Texas Democrat James Talarico’s Senate campaign accepted $3,000 from a celebrity Muslim speaker accused of grooming female fans for sham marriages and assuring husbands that Allah would “let you get away with” wife-beating — under certain conditions.
Nouman Ali Khan — founder of the Bayyinah Institute, an Islamic studies outfit boasting millions of fans on YouTube — cut the Texas Democrat three $1,000 checks, Federal Election Commission records show.
The most recent donation arrived Oct. 19, the day early voting opened in the Lone Star State — and one day after Talarico worked the room courting Muslim voters at a halal barbecue spot in the Dallas suburb of Irving.
Khan, who a Talarico campaign official said did not attend the halal event, took a major reputational hit in 2017, when multiple women accused him of using his celebrity to draw them into relationships — in some cases quickie religious marriages they said were a cover for sex — and then pressuring them to keep their mouths shut.
A panel of four Muslim scholars found that when women complained about his conduct, Khan “apologizes and attempts to buy their silence or threatens them,” BuzzFeed News reported in December 2017.
The panel’s findings reportedly included a screenshot of a bank transfer of nearly $7,000 that one woman described as hush money.
A second panel of six clerics concluded that Khan’s behavior was “unbecoming of any believer, much less someone who teaches about the Holy Qur’an.”
Khan, for his part, denied any wrongdoing and his lawyer called the claims “unfounded.”
Two years before the allegations surfaced, Khan posted a lecture to his YouTube channel titled “Hitting Women – That’s Messed Up.”
It opens as a condemnation of Muslim men who use scripture to justify domestic violence. But about 10 minutes in, Khan finds a theological loophole: a situation in which a wife “is actually caught” and her husband “sees her with another man.”
“He loses his mind, and what does he do? He hits her,” Khan said. “You snap, now he hit, or he pushed her, something he did and he feels bad. ‘How could I have done that?’ Allah says, ‘I will give you license in that crazy case. I’ll let you get away with that one.’”
The exception, Khan added, applies only to “repeated” and “perpetual infidelity from a wife” that “drives the man nuts” — and even then, a husband should limit his blows to a “tap, or whatever.”
In the same lecture, Khan turned to what he called one of the Quran’s “most unusual” scenarios: a man raising four orphaned girls may, once “they gain a certain age,” marry “one of them or two of them or three of them.”
“Is that a usual case?” Khan asked.
It isn’t, he conceded, but a man marrying the orphaned girls he raised is permitted all the same.
The Talarico campaign insisted it didn’t ask for Khan’s money.
“Our campaign did not solicit a contribution from this individual and condemns violent rhetoric in all its forms,” spokesman JT Ennis told The Post. “This individual is one of more than 1.6 million contributors and does not speak for our campaign.”
Khan did not respond to a request for comment.
Talarico, a former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, is locked in a tight race with Republican Ken Paxton as he tries to be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.
