Mohamed Hussein, a thirty-eight-year-old manager at a health-care company in Houston, is a lifelong conservative, describing himself as a proponent of small government who often votes Republican. He moved from Cairo to Texas as a young child, and professes “tremendous faith in America.” He is also a practicing Muslim who prays daily. In June, he went to the Republican Party of Texas State Convention, in downtown Houston, joining his father, Tarek, who was serving as a delegate.

Tarek Hussein, a physical therapist, founded the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil-liberties organization. With thousands of people assembled in the Houston convention center, Party members made several attempts to oust Tarek and another Muslim delegate, owing to their ties with CAIR, which Governor Greg Abbott has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. At one point, the G.O.P. chair told Tarek and the other delegate to leave the caucus. “There is a Democrat convention happening in a couple of weeks,” he said from the stage. “Join them.”

Mohamed Hussein told me that he was shocked by the hostility. At the convention, the Party approved a resolution that called on the legislature to declare Sharia a “seditious, subversive competing enemy.” Sharia is a form of guidance about how Muslims should live and worship, akin to the messages of the Ten Commandments. Yet, for two decades, many G.O.P. critics have conflated it with political extremism and terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. The resolution said that advocating for Sharia should be considered a crime, with punishments that include the stripping of U.S. citizenship and deportation. Hussein recalled, “When I read this, I’m thinking, Seditious? People to be denaturalized and deported? This is utter madness.” He added, “This is the party in power adopting this resolution with the intention of leveraging the state against a community.”

Hussein decided to remain at the convention. “I don’t know of any other solution than dialogue,” he said. On the final day, he attended a session with the Judeo-Christian Caucus, reasoning that, if Christians and Jews could come together, surely the attendees would be open to Muslim voices, too. But the moderator, a former Southern Baptist minister named Rick Scarborough, warned the attendees that they would encounter Muslims who only pretended to be accommodating. “I’ll guarantee, if they get power, they’ll cut your head off as believers of Christ,” Scarborough reportedly said.

Hussein spoke up several times. “I felt I had to preface it by apologizing to people,” he recalled, “because my intention was not to impose myself on the session, but I felt compelled to tell them that you have heard a lot of lies.” He talked with Scarborough afterward: “I asked him rhetorically, not expecting his response, ‘What do you want us to do? You want us to leave?’ In a heartbeat, he said, ‘Yes.’ ” Hussein retreated to an empty seat where he could be alone, and he wept.

The targeting of Muslims by politicians is not a new phenomenon in the United States. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon spawned a wave of anti-Muslim harassment and hate crimes. Donald Trump, who falsely claimed for years that Barack Obama was a Muslim, first tried to restrict immigration from majority Muslim countries nearly a decade ago. But, in his second term, he has led a groundswell of unsupported claims about an insidious Islamic presence in the country. Nearly seventy representatives have joined the Sharia-Free America Caucus, in the U.S. House of Representatives. One member, the Georgia Republican Andrew Clyde, posted on X, “No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat.”

Two weeks ago, federal agents raided the home of Ilhan Omar, a Muslim member of Congress from Minnesota whom Trump has repeatedly vilified, reportedly seizing notebooks, her mobile phone, and her passport. The goal, according to the Wall Street Journal, is to find evidence to denaturalize Omar, a Somali refugee who arrived in the United States at age twelve, and deport her. Trump has called the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, a “jihadist lunatic.”

Nowhere, it seems, has the vilification been more widespread than in Texas. Ted Cruz, the G.O.P. senator who has said that he wants to be President, told the crowd at this year’s national Republican midterm gathering in Dallas that “communists and Islamists” are “coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party . . . . They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution, and they hate America.” Earlier this year, Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner (a position that actually oversees the regulation of oil and gas, not railroads), posted on social media, “I know I won’t rest until every muslim is gone.” Governor Abbott, a Republican who is running for a fourth term, designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization only nine days after launching his reëlection bid. (CAIR called the move a publicity stunt with “no basis in fact or law,” and filed a lawsuit, which is ongoing.)

These attacks have prompted fresh efforts to mobilize Muslim voters in Texas. Although the group likely comprises less than two per cent of the state’s population, they could make a difference in this year’s unusually close contests for Senate, governor, and multiple congressional seats. Ahmad Siddiqi, who has served as the imam at the Kingwood Islamic Center, in the northeast Houston suburbs, since 2008, told me, “I think we were afraid in the beginning, because we would get the yelling, the screaming, and all of these things. But many of us have grown out of that phase. Now we want to stand our ground.”

On a Friday in late September, Siddiqi welcomed Imran Ghani, the director of the local chapter of CAIR—the one that Tarek Hussein founded—to address the congregation about the need for Muslim citizens to vote in November. The visit was arranged by Salam Arif, a local anesthesiologist, who said that it has been difficult to inspire his fellow-Muslims. “The perception of most of the people is: ‘Red state, my vote doesn’t count,’ ” he told me.

