We the People, Still Becoming: A Reflection at 250
This week, the country turns 250. There will be fireworks, bunting, and speeches about a nation "conceived in liberty" — a tidy story with a clean beginning. At the Muslim Civic Coalition, we want to sit with that number honestly, because the communities we serve know how partial it is. For the nations Indigenous to this land, 1776 was not a birth. It was a chapter, already deep inside a far older story of colonization — of people, of land, of language. Counting from the Declaration lets us skip the parts that are harder to celebrate.
So let us say it plainly: 250, in itself, is an act of authorship — a claim about whose story counts, told by those who would narrate the rest of us out of it.
A 250th is not a birthday; it is a reckoning. This land was not empty. The Indigenous peoples here were ethnically cleansed so the map could be redrawn — and that same violence grinds on today against Palestinians, in the genocide in Gaza that our own tax dollars, weapons, and military spending help underwrite. It is the oldest American arithmetic — land and people converted into profit, erasure dressed up as security. We see it in our own time: in ICE detention that disappears neighbors from courthouses and workplaces, in prisons built to be filled, in surveillance that treats whole communities as suspects, in data centers devouring land, water, and power to watch and sort us at scale. A few profit; the many pay. We name it, because repair begins with the telling.
Our faith gives us another word for land: amanah, a trust. We are not its owners but its stewards — answerable for how we keep the land, care for one another, and build a better world for the generations to come.
This is a hard and hopeful week for that work. The Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, striking down an order that tried to read the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution for immigrant children. We celebrate it. But days earlier the same Court stripped protected status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. The assault on our Constitution has not stopped; it has moved — to the vote, to due process, to the question of who counts as one of us.
Muslims have been part of this story since the founding. Some of the first Muslims in America were enslaved Africans, brought here in chains — people who did not choose this land but helped build it, and whose faith survived the attempt to erase it. The American Muslim story is, at its root, a Black Muslim story, and that is a history all of us are called to learn, honor, and remember. It is also a living one: Black Muslims are the largest part of the Muslim community here in Illinois, and our neighbors have everything to do with what this state becomes. That is why we have fought and won: halal meals in public hospitals, prisons and schools, dignified uniforms for Muslim student-athletes, our history taught honestly in classrooms, and the Wadee Resolution, in memory of six-year-old Wadee AlFayoumi, killed in Illinois for being Palestinian and Muslim.
This country has only ever moved when people moved it — organizers, students, neighbors, the movements power once called dangerous and history later called right. So this summer we are listening, learning, marching, and honoring the histories that carried us here. We the people are the power. That is civic justice: the truth that we need each other, and that our liberation is bound up in one another's.
So at 250, our question is not what America was, but what we will steward it into.
Get registered. Show up and march. Listen, learn, and stand with people who don't share your name, your faith, or your country of origin. The next 250 years are not promised, and no one in power will hand them to us: we decide, through our work and through our solidarity. They are ours to tend, ours to author — guided by our faith, strengthened by solidarity, rooted in the truth that we belong here, we lead here, and we are building the better tomorrow, for everyone.
— Amina Barhumi, Muslim Civic Coalition
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Plug in with us: Summer of 250
This is a season for listening, learning, and showing up. Here's where you can join us:
March with us at Marquette Park. We return to the very ground where Dr. King marched for open housing in 1966 and was met with violence — to carry that unfinished work forward today. Fierce Urgency Now — details and RSVP.
Tell us what you need. Our Listening Tour is coming to communities across Illinois to hear from you and build our agenda together — because laws made for us must be made with us. Find a stop near you or host one.
Honor our histories in Louisville. A delegation from Illinois is heading to Louisville for the Muhammad Ali Day Legacy Trip — to pay our respects and honor the legacy of Muhammad Ali, a proud Black Muslim whose courage is part of our American story. Be the first to know.
Learn the story. Read the Illinois Muslims Report and explore the American Muslim Story to know our community's assets, needs, and deep roots in this country.
Register and be ready to vote. We protect our rights by exercising them. Register or check your registration.