Following recent comments from U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, CAIR—the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the U.S.—has made an unprecedented move, placing the senator on its list of “anti-Muslim extremists” in the U.S.
Never before has a sitting U.S. senator received the designation.
The organization’s decision comes in direct response to Tuberville’s most recent string of Islamophobic comments in which he blatantly claimed that Islam is not a religion and called for the deportation of all American Muslims.
“Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult,” Tuberville stated in a post to his official X account Sunday. “Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer.”
“Stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers,” the senator continued. “We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.”
Tuberville was also involved in a recent campaign of anti-Muslim hate that led the Islamic Academy of Alabama, an Islamic K-12 private school, to cancel its planned relocation from Homewood to Hoover, Alabama, over safety concerns.
During an interview about the school, Tuberville asserted that Islam “preaches hate” and instructs to “kill all infidels” and “kill all Christians.”
In a statement announcing their designation of Tuberville as an anti-Muslim extremist, CAIR officials compared the senator’s attacks on the academy to Governor George Wallace’s infamous stand in the schoolhouse door.
“Senator Tuberville appears to have looked at footage of George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse door to keep Black students out and decided that was a model worth reviving—this time against Muslims,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director. “His rhetoric belongs to the same shameful chapter of American history, and it will be taught that way.”
Meanwhile, Tuberville celebrated his new designation as an “anti-Muslim extremist,” calling it a “badge of honor” in a post to his X account Monday.
“I will NEVER stop fighting for AMERICANS and our Constitutional values,” the senator added.
In a separate report analyzing Tuberville’s history with Islamophobia, CAIR went on to detail how the senator uses specific rhetoric to otherize Muslims in an attempt to deprive them of their constitutional rights.
“Like many anti-Muslim public figures, Tuberville claims ‘Islam is not a religion. It is a cult.’ This is a common tactic intended to deprive Muslims of the First Amendment protections,” the organization states in the report. “He also places his concerns in a counter-terrorism frame—declaring ‘we are at war’ with people ‘coming here from Muslim countries’ to justify blanket measures against Muslims.”
“Tuberville repeatedly uses Sharia as a term to frighten voters and vilify all Muslims and believes Muslims ‘are getting ready to take over New York,'” the report adds. “He has repeated conspiracy theories about Muslim only neighborhoods in Europe and that Islam enjoins perpetual war on its followers.”
Interestingly, Tuberville’s public espousal of anti-Muslim bigotry appears to have only began this year, with CAIR finding no public statements from Tuberville that criticized Islam or Muslims prior to June 2025—just one month after Tuberville launched his campaign to be Alabama’s next governor.
APR asked Tuberville’s Democratic opponent in the governor’s race, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, what he thinks of his opponent’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and CAIR’s decision to designate the senator as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
“We need to have that house with the crowded table where everybody is welcome. And I think Alabama can do a heck of a lot better than someone who has that kind of religious bigotry running through their blood,” Jones said.
“You don’t have to necessarily have a group designate somebody as anti-Islamic in order to know for a fact that he is anti-Islamic. His comments have been really horrible. I think it shows a complete lack of knowledge about the religion, about the Muslims in Alabama, and their history,” Jones told APR. “Quite frankly, I don’t even think he knows what the word indoctrination actually means, this is a school that he was talking about initially, just a school, and a school that exists already that just kind of wanted to move from Homewood to Hoover. And the fact that there was such a religious, bigoted backlash, including the comments from Tuberville has just no place in Alabama, it has no place in America.
Jones went on to further differentiate himself from Tuberville, explaining that he hopes to be a governor for all Alabamians while Tuberville looks to stir division.
“My history has been one of trying to work with everybody, to treat everybody with dignity and respect. I don’t call Republicans names the way he calls Democratic mayors and senators names. I don’t lash out against a particular religious group. I understand that there are different faiths in this world and different faiths in this country,” Jones said.
“We have Christian schools, we have a Jewish school here in Birmingham, we have a few Muslim schools. We have, significantly, the First Amendment that guarantees religious freedom,” he said. “And so I think the biggest difference with us is that I try to lift all boats and I don’t try to divide us. He is the divider-in-chief, and I think people in Alabama are tired of that. They want to find some common ground because that’s the only way we move forward as a state.”
Jones added that he does not believe Tuberville’s attacks on the Muslim community are part of a deliberate campaign strategy, but rather a reflection of the GOP frontrunner’s true character.
“I wish it was [a campaign strategy], I could criticize the campaign strategy. I wish it was, but I don’t think it is. I think that’s how he believes,” Jones told APR. “I think that he has that kind of religious bigotry and he just hasn’t had the opportunity to say it, but this was not just a rise with his campaign, this was also directed at the new mayor-elect of New York City and it has flown through that.”
“So unfortunately I don’t think it is a campaign strategy because I don’t think that there are that many people in Alabama who believe that way,” Jones said. “He is pandering somehow, but I just really believe this is him. He has made comments about inner-city African Americans, he has praised white nationalism–welcoming them into the military, which he had to kind of walk back some–I think this is just who he is.”
Despite Alabama’s Muslim community making up only 0.5 percent of the state’s population, issues concerning Muslim Alabamians could end up playing an outsized role in the 2026 gubernatorial race if Tuberville’s Islamophobic streak continues, with further criticism from Jones, CAIR and others likely to follow.
