Hejrat Foundation

The Foundation has been an organized non-profit since 2005, though it has not filed public 990 nonprofit forms since 2014, likely because it is exempt from filing a nonprofit tax return as a religious institution equivalent to a church. ³

Political Engagement

In addition to its everyday religious practices, the Foundation engages in national and international work. In 2007, the United Nations Department of Public Information Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations accepted the Hejrat Foundation a recognized group. ⁴ In November 2023, the foundation signed a letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and other elected officials urging them to support an armistice and to oppose Israel’s “crimes against humanity” in its war against the terrorist group Hamas. The letter, which was also signed by groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations’ California chapter and American Muslims for Palestine, also claimed that incidents of “Islamophobia” increased after Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel in October 2023. ⁵    

The Hejrat Foundation has signed multiple letters along with other Muslim groups affiliated with the Solidarity for Human Rights of Shia Muslims consortium alleging human rights violations against Shia Muslims around the world. ^{6 7 8}

In 2021, the Hejrat Foundation signed a letter with other Muslim groups urging U.S. protection for Shia, Sunni, and other Muslim sects that were threatened after 58 Shia Muslim children were murdered in Afghanistan. ^{9 10}

A similar letter was signed urging the Pakistani government to stop alleged persecution of Shia Muslims in Pakistan. ¹¹

Praise for Radical Cleric

The Hejrat Foundation called Iranian Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Fazel Lankarani “one of the world’s great religious scholars” after his death in 2007. ¹² In 2006, Lankarani was one of several leading Muslim scholars who issued a religious ruling or fatwa, permitting murder for religious reasons of a journalist and an editor who were accused of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad. ¹³ The journalist, Rafiq Tagi, was later stabbed and mortally wounded for reasons that were unknown but which Tagi said may have been related to the fatwa. ¹⁴

Founder

The Hejrat Foundation was founded by Sayed Mahmoud Mousavi in 2000. ¹⁵ An Iranian who came to the U.S. in the 1980s after being employed as a government interrogator in Iran, Mousavi was convicted in 2008 for lying during U.S. citizenship interviews, filing a false tax return, and other charges. ¹⁶ The U.S. Department of Justice also pointed to omissions and false statements about work conducted for Iran-linked companies. ¹⁷

Most of Mousavi’s convictions were upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2010. ¹⁶ However, the Circuit Court overturned the immigration-related convictions. ¹⁸ After his death in 2014, the Islamic Human Rights Commission claimed that Mousavi had been improperly convicted and imprisoned and praised him as founder of both Hejrat and the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. ¹⁹

A petition supporting releasing Mousavi noted that his home and the Al-Nabi mosque were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ²⁰ Other Muslim individuals and groups as well as left-wing activists accused the U.S. government of generating false charges against Mousavi and treating him inhumanely while in prison. ^{21 22}

Financials

As of 2024, the most recent tax return filed by Hejrat Foundation in 2014 reported $445,166 in revenue. The same year it spent $66,806 and held net assets of $32,613. ²³ The IRS generally exempts religious institutions equivalent to churches such as mosques from filing a nonprofit tax return. ²⁴