Muslims Have Always Been Part of America’s Story

By Samina Ali

Samina Ali, Co-producer, immigrant, brown, woman, Muslim, writer.

Samina Ali

In the early 1970s, when I was two years old, my parents immigrated from the twin cities of Hyderabad–Secunderabad to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis–St. Paul. Something about that detail has always stayed with me, and growing up, I told myself that geography itself promised symmetry, balance—a layering of one life onto another.

But that version is a child’s imagining. The truth is, our arrival wasn’t just personal or poetic. It was political, historical, and newly possible. My family was among the first Indians legally allowed to immigrate to the United States after a profound shift in American law: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Before this landmark legislation, U.S. immigration policy had effectively shut the door to most people from India and much of Asia. In 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that people of Indian descent were not considered “white” and therefore were ineligible for naturalized citizenship. Thind, a Sikh immigrant who had served in the U.S. military during World War I, had previously been granted citizenship—only to have it revoked. His case triggered the denaturalization of dozens of Indian Americans and helped cement policies that, for decades, made Indian immigration nearly impossible.

The changes that came in 1965 grew out of the broader civil-rights era and dismantled a system that had long favored northern Europeans. The doors were finally opened to immigrants from countries like India—but not without conditions. Preference was given to immigrants with higher education and specialized skills. America, facing rising global competition and an urgent demand for scientific, medical, and technical talent, was actively recruiting expertise.

My dad fit that need perfectly. He had graduated with honors in engineering from the prestigious Osmania University in Hyderabad. Like thousands of other South Asians of his generation, he arrived in the United States in the early 1970s with training, ambition, and a willingness to begin again. Their migration helped fuel key industries—medicine, engineering, technology—that would reshape the modern American economy.

This first wave of immigrants also helped give rise to what would later be called the “model minority” myth: the idea that Indians are all successful, hyper-achieving professionals. But that image was not accidental—it was the product of policy. In those early decades, only those with certain credentials were legally allowed to enter.

As naïve as it might sound now, my parents were mostly unaware of the civil-rights movement that had helped make their arrival possible. They only knew that they had come to America dreaming of building a life for their children—not because it represented “American capitalism” or even the “American Dream,” but because it was simply the life they wanted for us, one that wasn’t available to them in India, especially not as Muslims.

The first Minnesotans we encountered were equally unprepared for us. Many assumed we were Mexican or light-skinned Black. Because of our last name, some asked if we were related to Muhammad Ali, the boxer. Not one of my classmates could locate India on a map. When I explained for the hundredth time where it was, they asked if people lived in mud huts and rode elephants. They complained that the curry on my clothes was “stinky.” And not a single adult or child had ever heard of Islam.

Yet there was something about that earlier innocence in America that allowed us, for a time, to be everything at once—both Indian and American, both Urdu and English, both saris and jeans, both chicken curry and hamburgers. My parents could leave India without giving up being Indian. Every summer, we returned to Hyderabad for long months. I did some of my schooling there and spoke fluent Urdu. I knew my cousins in India as intimately as my best friends in Minneapolis. My parents even kept a house in Hyderabad, imagining they might retire there someday. For them, birth and death belonged to India—just not their lives.

Then came September 11th.

In the days and weeks that followed, I felt the country’s gaze shift. The faith no one had heard of now filled every television screen. My last name, Ali, was no longer associated with the beloved boxer, but with terror. I was stopped at every airport. Questioned. Scrutinized. Suspect.

Suspicion of Muslims came with a demand that we remain silent to our mistreatment. There was an expectation that I should apologize for existing, prove my loyalty, make myself smaller. The dominant narratives about Muslims—that we were all threats, that Muslim women were oppressed, that Islam itself was incompatible with Western values—marked the first time I felt America reject me.

Photo Credit: The Independent

I refused to accept that I didn’t belong here. Not wanting to be naïve like my parents about American history, I began researching Muslim immigration. What I found was startling.

Muslims have never been newcomers to America.

Long before my family arrived, Muslims were already part of this nation’s story—a few as mapmakers and guides in early European expeditions in the 1500s, but most tragically through the transatlantic slave trade. Historians estimate that between 10 and 20 percent of the millions of Africans forced into bondage were Muslim. Many were literate in Arabic. Some came from scholarly or elite families before being captured, brutalized, and stripped of their identities. Their faith survived in fragments of prayer, memory, rebellion, and quiet endurance.

Muslims were also present in the imagination of the nation’s founders. As the new republic debated religious freedom, Islam was not an abstraction—it was a real test case. The historian Denise Spellberg has shown that Muslims served as a “litmus test” for whether America’s promise of religious liberty would truly extend to everyone.

Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an and argued that religious freedom must include “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan.” When the Constitution was ratified, Article VI declared that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” From the beginning, the idea that a Muslim could one day hold public office—even the presidency—was not unthinkable. It was anticipated.

Photo Credit: Al Jazeera

Even the Supreme Court bears this history in stone. On its north wall, a bas-relief depicts the Prophet Muhammad among history’s great lawgivers—alongside Moses and Confucius—not as a religious symbol, but as a figure of legal tradition. The irony is impossible to miss.

So what does it actually mean to be an American Muslim? Are the two identities as contradictory as post-9/11 rhetoric insists?

History tells a different story. Muslims are not foreign to this country. We have arrived in chains and with college degrees, in invisibility and in full view. We have been America’s forced labor and its legal test case, its erased presence and its newly visible one.

Even without knowing this long history in detail, my parents understood its truth instinctively. They didn’t see a contradiction between building a life in Minnesota and remaining rooted in Hyderabad. They didn’t believe becoming American meant erasing who they were. They traveled back and forth seamlessly, carrying two homes within them. They raised children who belonged to both worlds. That was the promise they believed in—that America had room for all of who we are.

This is my American story. It is a story of dislocation and belonging, of silence and voice, of learning that home is not only a place you leave or arrive at, but something you carry and continually remake. It is a story shared by millions of immigrants and children of immigrants who are asked, again and again, to choose between their histories and their futures.

We are told to pick one thing at a time: one country, one culture, one loyalty. But our country was built from the refusal of that choice. The American experiment was founded on the premise that its citizens could hold multiple identities at once, bound not by sameness of origin or faith or skin color or even language, but by shared civic ideals. It is the truest form of belonging this country has ever known.