In a picture that has since been deleted, the AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas, showed off Imam Wisam Sharieff (far right) as a member of its staff.

It looks like the school’s website no longer has pictures of the imam on it after he was accused of making child pornography.(Institute al-Maghrib)
The federal government has charged a well-known Islamist internet teacher in Alabama with planning to make child pornography.

The FBI accused Wisam Sharieff, a Qur’an recitation teacher for the Houston-based AlMaghrib Institute, of encouraging a woman and her child, who was underage, to make sexually explicit videos that were sent through Telegram in a complaint that was sent on October 29, 2024.

According to an FBI statement, Sharieff’s wife called Alabama police when she found inappropriate texts and videos on her husband’s phone.

Soon after the charges were made public, Sharieff was fired from the AlMaghrib Institute, where he was in charge of a campaign called “Qur’an Revolution.” The group said on X that the victim was not a student there.

Officials at AlMaghrib also said, “Allah’s religion does not depend on any one person, and the Quran Revolution program will continue with our students as planned.” The school has a “longstanding policy of zero tolerance for instructors having any romantic relationships with their students,” they said again.

The answer failed, and hundreds of mean comments were made about X. “This is a terrible answer,” one person said in response. “This gross person didn’t have a “romantic connection.” He abused a child.” It’s not just breaking the rules; it’s a CRIME against ALLAH and the LAW.

Muslim Matters, a well-known Islamist publication that had supported Sharieff’s ideas in the past, also released a statement condemning the imam’s actions, saying that they were “an unspeakable betrayal of trust and an abhorrent abuse of power, violating the core values of our faith, our community, and basic human decency.”

Since more than ten years ago, American Muslim groups have loved Wisam Sharieff.

In an interview on X, former Islamist Ismail Royer talked about the issue and praised Sharieff’s wife for telling on the abuse. He made fun of well-known Muslim groups for removing their links to the now-disgraced imam from the internet and spoke out against Muslims who wanted to hide the incident. He also said that AlMaghrib Institute was wrong for not talking about how it put “a manipulative abuser in a position of trust” in its public declarations.

Texas Islamist Abu Najim Bin al-Iskandar has also spoken out about the controversy. He said on X that the problem is not AlMaghrib’s failure to keep gender segregation in its programs, as some had said, but the fact that Muslim organizations often protect abusers. “For more than ten years, American Muslim groups have loved Wisam Sharrieff,” Iskandar said. “It’s not possible that he is guilty of the charges in the affidavit when no one knew about his habits.” I know that American Muslim groups always look out for their people in their networks and clubs.

Other Issues With Al Maghrib

Sharieff’s arrest is the latest in a long line of problems for the AlMaghbrib Institute, a Salafist educational group based in Houston that was started in 2002 by a teacher from Canada named Muhammad Alshareef.

As its slogan says, “A Life-Changing Experience,” AlMaghrib bills itself as the biggest academic center in the West that focuses on traditional Islamic sciences and grants bachelor’s degrees in Islamic studies.

In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane with an explosive device he had hidden in his underwear. He went to classes at the school.

Yasir Qadhi, a Salafist imam who was the academic dean of the school for 15 years, once said that Jews and Christians “are the worst of all evils.”

There are rumors that Sharieff studied with Pakistani teacher Israr Ahmed, who started the violent South Asian movement Tanzeem-e-Islami. Ahmed is one of the most important people in South Asia who supports the Taliban and other violent extremists. He has spoken in public in the West and called Jews a “cancer” and an enemy of Islam who “do not take advantage of the opportunity to repent, which is why they are afflicted by great calamities, as was the case with the Germans.” It is clear that the leader of Tanzeem-e-Islami’s branch in the US, the Islamic Organization of North America, wants sharia law to be imposed and secular democracy to be destroyed. Another one of Ahmed’s followers, the well-known Islamist imam Nouman Ali Khan, was accused by an unknown number of women in 2017 of “using his position to lure and groom women into sexual relationships under the guise of secret marriages.”

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