Zainab Kahloon - Religion or Re-Election: How Muslim Americans Running for Office Reconcile Their Islamic Values with Their Political Decisions

At the moment, Muslims running for office are in a unique position to shape the Muslim-American political vision. Whether or not they consider representing their faith to be a priority is their personal decision. Yet their actions will create a ripple effect insofar as the example they set will serve as blueprints for future Muslim-Americans running for office. Because Muslim-Americans running for office are some of the most visible figures in the Muslim-American community, some questions their actions raise include: How do Muslim Americans running for office reconcile their Islamic values with their political decisions, if at all? What consequences do their actions have for Muslim-Americans as a political constituency? My thesis explores these questions as to how Muslim-Americans running for office reconcile their religious Islamic values with their decisions and the implications it has for Muslim-Americans as a political constituency. In answering these questions, I aim to provide an account of how Muslims engage with a democracy predicated upon religious pluralism. This account is especially relevant given the exponential rise in the number of Muslim-Americans running for office and the fact that the scholarship on Muslim-Americans running for office is sparse, if not non-existent.

In order to answer my set of questions, I decided to conduct qualitative interviews with Muslims who have previously run for office. I reached out to over 100 Muslim-Americans who ran for office from 2012 until now. Each of these people were on a database that Jetpac, an NGO that trains Muslim-Americans on how to run for office, had collected. I ended up conducting approximately 32 interviews with Muslims who have previously run for office. Using their answers, I then coded their responses to analyze trends in their responses. To supplement these interviews, I also conducted qualitative interviews with academics and religious scholars.

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