to a public library, the public has a right to know which kind of network that is.

Qureshi’s political project is not merely cultural pride. A Shepherd Express profile describes her work as “empowering Muslim voters and amplifying voices,” and shows her in proximity to Linda Sarsour. The same article notes that the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Foundation hosted a gala featuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib as keynote speaker.

Again, none of that is secret. It is public. Which is precisely why it should not be ignored.

The Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance has also made Gaza a political litmus test for Wisconsin candidates.

At a July 2026 gubernatorial candidate forum, the organization said candidates were asked a yes-or-no question: whether they agreed that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted genocide. According to WMCA’s own press release, some candidates objected to the format and wanted a fuller answer. WMCA rejected that.

“For our community,” the organization explained in a video discussion of the event, “it is a yes or no. It is a litmus test.”

Think about that.

A Wisconsin civic organization representing itself as a voice for Muslim participation in state politics demanded that candidates for governor answer a foreign-policy accusation as a yes-or-no test of moral legitimacy. No nuance. No legal standard. No discussion. Yes or no.

This is not civic education. It is ideological discipline.

The “genocide” accusation has become central to pro-Palestinian activism, even though it remains a contested legal and factual claim. The International Criminal Court warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant concern alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. Even the former head of the ICC, and the man who issued an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for war crime said repeatedly in a recent interview that there is no evidence for genocide in Gaza. –

Yet in WMCA’s political world, the matter is treated as settled. A candidate who refuses to answer the way the organization wants is treated as failing a community test.

That is where the Altoona display starts to look less innocent.

The display is one small public-facing piece of a larger political effort to normalize a particular Muslim civic identity — one tied not only to heritage, but to Gaza activism, “genocide” language, and pro-Palestinian coalition politics.

According to her LinkedIn page, Fauzia Qureshi was Website and Digital Marketing Manager for  Islam Channel from 2005-2010. Some of the videos from Islam Channel YouTube account include:

• Exclusive conversation with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti 
  • Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian MP who also claims Israel is committing genocide.
• 250 years on: Is America living up to its ideals? 
  • One of the panelists is Jihad Abdul Mumit. Here is his sermon, From Marxism to Islam

He went from Marxism to Islam because the later gave a better chance of defeating America. RAIR Foundation has an excellent profile on Imam Jihad here.

The Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance is listed among member organizations of the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine. That coalition was formed immediately after the October 7 Hamas massacre. Its member list has included the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance, Islamic Society of Milwaukee, Jewish Voice for Peace–Milwaukee, American Muslims for Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, Muslim American Society, and other activist groups.

The coalition’s early statement after October 7 said it was saddened by Israeli and Palestinian deaths, but it did not clearly condemn Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians. Instead, it warned against labeling Palestinian resistance as terrorism and argued that doing so dehumanizes Palestinians.

Issued days after Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians, that language was not a minor omission. It blurred the essential distinction between legitimate political grievance and the deliberate massacre of civilians.

In October 2024, WCJP again described October 7 principally as the day “Hamas broke out of their open air prison.” That phrase says a great deal. It turns a terrorist attack into a prison-break narrative and places the focus not on Hamas’s victims, but on the supposed inevitability of the attack.

The coalition’s statements have consistently emphasized “genocide,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” and “resistance.” They have not given comparable moral weight to Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians.

This is the world connected to the “community” behind the Altoona display.

The coalition was founded by Janan Najeeb. Rachel Ida Buff, a co-founder of Jewish Voice for Peace–Milwaukee. Jewish Voice for Peace presents itself as a Jewish peace organization, but its record is far more radical than that branding suggests. JVP has publicly supported Rasmea Odeh, a convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist involved in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two Hebrew University students. The Anti-Defamation League has documented JVP’s radical anti-Israel activism and its support for figures such as Odeh.

American Muslims for Palestine is also part of the Wisconsin coalition. AMP has long faced scrutiny because of alleged continuity with earlier organizations tied to Hamas-support networks in the United States. The Islamic Association for Palestine was found by a jury to be civilly liable in litigation connected to the murder of David Boim, a seventeen-year-old American killed by Hamas terrorists in Israel. The Boim family has alleged that AMP is a disguised successor to IAP, citing personnel and operational continuity. AMP denies the allegation, and courts have not entered a final judgment establishing AMP as IAP’s alter ego after 20 years in court. But the history is relevant, especially when AMP appears inside a coalition formed after October 7 and speaking in the language of “resistance.”

Then there is Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a board member of American Muslims for Palestine. The Islamic Society of Milwaukee has been listed among WCJP member organizations. Sarsour has recently fought deportation proceedings. According to reporting on the case, federal authorities cited decades-old Israeli convictions involving a Molotov cocktail attack at homes of Israeli armed forces and attempted possession of weapons and ammunition. Sarsour and his defenders dispute the government’s characterization and describe the action against him as political retaliation for pro-Palestinian speech.

A public library display in Altoona was presented as a harmless celebration of Muslim American heritage. But the organization behind it belongs to a political ecosystem that includes Gaza “genocide” litmus tests, post-October 7 coalition activism, groups that blur “resistance” and terrorism, and organizations with long records of radical anti-Israel politics.

Olivia Morris, the library director, is certainly not the issue. She appears to have treated the display as an ordinary educational exhibit and defended it as a matter of inclusion.

But public libraries are not obligated to accept advocacy materials uncritically. They are not bulletin boards for ideological networks. If a library hosts a display supplied by an outside group, especially one tied to political activism, it has a responsibility to ask what is being presented, who produced it, and whether the claims are accurate.

That responsibility becomes even more important when the display repeats dubious civilizational claims about Islamic inventions while the sponsoring network is simultaneously engaged in aggressive political mobilization around Gaza.

The public backlash may have included ugly comments. That happens online. Libraries are right to ask for respectful public discussion.

But criticism of the display is not automatically Islamophobia.

Citizens are allowed to ask why a public library is displaying material from a Muslim civic organization without scrutiny. They are allowed to ask whether the claims are true. They are allowed to ask why a public institution is partnering, however casually, with a network whose political allies treat “genocide” as a campaign test and “resistance” as something other than terrorism, even after October 7.

They are civic questions.

And they are exactly the questions local television should have asked before reducing the story to “Muslim heritage display faces backlash.”

The issue at the Altoona Public Library was never only a display case.

It was a glimpse of how cultural celebration, historical revisionism, public institutions, and post-October 7 activism now flow into one another.

That is worth more than a sad quote about Facebook comments.