Nabeela Syed was in high school when Donald Trump, who called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” was elected to office. “As a visibly Muslim, Indian American young woman, it was heartbreaking to see someone with such divisive rhetoric, such hateful language, get elected to public office,” she tells Teen Vogue.
It lit a fire in her belly. Today, the 23-year-old is a state representative-elect to the 51st House District in Illinois. In the 2022 midterm elections, Syed managed to flip a Republican seat and make history; in January, when she assumes office, she will be the youngest elected member of Illinois’s General Assembly.
“This is my home; this is the only home I’ve ever known,” she says. “I was not going to let the new wave of far-right extremism make it feel like me or other folks don’t belong in a country that is ours as well.”
Syed joins a record number of Muslim Americans elected to local, state, and federal offices in the midterm elections. The Council of American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group, and Jetpac, a nonprofit focused on Muslim political representation, stated in a November report that Muslims won 83 seats, compared to 71 in 2020. Many of the candidates, like Syed, are in their 20s.
Somali American Zaynab Mohamed, 25, made history with her election in Minnesota: She is one of three Black women, the youngest woman, and the first Muslim woman ever elected to Minnesota’s state Senate. In Maine, Mana Abdi, 26, became the first Somali American state legislator. During the campaign, it emerged that her Republican opponent had once posted on Facebook that Muslims “should not be allowed to hold public office.” He ultimately dropped out of the race, leaving Abdi to run unchallenged. Ruwa Romman, 29, became the first Palestinian American and Muslim American to be elected to Georgia’s House of Representatives. In Ohio, Munira Abdullahi, 26, was also elected to the state House of Representatives.
“They are a generation that has been completely shaped — their lives have been completely shaped and formed by the War on Terror,” says Sylvia Chan-Malik, an associate professor at Rutgers University, about why young Muslims are increasingly running for office. “They’ve never known another America, except one in which these anti-Muslim, very racist anti-Muslim types of logic are in the air and circumscribe every aspect of their lives.”
Before 9/11, Chan-Malik says American Muslim communities were disparate and broken up along ethnic and sectarian lines. However, the anti-Muslim racism after the terrorist attacks was unified and national, forcing an internal reckoning within the American Muslim community to construct a collective identity producing “the ground on which this generation of Gen Z Muslims steps into,” according to Chan-Malik.
Access to social media and alternative viewpoints has also influenced the political agency of Gen Z American Muslims. “They are an inherently skeptical generation,” Chan-Malik says. “Young Muslims in particular, who have seen time and time again the falsehoods that are perpetrated against their communities, the level of surveillance they’ve dealt with.”
Because they do not trust the mainstream narrative, young Muslims, like their peers, turn to social media for news and information. According to a 2022 study by the American Press Institute, 74% of Generation Z get their news from social media.
This access has emboldened this generation, Chan-Malik says. “They don’t feel disempowered” because they can create content themselves and contribute a counter-narrative. She adds that post-9/11 surveillance of American Muslims has resulted in a defiant attitude in this cohort because they grew up with the feeling of being watched. In the days following the terrorist attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which allowed US intelligence agencies unprecedented new surveillance powers. Former president Bush also authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on phone conversations within the US without first seeking warrants — a violation of the Constitution.
“We’re not paralyzed by [9/11]. We know what it means to be a Muslim American, we know how to be like, I’m actually going to pray here, and I’m actually going to wear my hijab,” says Mohamed, the senator-elect from District 63 in South Minneapolis. “I walk into the Senate, and I’m working with majority white men who are from Greater Minnesota and who probably [are seeing] a Muslim woman for the first time in their lives. But I’m okay with that.”
After lobbying for criminal justice reform bills at the state level, she noticed how her local government didn’t have elected officials who looked like her, a Black, visibly Muslim woman. “For me, that was a clear message to the people in our state from our government being like, oh, someone like you has no place here,” Mohamed says. “It was so evident to me that I needed to step up and make space for our people, because we do deserve it.”
Syed echoes these words, stating matter-of-factly that “there will never be a district that looks like me.” When she talked to constituents, she noted she was born and raised in the district she was elected in, went to the public schools there, giving her an intimate understanding of her community.
“It’s important that we’re taking care of senior residents in our community,” she says about one of the key platforms on which she ran. “Growing up in a community and in a culture that very much cares about respecting your elders and taking care of our elders, that became a focal point for me.”
Syed hopes to reduce prescription drug costs and make health care affordable for seniors. As part of a generation that grew up with active shooter drills, preventing gun violence is also a top priority.
“The first active shooter drill I can vividly remember is in third grade when a police officer during the drill came in and moved the door handle to see if any of the students in the class would react,” she remembers. When she went canvassing door to door, parents would tell her that their kids are now doing active shooter drills in daycare.
As an immigrant who moved to America as a nine-year-old and didn’t speak English, Mohamed wants to improve the immigrant experience. “It’s really important for me to have an education system that’s working for all of us, that is funded, that’s equitable, that’s ensuring that our students who are immigrants have [Expanded Learning Opportunity] programs that actually teach them English, so that they can continue to learn,” she says. She also hopes to build a community across the country as she continues to speak to the issues that affect her as a young Black Muslim immigrant woman.
These election victories, Mohamed says, will help in “creating a government that is reflective of our values, of who we are. And that makes our lives a little bit easier.”
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