The race for the first Muslim woman in the US Congress
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SPRINGFIELD: It’s an incongruous sight, a woman in a salmon pink hijab standing on a Massachusetts traffic median, waving at oncoming cars and asking perfect strangers to vote her into Congress.
"Hey how are you? Good to see you!" hollers Tahirah Amatul-Wadud at a male pedestrian. A few cars beep their horns, the odd driver zaps down his window to say hello. Quite a few drive past, seemingly oblivious.
Amatul-Wadud is a mother of seven, a lawyer, a community activist and a Muslim, who rises before dawn, prays five times a day and fasts during Ramazan.
Now aged 44, she faces the biggest hurdle of her life: asking a majority white constituency, where Catholics are the biggest religious group, to make her the first Muslim woman elected into Congress.
But for her, it’s about policy, not religion. It’s about better representing and improving lives in western Massachusetts, an area suffering from higher than average unemployment, where many work two jobs just to make ends meet.
"I don’t always talk about religion because I don’t look to lead or serve from a religious prespective," she tells AFP at her campaign headquarters just outside Springfield.
She says her goals are secular, but her faith is "where I find my core strength."
Indefatigable, armed with a warm smile and a lawyer’s mind, Amatul-Wadud is part of a groundswell of women and progressive Democrats running for office this year, motivated at least in part by opposition to President Donald Trump.
She’s one of five candidates vying to become the first Muslim woman in Congress in November mid-term elections — 12 years after Minnesota’s Keith Ellison became the first Muslim in the US House of Representatives.
If she’s successful, she would also become her district’s first woman and first African American in Congress.
