Asma Khalid has written a beautiful, painful essay in The Atlantic, titled “Islamophobia Has Corroded American Values.” She tells of bullet holes found in her Indiana masjid’s window three months after 9/11. Of a neighbor who piled a mountain of dirt along the property line to hide the masjid from view. Of a Republican volunteer named Connie who looked at her hijab and said, “We were here first, okay? You’re second.”
We believe every word of her testimony. And we read it as Black Muslims in Philadelphia — a city where Black Muslim communities have been raising masjids, schools, and businesses for a century, where the masjid is not a novelty amid the cornfields but a fixture on the block. Her grief is real, and it deserves to be honored. Our families have carried versions of it for generations.
In the early 1990s — the same years that berm was rising along the Indiana property line — a principal in Northwest Philadelphia told our mother, Aisha El-Mekki, Black Panther turned public school science teacher, that her hijab and modest dress violated Pennsylvania’s garb law, an 1895 statute written to keep Catholic nuns out of classrooms. Her faith was non-negotiable: she would teach in full garb or not at all. The principal declined to enforce it, and she taught for decades more. But as our sister Haajar put it, the law “just loomed in the atmosphere” — always one more reason a Black Muslim woman could be let go. Pennsylvania, the last state in the country with such a ban, did not repeal it until 2023. Our mother did not live to see it.
But the headline’s frame deserves a loving challenge. Corrosion requires metal. For a value to corrode, it has to have been installed in the first place. So before we mourn what Islamophobia has supposedly eaten away, we should ask a harder question: name the decade. In her lifetime or ours, name the decade when Muslims — or anyone outside the white Protestant mainstream — were consistently, reliably full citizens of the United States.
We have been searching. We cannot find it.
America Was Built This Way
The evidence is right there in her telling. The berm went up along the masjid’s property line in the early 1990s — a full decade before September 11. Her middle school taught Islam by screening Not Without My Daughter. And she recounts how Thomas Jefferson invoked “the Mahometan” to demonstrate the reach of religious freedom in Virginia — while tens of thousands of enslaved African Muslims were denied that freedom, and every other freedom, on his own soil.
The idea of the Muslim was welcome in theory; the actual Muslim was held in the barracoon. No value corroded between those two clauses. The arrangement was built that way.
And a thing launched with force stays in motion. Jefferson and the men beside him set exclusion moving with massacre, the auction block, and an appetite for land and labor that no amount of either could satisfy. Momentum that heavy does not stop on its own. It has to be met by a stronger force. The Civil War met it with one — for a moment. Then the momentum regathered its anti-Black, anti-human logic in Black Codes and convict leasing, slavery by another name, and kept right on moving.
The law never hid this. The very first Congress limited naturalization to “free white persons” in 1790. One hundred and thirty-three years later, the Supreme Court told Bhagat Singh Thind — a U.S. Army veteran — that he was not white enough to be a citizen. In 1942, a president’s signature sent 120,000 people of Japanese descent into camps, most of them citizens. An anti-Catholic mob burned an Ursuline convent outside Boston in 1834. Harvard and its peers capped Jewish enrollment well into the twentieth century.
The circle of full citizenship has never quietly included everyone and then eroded. It was drawn narrow on purpose, and every widening of it was fought for, bled for, and litigated by the people standing outside it — and even the wins never sat on solid ground. Reconstruction was overthrown within a generation. The Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013. What this country grants us, it has always reserved the right to take back.
Our students never needed this lesson explained. When a presidential candidate was promising to shut Muslims out of the country, teenagers at Shoemaker — the West Philadelphia school I led for years — talked about what his presidency might mean for Muslims like them. Husnaa Hashim, who would go on to become Philadelphia’s Youth Poet Laureate, reached straight for the precedent: “I think about Japanese internment camps. They could keep us right here and put us all in the same place and make us suffer.” A teenager in our hallways connected 1942 to her own future. The children already know the line is unbroken. It is the adults who keep calling it corrosion.