Ghani, who is thirty-seven and was raised mostly in Houston, had been on the job for around two months when Abbott designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization. “What did I just sign up for?” Ghani recalled thinking. “But very quickly I realized that this is a path of all of the great civil-rights organizations in American history. Whenever a civil-rights organization is effective, it will be targeted by certain members of the political establishment.”

At the Kingwood event, as more than two hundred men and women filed into their separate prayer halls, Ghani drew on several verses in Al-Hujurat, the forty-ninth chapter of the Quran, widely interpreted as a directive for the ethical treatment of one another and a call for Muslim unity. He said that a lack of political power has made the community an easy target. He reminded his listeners of the right to religious freedom under the Constitution, and urged them to be “openly Muslim” at a time “when there is all sorts of hatred being spewed by the political élite and our children are being attacked in schools.” And he directed the attendees to the volunteer voting registrars seated at tables in the mosque.

Afterward, Mir Ali Sadat, an internal-medicine doctor, made his way to a table to confirm that he was registered. “We have to vote,” he told me as he filled out a form. “We have to make a society where everyone respects everyone, regardless of their religion, their language, their looks, their skin, their gender.”

Jida Nabulsi is the Texas director of Emgage, a nonprofit founded twenty years ago to propel civic engagement in the Islamic community. When we met, she was standing in the blinding sun in an elementary-school parking lot in the Houston suburb of Cypress, alongside nine young staffers as they prepared to knock on hundreds of doors. Nabulsi said that the group was trying to motivate people “who are unregistered or haven’t been involved at all.” In addition to canvassing, Emgage conducts sessions in mosques and other locations that focus on the rudiments of voting. Nabulsi told me that a right-wing, anti-Muslim group had recently put up a post calling her a “Sharia operative.” In her view, the term “Islamophobia” isn’t adequate for such attacks; she prefers the more plainspoken phrase “anti-Muslim hate.”

One of the door-knockers, Abdullah Younes, a seventeen-year-old university student, allowed me to tag along as he made his rounds. He drove his black pickup truck through the exit gate of an upscale subdivision and parked on a deserted street. The work, which he has been doing since July after being recruited by a relative, can feel thankless. Guided by a canvassing app that helps Emgage workers identify likely Muslim households, he was ten houses into his route and starting to sweat through his shirt before anyone opened the door. One woman waved him away. At homes where there was no answer, he left behind a flyer that read “The polls are calling. Will you answer?”

Abdullah Antepli, a Turkish-born imam and scholar who is the president of Houston’s nonsectarian Rothko Chapel, believes that the anti-Islam rhetoric will continue, not only because it attracts votes for Republicans but also because, in his view, the response from Muslims is too weak and disjointed. Many Muslims, Antepli told me, “realize the American dream individually, but that individual success doesn’t translate into a collective civic response.” One reason, he said, is “the lack of connecting tissues between various racial and ethnic Muslim communities,” which include, among other groups, recent arrivals from “socioeconomically, politically, and historically very disconnected and fragmented parts of the world.” This lack of cohesion is evident, too, in Houston’s mosques, where, he said, many who attend prayer services “come five minutes before” and leave two minutes after the services have ended.

The day after I accompanied the Emgage canvassers, more than a dozen candidates for Congress, state legislature, and local office showed up at the Clear Lake Islamic Center, southeast of Houston, to make their pitches and take questions. Republicans were invited; none appeared. The event was part of a new monthly series led by Mohammed Nasrullah, a former Boeing project manager who once served as the chairman of CAIR-Houston’s board. He is pressing Muslim citizens to vote, in particular in local races, where a few thousand votes can be the difference. “What I notice,” he said, “is every four years they wake up and vote for President, and then they go back to sleep.”

A significant motivator this year is a revised K-12 curriculum, which was approved in September by the Republican-controlled State Board of Education and which casts Muslims in negative terms. In one lesson, students will be asked to explain early Islam in terms of the Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization and regulation of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” In another, they will have to describe “the teachings of jihad and how these teachings led to the expansion of Islam and the conquest of Christian lands.”

Dana Van De Walker, who is a professor and administrator at a community college in the northern Houston suburbs and a candidate for the State Board of Education, was campaigning at a mosque for the second time in forty-eight hours. Flipping just a few of the fifteen seats on the board, she told me, would give Democrats a majority and a chance to overturn the curriculum vote. “The thing that really pisses me off as a teacher,” she said, “is that we’re spending so much time talking about Islamophobia that we can’t talk about how we’re forty-fourth in the nation in eighth-grade English language-arts/literacy scores.”

As Rabeea Sultan Collier, a district-court judge who is running for reëlection, told the Clear Lake audience, the solution is as simple as it is urgent: “This last year, we have been under attack in a way that we’ve never seen before. So we want you to come out in numbers like they’ve never seen before.” ♦