Leaders of some of America’s most prominent Muslim advocacy and civic engagement organizations used a panel at the 63rd Annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in Detroit, Michigan that took place over Labor Day weekend to press their community toward deeper political mobilization. They repeatedly invoked New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed as the template for Muslim political ascent.
The session, titled “Voicing Vulnerability Through Civic Presence,” brought together Salam al-Marayati, president and co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Mohamed Gula, interim chief executive officer of Emgage USA; Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Mufti Wasim Khan, dean and director of Texas-based ISRA Foundation; and Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s former special representative on combating Islamophobia.
Towers had crumbled. America was crumbling. Our innocence was crumbled. Our political power crumbled.
ISNA has a troubling institutional history that raises questions about what motivates the panel’s call for political ascent. The organization itself was named in a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood strategic memo, seized by the FBI in 2004 and later introduced as evidence at the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, which described the group’s North American project as a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” meant to work “from within” to undermine Western institutions — with ISNA listed first among the “organizations of our friends.” Declassified FBI memos from the late 1980s similarly found that Brotherhood-linked figures had risen to “leadership roles” within ISNA and its parent trust, the North American Islamic Trust, putting them in a position to direct the activities of Muslims across the U.S. ISNA has rejected any such characterization, describing the claims as an exercise in “guilt by association.
The panel was moderated by Muzammil Ahmed, a Michigan-based physician, who set a oppositional tone at the outset. The session, he said, would cover “strategies in improving our civic engagement and our civic power in this community” and “ways of preventing some of the people that are holding us back.”
The hour that followed leaned on two recurring claims: a Gaza “genocide” financed by American tax dollars, and an all-time high “Islamophobia” that is far worse than it was after 9/11. Both allegations were held up as proof that the audience had no choice but to mobilize and fight back.
Gula opened by casting two years of Muslim electoral activity as “amazing feats,” cataloguing the community’s impact through the “Abandon Biden” and “Uncommitted” campaigns of the 2024 presidential race. As evidence, he pointed to the first-ever official panel on Palestinian human rights at that year’s Democratic National Convention, and to five unidentified African-American Muslims who addressed the same convention. Without naming them, he also invoked the Muslim identities of Butch Ware and Melina Abdullah—the Green Party and independent vice-presidential nominees—as proof of the community’s fast-growing influence in American electoral politics.
“How we define success is not necessarily about whether we win an election,” he said. “How we define success is the impact that we’re able to make in the building blocks that we build off of.”
He then turned to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who he claimed had only been “polling at like one percent” in December 2024 before going on to win the mayoral race in November 2025. “They said he couldn’t do it, and he did it,” Gula said, adding that Muslim children “were seeing someone that looks like them and sounds like them.” El-Sayed’s failed 2018 gubernatorial bid, he argued, seeded a generation of candidates and campaign operatives.
Obliquely referring to the upcoming midterm elections in November, he ended his remarks saying, “It’s extremely important because as we go into 2026, we’ve already won so many races and created so much impact to the extent that our narrative is being used as a strategy against us. We’re still at the forefront. That impact is the power that we’re building.”
CAIR-LA’s Ayloush called Mamdani’s victory “a beautiful momentum” and repeatedly pressed attendees to make civic engagement a “part of the culture” of the Muslim community: “Continue to vote. Continue to run for office. Continue to support bills. Continue to build coalitions.” Framing civic engagement as a religious obligation, he said, “This is an order, a mandate. You forbid evil, and you believe in Allah. You do this for the selfless reason to serve Allah. So we’re an ummah (global Muslim collective) with a purpose. There is no need for us to develop, to think, to come up with a purpose. That purpose is given to us, mandated upon us by Allah through our faith.”
Ayloush also instructed attendees to lobby their imams and mosque boards until electoral participation becomes a fixture of religious life, warning that “voting is the beginning, not the end.” He asserted that American opinion had swung decisively against Israel, claiming association with the pro-Israel lobbying group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has now become an electoral liability for candidates.
Mufti Khan urged organizations like ISNA to hire and fund imams across American cities to cultivate relationships with elected officials.
How 9/11 Affected Muslim Political Aspirations
Al-Marayati insisted that Muslims must be “at the table” rather than “receive the crumbs from the table and say thank you.” He 9/11 in personal terms—he was walking to a White House meeting at which President George W. Bush was expected to name a Muslim to his administration when word came of the first plane hitting the North Tower.
Neither “terrorism” nor “terrorist” appeared anywhere in his account. He described watching “the second airplane hit the second tower” and moved directly to what the tragedy cost his own community politically. “Everything had crumbled at that point,” he said. “Towers had crumbled. America was crumbling. Our innocence was crumbled. Our political power crumbled.”
The meeting with the President, he explained, had been a goal of the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council, an alliance of Muslim advocacy groups which pressed for “Muslim representation, starting from the White House” — something President Bush “had agreed” to. “Of course, that didn’t happen, but that is part of the plan,” he admitted.
Elghawaby closed her remarks with a warning: “If we don’t participate, others will fill that void.”