A record number of Muslim women ran for office in 2022 — and they won. The election cycle made history with 153 Muslim candidates on the general ballot, per a report released by Jetpac Resource Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Sixty-one percent of Muslim women candidates won, compared with 56 percent of Muslim men. Mauree Turner, the only nonbinary Muslim in the midterm elections, won a second term in the Oklahoma legislature. It’s a notable shift in a country with a deep history of Islamophobia.
Sahar Aziz, professor of law at Rutgers University and author of “The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom,” attributed this rise in representation to two factors: immigration history and differing reactions to Islamophobic society.
Aziz said these gains in representation are partly due to a “generational coming of age” that is common with new immigrant populations. Over 70 percent of American Muslims are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came to the United States after national origin quotas were abolished in 1965, making many Muslims second- or third-generation Americans.
“With those changes, you will have people who are now born and raised in the U.S., educated only in the U.S., their parents were born and raised in the U.S.,” Aziz said. “So they have the social network, human capital and the familiarity with the society as a political system that [now] they’re much better equipped to run for office.”
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