In a few days, Ibtihaj Muhammad will make history when she becomes the first American to ever compete at the Olympics in a hijab. But instead of shying away from politics in the months since she entered the national spotlight, the 30-year-old New Jersey fencer has embraced the opportunity to take on the many misconceptions about the Muslim American community she belongs to.
In December, just days after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., Muhammad tweeted these six words:
Now, in a new interview with CNN that aired Wednesday, Muhammad was asked point-blank whether she believed Trump to be dangerous. She replied,“I think that his words are very dangerous.”
The Trump campaign is still trying to pick up the pieces after its latest controversy: the Republican nominee’s critical comments about the parents of a fallen Muslim American soldier after they spoke at the Democratic National Convention. “If you look at his [the father’s] wife, she was standing there,” Trump said. “She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”
“When these types of comments are made, no one thinks about how they really affect people,” Muhammad told CNN, speaking about Trump’s comments more generally. “I’m African-American. I don’t have another home to go to. My family was born here. I was born here. I’ve grown up in Jersey. All my family’s from Jersey. It’s like, well, where do we go?”
But Muhammad remains optimistic that by giving a face to women in the Muslim American community, she can improve understanding of people like her more generally. “I’m hopeful that, in my efforts to represent our country well as an athlete ― that they change the rhetoric around how people think and perceive the Muslim community,” she said.
“If I’m blessed to win a medal this summer, it will be icing on the cake.”
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