The Oldest Muslims in America Never Got a Golden Age
For Black Muslims, the timeline is even less forgiving. The oldest Muslim community in this country arrived in chains — historians estimate that up to 15 percent of enslaved people brought to the United States were Muslim, and some put the share far higher. Omar ibn Said, a scholar captured from Futa Toro, wrote his life story in Arabic in 1831 while still legally owned by another man in North Carolina. And Yarrow Mamout — the elder Khalid honors in her essay — sat for Charles Willson Peale in 1819 after decades of enslavement in Maryland, a Muslim freedman who kept his faith through it all. His portrait hangs today in thePhiladelphia Museum of Art, an African Muslim gazing out at our city, older than the myth that Muslims arrived in America after 1965.
And when Black Americans rebuilt Islam here in the twentieth century, the government answered with a file, not with a welcome that later corroded. The FBI opened its file on the Moorish Science Temple in 1931. Elijah Muhammad was sentenced to four years in prison in 1942 on sedition and draft charges. Malcolm X was under FBI surveillance from 1953 until the day he was assassinated, and the bureau’s campaign to “discredit, disrupt, and destroy” Black organizations swept up masjids alongside movement offices.
Malcolm gave the country its diagnosis while that file was still growing: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” After 9/11, the NYPD mapped Muslim neighborhoods and infiltrated student groups for more than six years — and by the department’s own admission, all that spying never generated a single lead. In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a ban that a presidential candidate had announced, in his own words, as a shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
That is not a fall from grace. That is an unbroken line.
Our tradition prepared us to recognize it. Every land is Karbala; every day is Ashura. The struggle against tyranny is not confined to one place or one date — and neither is the obligation to stand against it. A community formed by that teaching never experienced 9/11 as the moment America broke — only as one more date on a long calendar.
American Nostalgia and “MAGA”
We are pushing on a sister’s frame, not her experience — and the frame matters. A story about American values corroding is a nostalgia story, and nostalgia for a tolerant America that never existed is the gentler cousin of “Make America Great Again.” Both point backward to a golden age. Both require the same forgetting to work. One mourns a lost greatness; the other mourns a lost welcome. Neither can name the decade when the thing they mourn actually existed for all of us.
What Khalid experienced in Indiana was real — the classmates who complimented her tie-dyed hijab, the neighbors who knew her family as “the Khalids.” Individual decency has always lived alongside structural exclusion in this country. But citizenship that depends on your neighbors knowing your name is a lease, and leases get revoked. America’s values did not corrode after 2015. Connie just felt free to say to a hijabi’s face what the 1790 naturalization law had already said in writing: you’re second.
The Task Is Construction, Not Restoration
This is why we insist on teaching truth. This year the country marks 250 years since its founding, and the truthful version of that story does not celebrate values that were established and then eroded. It honors the enslaved Muslims, the abolitionists, the freedom-school teachers, the litigants, and the organizers who are still making America mean what it said.
Our students — Muslim children, Black children, all children — are a SEPTA ride from Yarrow’s face. They deserve to stand in front of that portrait and study the FBI’s masjid files in the same unit, so they inherit the whole struggle rather than a false grief. Some of them are already ahead of us — Nasihah Thompson-King, a hooper from Shoemaker, took on the state rule that made Muslim girls ask permission to wear hijab on a basketball court and told Pennsylvania to terminate the waiver altogether. This is what we prepare young educators to carry — in Freedom Schools, in our teacher pipelines, in every classroom led by teachers who are actually trying to prepare students, and themselves, for the truth.
Khalid says she spent three years making a documentary so her sons could have a fuller vision of American and Muslim history. We are grateful for it, and our own children will watch it. But the fuller vision carries a harder assignment than the headline allows. If the values had merely corroded, the work would be restoration — sand off the rust, polish what our grandparents enjoyed. They did not corrode, because for most of us they were never installed. The work is construction — the stronger force. Everything we have been handed — the literacy Omar guarded, the masjids our elders raised, the classrooms we teach in — is an amanat, a trust, and a trust is carried forward, not mourned. Construction, as every teacher and every believer knows, is the more hopeful task — because it does not ask us to pretend about the past in order to build the future.
