CHARLESTON, South Carolina — “I am a psychologist, and I run [the] Islamic School of Charleston,” said Ruby Abid, 48, an ace multitasker who has raised three grown children. “I am a substitute teacher, too, in like American schools, and I’m a Realtor. I sell houses, and I run a business, and I teach Arabic online, and like little stuff here and there.”

But midday on Fridays, Abid takes a pause from work for Jummah, the Friday prayer services at the Central Mosque of Charleston, a former church on a corner lot in a working-class neighborhood. A police patrol is stationed in the parking lot during worship. The mosque’s former president, Shahid Hussein, said it was just one of several houses of worship in Charleston that have been targets of threats or attacks, including the mass killing of nine people by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME church last year. During prayers, men sit in the main room where the imam leads prayer, while women are on the other side of a partition through which they can see and hear, with a separate entrance.

During the February primary season in South Carolina, Abid, who lives in nearby Mount Pleasant, told me that she was going to vote “with Democrats,maybe Hillary.” (She wouldn’t divulge who got her vote, in the end.) Donald Trump was speaking in town that very night, and Abid said “we’re more than happy to host him here and answer whatever questions he has about Islam and maybe we’ll be able to satisfy his … you know, whatever hatred he has about Muslims. Muslims are not bad people.”

Abid, a naturalized U.S. citizen who moved here from Pakistan two decades ago, is one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim American voters who will get to have their say in an election in which one of the two main candidates has openly proposed banning Muslims and immigrants from nations “compromised by terrorism.” According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, there are only a handful of swing states that have more than 1 percent Muslim population.

Swing states in bold

SOURCE: PRRI

The Pew Research Center has estimated there were about 3.3 million Muslims in the United States in 2015, or about 1 percent of the population.¹ By 2050, according to Pew, the Muslim share of the population should more than double, surpassing the number of Jewish Americans (who are estimated to decline to 1.4 percent from 1.8 percent now) and double the number of Hindus.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, using a private voter database from the companyAristotle, found that 824,000 registered voters in the U.S. matched a list of 43,538 traditionally Muslim names. That figure is roughly half of 1 percent of U.S. registered voters. According to CAIR’s research, that means more than 300,000 Muslim-American voters may have registered since the 2012 election, which the group said may be the result of political attacks on Muslims.

The subject often comes up during Friday prayers at the Charleston mosque.

https://www.islamstory.com/en/artical/19828/uslim-americans-respond-caustic-campaign-raising-money-mobilizing