West County Democrats

History may be made in St. Louis this spring. For the first time, two Muslim women have filed as nonpartisan candidates for the school boards of two of the area’s largest districts: Azra Ahmad for Rockwood and Farida Ahsan for Parkway. Saad Amir, the executive director of the St. Louis-based Muslims for a Better America, views their candidacies as a significant benchmark for St. Louis’s Muslim community.

Amir, who is 25 and a political science graduate of Truman State University, is a frequent presence at Democratic meetings in the St. Louis area. He aspires to attend Republican meetings as well. “Muslims for a Better America is strictly nonpartisan. It was incorporated in February 2018 after more than a year of planning meetings,” he says.  “We are a 501 c (3) civic engagement and education organization. Our goal is to get Muslims involved in the electoral process. We want to educate and engage the Muslim community so that Muslims are represented in government.”

About 100,000 Muslims live in the St. Louis area, says Amir. The numbers come from the International Institute, the U.S. Census and the Imam Council, which represents the 24 mosques in St. Louis. Muslims for a Better America is the first organization to attempt to unify the entire Muslim community—Bosnian, South Asia (Pakistan and India), Middle Eastern and African American—into one group, he says. Stakeholders from each cultural sector are represented on the organization’s board.

“One of our main goals is to get more Muslim names on the ballot,” says Amir. “If Muslims see people who look like them running for office, they will be more excited about voting. In St. Louis, the main concern of many Muslims when they immigrated here was to put food on the table. They had no experience in getting involved in the civic sector and they had no desire to because no one was ever targeting them. They skirted under the radar.”

That changed on 9/11when radical Muslim terrorists attacked the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, directly killing almost 3,000 Americans. “That attack, by people who are not like us or representative of the Muslim community, painted a target on the backs of all Muslims,” says Amir.

In the years since 9/11, hatred of American Muslims has continued to increase. Nationwide, in just one year from 2015 to 2016 (the year of the most recent presidential election) Islamophobia hate crimes and legislation targeting Muslims (such as banning sharia law) jumped 44%, says Amir. The number comes from an annual study conducted by the Council on American Islamic Relations.

“What the Muslim community agrees on, right now, is that for no other discernible reason than the fact that we pray to a different God, we are being targeted,” he says. “The ignorance and the negative perceptions come a lot from fear of the unknown. The only way to get rid of that fear is by making the unknown, known.”

What is a better America? Amir describes it as is one where hatred and fear of Muslims isn’t accepted. He points to the 2018 Parkway School Board election. One candidate had a known history of posting hateful comments about Muslims on her social media. During two candidate forums, no one questioned her about these beliefs. Muslims for a Better America stepped in to host a third candidate forum at the West County Mosque. Muslims and non-Muslims attended. The moderator asked the candidate about her anti-Muslim comments and gave her time to respond. Nothing that she said made her comments acceptable, says Amir. She lost by 7,000 votes, but about 4,500 people voted for her, he notes. This bigotry doesn’t belong in our government. 

For a young organization, Muslims for a Better America is making impressive headway. In the first year, the group plowed through a list of 700,000 registered voters in the St. Louis area. It identified where different groups of Muslims live in St. Louis, and within the neighborhoods, it pinpointed registered voters and active voters by election. Now it is laying out strategies on where and how to target voter registration drives and developing strategies to encourage registered voters to actually go to the polls. The goal is to register 500 new Muslim voters in 2019 and 1500 by 2020, says Amir.

“We can make an impact in different districts, especially in the ones that were won by very small margins in 2018,” he relates. “We are hopeful. We know people register to vote and then don’t actually go out and vote. The strategy to get Muslims excited to vote. We are slowly chipping away at the idea that ‘my vote doesn’t count.’ It is going to take some time to break away from that thinking.”

This year, Muslims for a Better America is launching a fellowship program to help train Muslims interested in running for office—regardless of political affiliation. “Already, we are highlighting and promoting the Muslim candidates running in April for school boards,” says Amir. “We want candidates to know that our organization is here and can help lead them to success.”

By Florrie Kohn  

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