Excerpt:
The last seven years have been strange ones for American Muslims in politics. That much was evident at this morning's first ever Muslim Democratic Caucus meeting. Aftab Siddiqui, a member of the Texas Democratic Muslim Caucus, walked me through the recent history. Prior to 2000, Muslims hadn't been, as a group, particularly active in national politics. But in the run-up to 2000, a coalition of Muslim groups got together and decided to make a serious play for national political prominence and put feelers out to both the Bush and Gore campaigns. Bush met with them and Gore didn't. They endorsed Bush. (NB: This story is unconfirmed, though there were scattered news reports at the time backing it up.)
Then 9/11 happened and, at what Siddiqui called "our moment of need," the Republican party "wanted to have nothing to do with us." The irony is that like many immigrant communities, the affluent second generation of Muslims, those with professional degrees, living in the suburbs, had been fairly reliable GOP donors. But no longer, according to Siddiqui "It's very hard to find Muslims who say they are Republican now," he told me. "Now they say they're independent. When you meet a Muslim who says he's an independent, it means he used to be a Republican."