I read it on my phone, standing in the middle of my own house, and the world collapsed.

“Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate,” my senator posted. “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.”

Capital letters. The full name spelled out long, the way you read a charge sheet. Posted by Tommy Tuberville, United States senator from Alabama — my state, which makes him my senator, which means he spoke for me.

I know that collapse. The drop in the stomach, the heat in the face, the instinct to explain yourself to no one. To that kind of person you were never a man with a name. You were a category, and the category came with a verdict.

You know better, Coach.

Let me tell you what my faith looks like. It looks like a boy walking to the mosque in the dark for Fajr, the prayer that comes before the sun — streets empty, my footsteps the loudest thing for blocks, the sky going black to gray to thin blue at the edge.

It looks like Ramadan, the table running wall to wall: maqluba turned out of the pot in one held breath, yabra rolled tight by hands that had done it ten thousand times. And before any of it, the first thing to touch our lips after a day of dry heat — Qamar el-Din, apricot nectar, cold. It felt like a reward because it was one. My childhood in Islam was warm and loud and funny, and the safest I have ever felt.

That is the faith you called a thing that produces terrorists.

Labels don’t define us. Acts do.

So let’s check. Abdul El-Sayed is a physician: Michigan, a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate at Oxford, an M.D. from Columbia. At thirty he took over Detroit’s health department, in a city just out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, and rebuilt it — services returned to neighborhoods every institution had abandoned. This year he beat a sitting congresswoman and a wall of outside money.

If he wins in November, he will be the first Muslim to sit in the United States Senate. The first in 237 years.

Disagree with his politics. He wants an arms embargo on Israel and calls Gaza a genocide. He wants the money to help the people of Michigan. Argue with him — those are real arguments deserving real answers.

But “you are wrong about foreign policy” and “you are a terrorist” are not the same sentence. The first is politics. The second is a door slammed shut — what you say when you would rather not answer a Muslim’s argument at all.

You know better, Coach.

I call you Coach because that is what you were, and for a long time a great one. Ten years at Auburn, undefeated in 2004, six straight wins in the Iron Bowl.

And I know what that job was. Not the wins. It was two hundred young men, nineteen and twenty, far from home, and your work was to build them into something. To teach them character, and to take the high road, because at that age they believe you.

Now the people of Alabama look up to you. Same arrangement, bigger field. And you used it to teach every kid in this state that a man’s religion is grounds for calling him an enemy.

Since we are handing out labels by faith: beginning in 1095, Christian armies marched into the Middle East, sacked cities and slaughtered civilians. In Jerusalem in 1099, Muslims and Jews were massacred in the streets. The crusaders carried crosses and said God willed it.

Does that make you a terrorist?

Of course not. You do not answer for men who died eight hundred years ago because you share their religion. Neither do I. Neither does Abdul El-Sayed.

I have three children growing up in Alabama, a state I love and one that has been good to me. They have already heard that word. Now they have watched a United States senator type it in capital letters with the weight of his office behind it.

I am not asking you to change your politics. I am asking for something smaller and apparently harder: say the man’s name without the slur. Argue the policy on the merits. That word does not land only on a candidate in Michigan. It lands on the woman in a headscarf in the checkout line. It lands on my three kids.

You spent thirty years teaching young men to build character.

Be that man again, Coach.