President signs executive order for Rubio and Bessent to submit report on chapters in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan

Donald Trump on Monday began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move that would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements.

Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and treasury secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, according to a White House fact sheet. It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan says One Nation leader ‘debased’ parliament while independent Fatima Payman says she is ‘disrespecting Muslim Australians’

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Pauline Hanson has worn a burqa in the Senate, repeating a widely condemned stunt as she sought to ban the Muslim face covering on national security grounds – despite being unable to name a single safety incident linked to the burqa.

The special envoy for Islamophobia warned the stunt could “deepen existing safety risks for Australian Muslim women who choose to wear the headscarf, the hijab, or the full face and body covering, the burqa”.

Architect Farshid Moussavi is behind a tranquil and timeless new building where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community can come together. But how has she created something that looks so delicate out of stone?

On a hot autumn day in southern Texas, monarch butterflies flit around the gardens of Houston’s new Ismaili Centre. Fragile and gaudy, they are on their way south to overwinter in Mexico, travelling up to 3,000 miles in a typical migration cycle, an epic feat of insectile endurance.

Their combination of delicacy and stamina is an apt metaphor for the Ismaili Centre, a building that has taken seven years to realise and is designed to last for a century or more. It’s a place where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community, one of the largest in the US, can practise their faith but it’s also a venue for shared activities.

Greg Abbott’s move heightens the clash with Muslim groups and usurps federal authority

Texas governor Greg Abbott declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) and the Muslim Brotherhood to be “foreign terrorist organizations” on Tuesday, prohibiting them from acquiring property in the state and authorizing legal action to shut down affiliated entities.

The move marks a massive escalation in Abbott’s confrontation with Muslim organizations and communities in Texas, though states have no authority to designate foreign terrorist organizations on behalf of the US.

Worshippers prepare to start using first completed building and hope to host formal opening in early 2026

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On a bush block on the industrial outskirts of Bendigo, a minaret rises from the facade of a mosque. There are no fences, making the site of the central Victorian city’s first mosque visible from adjacent roads.

This is no accident. Sameer Syed, who has been involved in the Bendigo Islamic Community Centre’s inception from its start, says the vision was an “open mosque”.

New York City mayor-elect refused to ‘be in the shadows’ in the face of Islamophobic attacks during his campaign

Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.

The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.

Between July and October, 25 buildings were targeted in 27 attacks, according to British Muslim Trust

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Attacks on mosques in the UK have soared in recent months, the government’s Islamophobia monitoring partner has said, with more than 40% of incidents featuring British or English flags and Christian nationalist symbols or slogans.

In the past three months, a mosque was set alight in East Sussex; in Merseyside the windows of a mosque were shot with an air gun while children were inside; in Greater Manchester, a paving slab was thrown at a window; and in Glasgow, a window was smashed with a metal pole.

The racist abuse that Zohran Mamdani is still facing proves how normalized bigotry is. We need to keep calling it out

Pack your bags and flee, infidels: New York City has fallen to a cabal of socialist jihadists. With Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, many are celebrating the democratic socialist’s historic win. Billionaires, Islamophobes and Republicans, however, are in the throes of hysteria. But what’s new? The New York mayoral race has been marred by bigotry so unhinged it’s almost impossible to parody.

Far-right activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X, for example, that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC” under Mamdani. New York City councilmember Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”. Actor Debra Messing, meanwhile, has been having a Mamdani-induced meltdown on Instagram, posting story after story about how the puppy-eyed politician is a threat to civilization. She recently posted: “In Judaism and Christianity, we are commanded to speak the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam … Now, take a look at Mamdani … He’s revealing their goal: mass conversion.”

Total referrals reach record high, with 21% being due to ‘extreme rightwing concerns’ and 10% to Islamist ideology

More suspected far-right extremists were referred to the government’s anti-terrorism programme Prevent last year than those suspected of Islamist extremism, annual figures show.

In total, 8,778 referrals were made because of suspicions of extremist radicalisation in the year to March 2025, 27% more than the previous year and the highest number of referrals in a single year since records began 10 years ago.

Forty Labour and independent MPs call on Steve Reed to take ‘important step’ of defining anti-Muslim hatred

More than three dozen Labour and independent MPs have written to the housing secretary calling on the government to adopt a definition of Islamophobia, after recent figures revealed hate crimes against Muslims were up by nearly a fifth.

Forty MPs, including Labour MPs Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, Kim Johnson and independent Andrew Gwynne, were among the signatories on the letter from Afzal Khan who wrote to Steve Reed on Friday asking him to adopt a definition of anti-Muslim hatred as an “important step” in addressing discrimination, prejudice and hatred the community faces.