Levitating the Muslim Vote

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.

Iam 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.

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.

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.muslimdelegatesandallies.org/) coalition to hold our government accountable and to make our agenda as Muslims in the U.S. known.

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.

We cannot sit out the election. We have to take to educate ourselves. The Muslim Delegates and Allies coalition sought to take action to restore dignity, integrity and honor to our ownership of our democracy, to be a part of the win that will open a new page nation’s capital. We cannot backslide any further as in U.S.-Muslim relations. a democracy. Yesterday my partner took out the book I had co-edited in 2002, Unveiling

In no other country than the U.S. would I have the Real Terrorist Mind. He gave it to my son Senan, who is now 9, and told him, the freedom and the capacity to even exist, to study, “Your mother wrote this book a long time ago for you to read now.” to teach and drive change in my community. When I was Senan’s age, I made my Dad take me to see the Nasir Bagh Refugee

My father, an immigrant from Pakistan, was born camp in Peshawar — the tented camp set up in 1980 as the first wave of Afghan a colonial subject of the British Raj who came here refugees fled the Soviet occupation of their homeland. came from two nations always on the brink of war. When I was 13, my parents and other commu-

MEANWHILE, THE MUSLIMS ARE HAVING nity members organized a bus so we could march

THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS MOMENT RIGHT NOW UNDER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP. THE on Washington against the embargo on Bosnia. The bus was literally parked in front of our house, and we boarded it with our friends in the community to partic-

RECKONING WE ARE HAVING IS WITH ipate in the largest Muslim rally in the U.S. at that time.

HOW FAR WE WILL GO TO PROTECT OUR Estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000. This also became what is probably the first Muslim American

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS AND THE IDEALS event to receive national news media coverage.

ENSHRINED IN THE DECLARATION OF When I was 20, I organized a protest with antiwar

INDEPENDENCE. activists at my college commencement at the University of California at Berkeley. We made the national news for our protests against the commencement speaker, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had callously said the price of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Clinton administration — the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children – had been worth it. The Muslims, the Columbians and the Serbians were all at it. When I was 21, I visited the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila just as the Second Intifada was underway. And seeing the depravity of humanity to each other really shattered me. When I was 22, I was the lead speaker at an antiwar protest held in front of New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which had 20,000 protesters and 5,000 police officers. The World Economic Forum was held there that year instead of in Davos, Switzerland. and worked the night shift as a security guard in the Rally in New York in what was the largest single event on climate that has been Pan Am hanger at John F. Kennedy International organized to date — one so large and diverse that it could not be ignored. One Airport. He worked his way through graduate school year later, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed. and moved to Orlando in 1973, the year SeaWorld In 2018, I rallied with my kids in Anaheim, Calif., against the Muslim Ban. Orlando opened. Through his hard work and sacri- Later that year, I joined the Women’s March Bus in Orlando for early voting. We fices, he now designs highways and airports all across were told that we were foreigners, that people who should be voting were voting. the country as an engineer. He built America. In 2020, I protested in front of Orlando City Hall with my three children

My mother came to Canada alone with a medical against going to war with Iran. degree from India and started working as a coupon Not once or twice but so many times over the course of my life I have seen counter in Montreal because she couldn’t get any people with limited means move against all odds to bring about change. Because other job — she didn’t speak French. Moving to the we cannot lose hope. If we lose hope in peace and hope for a better tomorrow, U.S. for more opportunities, as a pediatrician she we lose everything. is now standing on the front lines of the pandemic And now I stand before you to tell you that protesting is the lifeblood of this treating patients. country. The defining moments of my life and yours are those when we said, My parents met and married in Orlando. They “No.” We said, “No to racism. No to war.” ih In 2014, I marched with my two kids at the Climate But here in this country, they built family, love and Nadia B. Ahmad, JD, LLM, is a law professor in Orlando, Fla. She is co-founder of Muslim Delegates and community. And in this election, we have to mobilize our comAllies Coalition. She also serves as an editor of the Race & the Law Profs Blog, an editorial board member of Florida Bar News & Journal, and co-author, “Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation (3rd Edition). In 2020, she was appointed as a Council Member of the American Bar Association’s Section of Civil Rights munities like we have never done so before. We have and Social Justice and to the Advisory Board of the ABA Center for Human Rights, Dignity Rights Initiative.