A state legislator’s social media post of a video of Utah Muslims observing the Islamic tradition of Arba’in created a firestorm online, with dozens criticizing him as racist and scores of others disparaging the faith and its followers.
On Monday, Layton Republican Rep. Trevor Lee posted a video on X — formerly Twitter — of a group of Shiite Muslims observing Arba’in, a worldwide tradition marking the end of 40 days of mourning for the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein.
Lee’s only message on the post was: “In the small town of Taylorsville Utah.” He later replied to his own post, “Not a single American flag in sight.”
Many of the women in the video wore a black chador — a cloak often worn by women in Shiite communities that covers their hair and neck but not their face. Some pushed strollers, and children carried flags commemorating Hussein.
The video of the women and children was taken out the driver-side window of a slowly moving car. A honk is heard later in the video.
Lee’s followers piled on with anti-Muslim sentiment, calling Islam a “demonic ideology,” and saying the people should be sent back to where they came from. Other responses called Lee racist and xenophobic for singling out the Muslim women and making them a target for hatred and bigotry.
Last year, Utah documented two anti-Islamic hate crimes. One of those took place in Salt Lake County.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Lee’s tweet had been viewed more than 5.4 million times, reposted — without additional context — more than 550 times, and had more than 2,400 likes.
Lee said he was sent the video by a Facebook friend who filmed it in Taylorsville, a city where more than 60,000 people lived during the 2020 census, and he decided to post it.
“I wasn’t really trying to convey anything other than that is an interesting video,” Lee said in an interview. “This is small-town Taylorsville, Utah, and I’ve never seen this in my life before.”
“What I find interesting, though, is the assumptions both sides are making, whether it’s the right or the left,” Lee said. “I think it’s crazy. I haven’t insinuated anything.”
The women and children in the videos worship at Alrasool Islamic Center in Taylorsville. The mosque is located in a historic former meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is a block away from a chapel currently used by the Utah-based faith.
“We have done [the march in the video] every year for many, many years,” Hassan Mardanlou, a member of the executive committee of Alrasool Islamic Center, told The Salt Lake Tribune.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The Alrasool Islamic Center in Taylorsville, is pictured during Ramadan in March 2024.
The center’s congregation, he said, includes Muslims with roots in numerous countries, including Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mardanlou, who added that he has lived in the U.S. for half a century, said the Constitution protects Muslims’ speech and religious freedoms just as it would any other Americans’.
“Our door is open for everybody — please, please say this to everybody,” Mardanlou continued. “We don’t have any animosity toward anybody. … Some people misunderstand our religion — until you come and see us in person, you don’t know who we are.”
Mardanlou said elected officials, including Lee, are invited to the mosque, too.
On Wednesday morning, the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a national organization that advocates for Muslim civil rights — called on Lee to meet with Muslim community members.
“It is important for elected officials to know and understand all segments of their constituencies. We encourage Representative Lee to take up the Muslim community on its offer to meet with them and build greater understanding,” CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor said in a statement.
Lee told The Tribune on Wednesday morning that he had not seen the request from CAIR, and said “they can email me anytime.”
Dan McClellan, a religious scholar from Utah who explained the religious observance while responding to Lee’s post, said the lawmaker is being “disingenuous” and trying to “gaslight and escape responsibility for his rhetoric.”
“His sharing of this video along with the misrepresentation of Taylorsville as a ‘small town’ was transparently intended to gin up fear and anger among folks who think that immigrants are hurting small-town America and/or that Muslims are terrorists,” McClellan said, “and one just has to look at the comments or the retweets ... to see that he succeeded.”
Lee said he has received threats during his political career and if anyone informs him of threats against the Muslim community or anyone at the center, he will take down the video, but he added nobody has contacted him yet.
Lee’s colleague, state Rep. Phil Lyman, who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary but is running a write-in campaign for the office, later reposted the video, referring to it as “Consequences of [Gov. Spencer Cox’s] ‘New Americans’ aka illegal aliens sham. … Words matter, accuracy matters, definitions matter. Branding illegal aliens as refugees, undocumented, DACA recipients, ‘New Americans’, asylum seekers, etc only harms our state. Lumping legitimate political refugees with all other types of illegal aliens only harms those who are legitimate, lawful asylum seekers.”
Lyman tagged conservative media host Tucker Carlson in his message.
Lyman did not respond to questions about his motives for posting the video or whether he knew if any of the individuals in the video were refugees, asylum seekers or undocumented.
Until 2022, Lee ran a Twitter account under a fake name where he promoted election conspiracies and attacked women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and frequently used the #DezNat hashtag, supporting a far-right Latter-day Saint nationalist philosophy.
Earlier this year, Lee proposed, then pulled, a state constitutional amendment to “limit the public education system to children who are citizens of the United States or legal residents of the United States.”
When explaining his reasoning to The Tribune, he said immigrant children are a burden for schools. “We say, ‘Hey, here’s a bunch of kids, they don’t even speak English, but it’s your problem. Here you go,’” Lee said. “And that’s not right.”
Update, Aug. 28, 10:55 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comments from Dan McClellan, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Rep. Trevor Lee.