OP-ED
Levitating the Muslim Vote Never forget that people died so you could vote! BY NADIA AHMAD IT’S 1:25 A.M., SEPTEMBER 15, 2020.
I
am writing this article, which will hit mailboxes the week before the November 2020 elections. I hope so much that a voter mobilization strategy has been put in place between now and when this publication goes to press, and that you read it. The dialers. The signs. The bumper stickers. The apps. The mail-in ballots. The early voting. The voter registration. The precinct locations. The friends and family. The community. The mosques. The supersonic GOTV. The full-throttle nationwide voter mobilization strategy. But even more than that, I want to make sure that you set aside whatever you are doing and make sure to vote in this historic election. People died for the right to vote. Here and in our countries abroad. If the “I voted sticker” didn’t get you excited, then those purple thumbs should have worked.
The rights in our Constitution to speak out and to have a free press are so critical. When we are silent, we cannot have our problems magically solved. I am not sure how I went from being auto-banned from the Daily Kos (https://www.dailykos.com/) community to CBS News and the Washington Post, except by the help of God. The more people tried to silence me, the more others stood up. We formed the Muslim Delegates and Allies (https://www.muslimdelegates andallies.org/) coalition to hold our government accountable and to make our agenda as Muslims in the U.S. known.
LEVITATING THE MUSLIM VOTE The Pew Center reports statistics on partisanship and ideology. A solid twothirds of U.S. Muslims identify or lean toward the Democratic Party (66%). A far lesser amount indicate they are Republican or lean Republican (13%), while one-in-five say they prefer another party or are political independents and do not lean toward either major party. Statistically speaking, the Muslim Americans’ partisan composition has changed little over the past decade. In fact, more than other populations, they remain far more strongly Democratic than the public does as a whole. I remember last fall being in a classroom with students discussing Selma’s Bloody Sunday. Those innocent days before the pandemic. But it still felt so dreadful. Even after the canons and the guns of the Confederacy fell silent, the racism remained in place in the Jim Crow South. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was part of a series of coordinated civil rights protests that occurred in Alabama. The year was 1965. Earlier that year, in order to register Black voters in the South, protesters marched the 54-mile route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Those brave protesters were confronted with deadly violence from local law enforcement and White vigilante groups. After much negotiation, the National Guard protected the protestors as they completed the march to their intended destination. Those protestors, including Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis [later representative from Georgia], defined their generation. They were emblematic of an era. They rose against the tide of bigotry to shape the laws and uphold the principles of the Constitution. I am of the opinion that our Constitution is a living, breathing document that has space for all of us. Meanwhile, the Muslims are having their civil rights moment right now under President Donald Trump. The reckoning we are having is with how far we will go to protect our constitutional rights and the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. I figured that if people could go vote while being beaten by batons, pelted with teargas and sprayed with bullets, then we could figure out a way to the vote in the pandemic. I have caught a lot of flak for my political positions, whether about prison abolition or the Green New Deal. But it’s my faith and trust in God more than the concerns of individuals and tainted organizations that carries me through the day. 20 ISLAMIC HORIZONS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
But one thing I realized through all of my bursts of complaining about Muslim institutional powers and hierarchies was how decayed and decrepit our systems are and how much we have tolerated them. In Urdu, we have a saying, “Chorh Day [Let it be].”
IT’S 2:25 A.M. SEPTEMBER 26, 2020. I am missing my submission deadline. I wanted to share my speeches that were delivered as a part of the Muslim Delegates and Allies Assembly, which was the first official Muslim event at the Democratic National Convention and the American Muslim Democratic Caucus’s Fifth Quadrennial event. As a law professor, I am troubled by how Donald Trump is ruining our democracy and the rule of law. As a mother of three young children, I cannot stand to hear the cries of children separated from their parents at the border. As the wife of an immigrant, I cannot bear the pain of the families ripped apart by the Muslim Ban.
