How Harm Becomes Systemic: Abuse in the Muslim Education Industrial Complex
Over the past decade, repeated cases of abuse and harm have surfaced in American Muslim communities from prominent religious teachers who have abused their positions of authority and responsibility. Each instance carries its own context, its own details, its own immediate fallout, and while the particulars are different, the responses are patterned: doubt → disbelief → moral shock → containment (removal / return / rebranding) → continuity
This reveals how systems absorb disruption and ignore accountability to preserve continuity at the expense of true resolution.
For the sake of continuity, responsibility is narrowed to an individual while the collective remains undiagnosed. Attention shifts from the conditions that made harm possible and moves toward managing the immediate disruption, ushering a response that abandons reckoning.
As a result, Muslim communities don’t make space to recognize patterns or share learning. We miss opportunities to reflect on how authority is structured, how proximity is governed, or how accountability is enacted across our communities. We reduce safeguarding to reactive compliance rather than formative learning and the status quo remains the same. Platforms persist, governance arrangements remain largely intact, and authority reorganizes without being reimagined.
This is how harm becomes systemic. Not because wrongdoing is common but because the same responses are repeated.
We say “He doesn’t represent us”. “It is one bad actor.” “A few bad apples.” “An unfortunate anomaly.” One person becomes the container for collective failure.
These responses allow communities and institutions to avoid deeper reckoning, turning structural harm into isolated scandal.
This arc is not just in Muslim communities but reflects patterns documented in organizational sociology, crisis communication, and abuse-prevention research. Each shows that harm is routinely individualized, contained, and absorbed without structural redesign, reckoning, or resolution.
Same Architecture, Different Power
The case of Jeffrey Epstein offers a stark example. Over many years, abuse was enabled and sustained not only by an individual, but by the networks and institutions that surrounded him. Financial power, social capital, and reputational insulation combined to absorb disruption and delay accountability.
What matters for Muslim communal purposes is not the specifics of that case, but the structure it reveals. Harm was repeatedly individualized, responsibility was narrowed, systems remained intact, continuity prevailed, and accountability was absent.
There is no need to hypothesize what would happen “If Epstein was Muslim…”. When placed alongside cases within Muslim communities like the most recent case of Wisam Sharieff, the forms of power differ, but the response follows the same logic even if it is on a different scale.
In one context, abuse operates under financial authority. In the other, it operates under religious authority. In both, harm travels through networks that stabilize themselves by localizing blame and preserving the wider structure.
Muslim Communal Exceptionalism
If the architecture of harm response is familiar across contexts, the question remains: why does it feel more difficult to name and address when it appears within Muslim communities?
Part of the answer lies in a form of communal exceptionalism, a quiet assumption that religious commitment offers insulation from the structural failures seen elsewhere. That religious texts, values, language, and political struggles place us on different ground. This form of exceptionalism is not claiming that harm does not happen but that it must be an anomalous deviation, perhaps due to lack of knowledge, or succumbing to shaytan but essentially an individual failure from who we know ourselves to be. Under this logic, public moral authority becomes a shield and the possibility that harm might be systemic, a consequence of how we confer authority, organize ourselves and whom we protect, is difficult to entertain.
Although the Epstein and Sheriff contexts are different, we see the same institutional reflexes and the pattern is the same: both architect immunity from structural self-examination. Harm is acknowledged but its implications are contained.
An Enabling Ecosystem
The case of Wisam Sharieff is not just about one man. Abuse is rarely solitary. It is accompanied by enablers, protectors of reputation, bystanders, people who look away, and systems that make harm easier to hide.
Abuse travels through networks. In the case of Epstein, airports, banks, lawyers, universities, foundations, and social circles all played roles in enabling continuity. In the case of Sheriff, his enablement came from an enabling ecosystem that I’ve outlined in my research – the Muslim Education Industrial Complex (MEIC). MEIC refers to the growing ecosystem of courses, platforms, influencers, retreats, and learning products produced by companies and organizations that treat Islamic knowledge as a commodity, packaged for mass consumption—often organised around capitalist logics of visibility, scale, and productivity rather than ethical formation, accountability, or relational depth.
The MEIC enables individuals to acquire authority quickly. This manifests in a number of ways:
follower count as a measure for trust
reach as a substitute for communal verification
visibility as evidence of legitimacy
absence of community proximity
a system that rewards scale while weakening responsibility
knowledge transmission and acquisitions as ends onto themselves
What I describe as the MEIC is not a single institution or set of actors, but a system that shapes who is seen, who is trusted, and who is able to reclaim the stage after disruption.
When harm surfaces, authority remains in place, relocates, or goes dormant. Rarely, does it dissolve. Networks absorb disruption and redistribute influence without revisiting the conditions that produced it.
The emphasis on scale, productivity, and continual output also narrows how harm is evaluated. Past benefit (“but so many people have benefited from his work.”) is invoked to offset present damage. Impact is measured in numbers rather than the spiritual health of communities, ethical formation, or relational integrity.
In this way, the MEIC treats each crisis as an interruption rather than a signal. Continuity is restored not because harm has been addressed, but because moral assumptions, reductive understandings of individual and communal benefit, and the structures that reward visibility and growth remain intact.
The result is not simply individual failure, but a patterned capacity for authority to reorganize without being reimagined.
A Quranic Imperative
O believers! Stand firm for justice as witnesses for Allah even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or close relatives. Be they rich or poor, Allah is best to ensure their interests. So do not let your desires cause you to deviate ˹from justice˺. (Quran 4:135)
The Qur’an as message to the Messenger contained the instruction to build societal systems of justice, in order to create the conditions for good to take root and endure, rather than a sole focus on personal rectification and individual enlightenment. The Prophetic task was not to eliminate wrongdoing, but to establish arrangements that limited harm, widened accountability, and made care durable. This moral responsibility was structural.
So when we hear phrases like, “You can’t prevent everything,” “There’s no way to stop this from happening,” “There will always be bad apples,” we can recognize how they fall short and conflate the limits of control and the limits of responsibility. They reduce justice to reaction rather than design.
The Quranic imperative is not a call to establish or guarantee perfection but to strive to the furthest limit of moral responsibility with every means we have at our disposal to build care systems. And then and only then, do we leave the rest with God.
This means a refusal of capitalism's promise that more access automatically equals more goodness. And to strive towards justice.
This reframing matters because it changes the questions we ask.
The issue should not only be about who caused harm, or even how it occurred, but whether we have taken responsibility for the conditions that made it possible.
