Editorial standards

Sourcing

Every factual assertion on a public page traces to a source a reader can open. We prefer primary documents — the bill text, the filing, the transcript, the scripture passage — over somebody's summary of them. Where we rely on a secondary account, we say whose it is.

We do not publish a number we cannot attribute to a named dataset with a year attached. We do not publish a quotation without a date and a place it can be found.

Review status

Every page states whether it has been through subject review. A piece marked review pending has been researched and edited but has not yet been read by a reviewer with subject expertise. We label it rather than imply a scholarship that has not happened.

Writing about religion

We distinguish between what a scripture says and what history can independently establish. "The Qur'an describes" and "historians have established" are different sentences and we do not trade one for the other.

Muslims disagree among themselves on many questions. Where that is the case, the page says so and gives the range, rather than presenting one school's position as the position. We acknowledge where Muslim, Christian and Jewish accounts differ without disparaging any of them. In our own prose, "(PBUH)" follows the names of the prophets — Muhammad (PBUH), Jesus (PBUH), Moses (PBUH), Abraham (PBUH). We never insert it into a direct quotation or a source title, and we never alter either.

Texas Muslim issues no religious rulings. If you need one, ask a qualified scholar; this is journalism.

Politics and public officials

Coverage of officials and candidates is factual and attributed: what was said, the exact words, the date, the venue, the document, and the response of anyone criticized. We publish no endorsements, no candidate scorecards or ratings, and no claims about what someone privately intended. A person's stated reasoning is quotable; their motive is not ours to assert.

Claims and evidence

Claims & Facts records lay out evidence. They carry no truth score, no traffic-light rating and no numeric scale, because those compress exactly the nuance a reader needs. Where evidence is contested or insufficient, the record says "insufficient" instead of picking a side.

Some subjects require particular care and are held until reviewed: crime and religion (where religion is generally not measured at all and nationality is never a proxy for it — being from India, or anywhere else, tells you nothing about a person's religion), migration comparisons (which are meaningless without country, cohort, year and admission category), and contested historical questions such as the traditional reports about Aisha, where honest treatment must separate what the hadith literature reports, what source critics have argued, what chronological reconstructions are disputed, and what modern child protection requires — without presenting any specific reconstructed age or any supposedly universal ancient norm as settled fact.

Photographs

No image on this site is AI-generated. Every photograph carries its creator, source page and licence, shown in the caption. Where a photograph illustrates a subject rather than depicting the specific place or business under discussion, the caption says "Illustrative photograph" in those words. We never caption an unidentified mosque as a named Texas congregation, and we never let a generic barbecue photograph imply a particular restaurant.

Corrections

We correct in the open and date the correction. See corrections.