Sorry but American Muslims don’t owe Democrats their vote to keep Trump out

Muslims in America have historically been an overwhelmingly Democrat constituency. But in 2024, that has changed over President Biden and Vice President Harris’s unwavering military support to Israel since October last year. To many non-Muslim voters on the left, this is an outrageous thought. Four more years of Trump’s bigotry, radical racism, abortion bans and outright Muslim hatred as a ‘gesture’ of support to Gaza? Be rational, the keyboard warriors furiously write. The alternative to Harris is the unthinkable. Remember the Muslim ban? Are you people crazy?

The rage is so terrible, so misplaced.

Dear exasperated voters on the left: Don’t put this on American Muslims. Don’t put this on the community America has loved to hate and humiliate for nearly 25 years.

Muslims in America are not a small demographic and politicians are catching on not nearly quickly enough that it’s going to hurt to ignore them. Swing states like Michigan with its huge Muslim population were crucial to Democrats winning in 2020. Though population data available is outdated, there are now believed to be roughly four million Muslims in America and Islam is slated to overcome Judaism by 2040 to become the second biggest religion in the US. That’s just four presidential terms away. 

But despite a growing population, according to three separate surveys conducted by Pew Research Center between 2014 to 2019, Muslims were consistently ranked the most disliked religious group in the country alongside atheists. In 2017, a report by the same center said that during the first few months of the Trump government, nearly half of all Muslim American adults said they had personally experienced some form of discrimination because of their religion in the previous year. 

The people who are so angry that Muslim blue voters don’t want to vote for the Democrat party because of Gaza, have missed the point of holding power to account. 

Amal Khan

Trump celebrated the outing of Muslim-hatred when he came into office with breathtaking brazenness. This is why it’s so terribly striking that still, Muslims in America are willing to risk another Trump presidency. It’s not crazy though, it’s brave. It’s the kind of courage that saves the day, and democracy, in the long term.

For those of us who grew up in the shadows of 9/11, 2024’s Gaza and its narratives in the US held up a mirror of a lifetime of racism and de-humanization.

In 2004, I went to college in Massachusetts, America’s most liberal state. I don’t know when I internalized it and when it became okay to laugh about it, but in the months after 9/11, it was completely acceptable to see Muslim families being physically pulled out of airport lines. Terrified dads and moms being led away with their kids, everybody being barked at while trying to hold on to the papers they’d meticulously stapled together weeks before. Papers that proved things like ordinariness, innocence, love for America.

A couple of weeks ago I stood in a US immigration queue with my 4-year-old and had the same sickening anxiety I’ve had since my first year of college when I approached the immigration officer. It’s an anxiety I refuse to pass on to my son. 

The people who are so angry that Muslim democrat voters don’t want to vote blue over Gaza, have missed the point of holding power to account. Four more years of Trump sound like a nightmare sure, but it’s four years. This is about the literal and symbolic reclaiming of political power from a community America has mired in indignities for decades, and that is huge. It’s so much bigger than four years. It says: This time you don’t get our vote no matter who the other guy is. 

American Muslims are saying they’ll take four more years of racism, immigration bans and de-humanization to ensure the political military complex in Washington doesn’t get impunity when Muslim children are slaughtered in the world. 

Maybe then, in 2028, the conversations and candidates will be wiser. The four-year detour may be long and painful but we can learn to think of it as the last and terrible chapter of the West’s shameless anti-Muslim era. We can live with it. We already have.

— The writer is op-ed editor at Arab News Pakistan Edition

X: @amalkhan