Texas: Head of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America advocates for jihad, calls for stoning of adulterers

What did anyone expect? The answer to that is obvious: numerous non-Muslims, abjectly ignorant of the texts and teachings of Islam, think that Islam preaches peace and tolerance, because they’ve been taught that it’s “Islamophobic” to suggest otherwise. They will be shocked beyond measure when they discover that Salah Al-Sawy represents the broad Islamic mainstream, as they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that the likes of him is only a “tiny minority of extremists.” It is not true, and was never true.

“Texas Sheikh Affirms Jihad, Killing of Civilians, and Stoning of Adulterers,” by Dexter Van Zile, Middle East Forum, October 21, 2026:

A Texas sheikh has been advocating for jihad, legitimizing violence against Israeli civilians, and the stoning of adulterers while receiving great acclaim from Muslim institutions in the United States. The sheikh in question, Salah Al-Sawy, is no small-time extremist, but the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, a body of Islamic legal scholars that issues religious rulings for Muslims living in the United States. He also serves as president of the Islamic University of North America (also known as Mishkah University) and president of the Medical Center Islamic Society in Houston.

The messages Al-Sawy is promoting can be seen on his Arabic-language fatwa website, Mawsu’at Fatawa al-Sawy (the al-Sawy Fatwa Encyclopedia), which promotes jihad and the stoning of adulterers to his supporters. The rulings, which appear to be published only in Arabic, are not stray remarks. Four of these rulings, posted in 2017 and 2025, indicate that Al-Sawy refuses to condemn violence on principle, including violence against civilians. Two other fatwas indicate that he regards slavery not as a moral wrong that infringes on people’s human rights, but as a practice that brings Muslims into disrepute….

Pro-Jihad Rulings

In one of two rulings dated December 26, 2017, an Egyptian asked whether he was religiously obliged to go and fight in Syria. Al-Sawy praised the man’s “religious zeal” and called jihad “the peak of Islam.” He affirmed that when an enemy attacks Muslim land, the duty to fight spreads “in gradually widening circles” until it covers “the entire land of Islam.” He advised against sending untrained volunteers, but only because they would burden the fighters and give the world grounds to label the battlefields a “meeting place for terrorist organizations.” He called that label a smear used against “anyone who holds firmly to his religion.” Instead, he urged Muslims to give financial, political, legal and media support, as “the field commanders of the jihad” request.

In the other ruling posted on his website on December 26, 2017, a questioner asked why scholars had blessed Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the Soviets but turned on him when he took the fight to America. “Isn’t America like the Russians?” the questioner asked. Al-Sawy did not dispute it. He left bin Laden’s “reckoning” to God and said he hoped for God’s “mercy and pardon” for every Muslim. He then explained that the disagreement with bin Laden “is not over the principle of jihad itself.” It was over errors in judging the conditions, “flawed calculations” and “recklessness in choosing the timing.”

Al-Sawy took a similar position in January 2025, when an Arab citizen of Israel asked him about Palestinians who run over or stab Jews in Israeli neighborhoods. The questioner, a woman, pointed out that the victims “may be innocent” and called the attacks suicidal.

He also declared that “the occupying Jews in Palestine are usurpers,” whether or not they themselves had done anything, since all of them had taken part in “the crime” of expelling Palestinians and therefore need to be punished. “And jihad, my daughter, is not merely a martyrdom operation; for jihad has aims and objectives. If jihad leads to the realization of these objectives, then it is a legitimate jihad,” he ruled. “But if it leads to the opposite—that is, if it brings satisfaction to the hearts of the disbelievers, torments the believers, and enrages their hearts—then it is not a legitimate jihad, and the obligation shifts to preparing for war.”

Stoning Adulterers

In March 2025, Al-Sawy posted a ruling on stoning married adulterers, written in response to young Muslims disturbed by an ISIS video of a woman being stoned. Al-Sawy affirmed that stoning is an established part of Islamic law and said that rejection of it is “known only from the Kharijites,” an early sect most Muslims regard as heretical. His only objection to the ISIS execution was procedural: the group lacked the power of an “established state” needed to carry out such punishments. “Their affair is with God,” he wrote….