Dear Senator Tuberville,

Let me begin before sunrise, in a city half a world from Auburn.

I am fifteen, and the darkness in our Damascus home seems to have weight. I splash cold water on my face, my wrists, my feet. Then I slip into my sandals and shuffle down the quiet stairs, one hand on the cool stone wall.

Outside, the city holds its breath. Then the call to prayer rises from a minaret a block away, and another answers, and another, until the whole sky over Damascus hums with the sound of surrender.

Inside the mosque, the carpet smells of rosewater and old wool. Men fill the rows shoulder to shoulder, the carpenter beside the banker, the old man with the cane beside the boy with sleep in his eyes. We bow together. We press our foreheads to the floor together, and in that hush, I hear only breathing.

When I step back outside, the sun is rising. The light pours gold across the rooftops, and the smell of fresh bread drifts from the bakery. The world is waiting, and I walk into it full of a joy I have spent the rest of my life trying to describe.

I have thought of those mornings often this past year, Senator, as you have made my Islamic faith your favorite target.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has kept track of your public attacks on Islam. Last December, you posted on social media: “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult. Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer.” You called on America to “SEND THEM HOME NOW.” In an interview about the Islamic Academy of Alabama, a K-12 school that had hoped to move from my town of Homewood to Hoover, you claimed Islam teaches followers to “kill all infidels” and “kill all Christians.” The school canceled its move over safety concerns.

When CAIR named you an “anti-Muslim extremist,” the first sitting senator ever to earn the label, you called it “a badge of honor.” Then, this July, you returned to the Senate floor and went further. “Cult” became “death cult,” and you warned of “the disease of Islam.”

Doug Jones, your opponent in the governor’s race, put it plainly. “I think it shows a complete lack of knowledge about the religion, about the Muslims in Alabama, and their history,” Jones said. “We need to have that house with the crowded table where everybody is welcome.”

I want to answer you the way my faith taught me to answer anger, calmly, and with the truth.

A cult does not span 1,400 years and nearly two billion people on every continent. A cult does not produce the poets my father recited, the mathematicians who gave the world algebra or the physicians whose textbooks Europe studied for centuries. The Quran you describe as a manual for murder speaks instead of love. Of Christians, the very people you claim it commands us to kill, the Quran says, “You will find the nearest of them in love to the believers those who say, ‘We are Christians.’” Those words shaped the boy shuffling down the stairs in his sandals.

As for sending us home, Senator, I am home.

I have lived in America for over four decades, most of them in Alabama. I raised three children here. I have photographed Alabama’s people, written about its gardens, taught its college students and buried my nose in its magnolias.

And I will tell you something that may come as a surprise. I identify as a Muslim, and I also believe in physics. I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Tennessee. I believe the universe began nearly 14 billion years ago in a burst of energy we are still measuring. I believe in gravity, in evolution, in the stubborn beauty of the second law of thermodynamics. When I look through a telescope at a galaxy whose light left home before the Earth was born, I feel the same awe I felt kneeling on that carpet in Damascus. Science tells me how the universe works. Faith reminds me to be grateful for every bit of this intoxicating life.  

That is what Islam looks like for the Muslims you have never met. It is my grandmother teaching me to wash before prayer. It is a family breaking the Ramadan fast with dates and water, then sending a plate next door to their Baptist neighbors. It is quiet, ordinary and deeply American.

Now let me be as direct as you have been.

You know no football coach worth his whistle takes the field without studying game film. As a coach, you watched hours of tape on every opponent, learned every formation, every weakness. Yet you have walked onto the floor of the United States Senate and condemned two billion people before learning about their faith.

That is not strength, Senator. That is ignorance, worn proudly, like a badge of honor.

Ignorance by itself is no sin. Every one of us begins ignorant of most things. But you have a Senate library at your fingertips, a staff of researchers and Muslim constituents a short drive from your office. You have no excuse. Choosing not to learn, and then speaking loudly anyway, is a failure of leadership. Alabama has seen where that road leads. We have seen governors stand in schoolhouse doors. We know how history remembers those men.

So I ask you, with respect and without fear, to learn before you speak again. I will take you to a mosque myself, Senator. Just say the word. We will slip off our shoes at the door, and you can sit in the back and watch the carpenter kneel beside the banker. Afterward, we will share a cup of tea, and you can ask every question you have been afraid to ask. Until you do, every word you say about Islam will sound exactly like what it is, the bigotry of a man who mistakes his pitiful ignorance for patriotism.

The door is open. In my faith, the guest is a gift, and my coffee is always hot.

Tomorrow before sunrise, somewhere in Alabama, a teenage boy will splash cold water on his face and shuffle down the quiet stairs in his sandals. He will stand shoulder to shoulder with his neighbors, bow, kneel and listen to the breathing. Then he will step outside into the sunshine, where the world is waiting, and his heart is full. And he will be home.

With respect, and with an open door,

Karim Shamsi-Basha
Homewood, Alabama