ALEXANDRIA, VA.— She works full time and takes college classes on the side and has a life, and she had things to do on a late-summer Sunday afternoon that did not involve sitting in an office and cold-calling 51 people. But Donald Trump was pulling close in the polls, and she’s a Muslim. And so, for first the time in her life, Nagina Bhatti, 26, showed up in September at a political phone bank gathering.It was run by Emerge USA, a group trying to make sure Muslims vote. At the end of the two hours calling Virginia Muslims from an airy room in a suburb of Washington, D.C., session leader Remaz Abdelgader, a composed young woman in a blue headscarf, had the volunteers write down why they had come. “I don’t want Trump to win!” Bhatti wrote. Across the country, the openly Islamophobic message of a Republican presidential nominee who wants to ban foreign Muslims from entering the country appears to be propelling American Muslims to their highest-ever levels of political interest, involvement and registration. Imams once reluctant to engage in politics have begun talking about the stakes and opening their doors to registration efforts. Leading Muslim groups have launched ambitious get-out-the-vote campaigns. And young U.S.-born or U.S.-raised Muslims, often more comfortable speaking out than their parents, have thrown themselves into activism at unseen rates. At civics training classes that used to draw 10 or 15 people at Houston mosques, 60 or 65 were attending this year, local Emerge leader Nabila Mansoor said this summer. “It’s the Trump factor,” she said. “A lot of people are realizing that maybe sitting on the sidelines is just not enough.”Aman Ali, a New York City storyteller who spends 200 days a year touring, said he has never heard so many Muslims talk about an election. In the 1990s, he said, “There were even people that had the idea of boycotting elections because ‘this a no ...
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