Then came the 2016 election season.

Unlike Hussein, who could walk through a crowd without drawing attention, the hijab flagged Amanda as a practising Muslim, a literal target for people like the shopper she overheard at a sporting-goods counter who said the guns on sale were needed against people like her.

On TV, she heard then-candidate Donald Trump calling for a “complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.

Clearly, she said, a lot of people must not know any Muslims.

Her voice cracked as she recalled the realisation: “Have I played a part in that? Have I not reached out to people and given them an opportunity to meet me?”

She told Hussein, “Let’s invite strangers over for dinner.”

That’s a tall task in Seattle, where the difficulty of making new connections is so established it has its own name: the Seattle Freeze.

That’s on top of standard suspicions of free and supposedly no-strings meals.

Once again, the TV exposure helped. Amanda’s social media posts, with invitations to share them widely, brought more volunteer guests than their dinner table could han- dle.

“I wish we could say that we don’t have feelings of contempt for Islam and what it appears to represent,” one local commented on Amanda’s blog after she wrote about the first dinner.

She responded with an invitation to the next. Dinner With Your Muslim Neighbour became a regular event, its reach only broadening when the couple moved back to Michigan recently to be closer to their families as they started their own.

One Friday in April, Saab asked on Facebook whether anyone wanted to host a Seattle dinner three days later, when she and Hussein were visiting. “I’ll do the cooking!” she added with a smiley face.

Seven solid offers came in by day’s end, some from people she had met, some from people she hadn’t.

The Saabs shopped near the home of their selected hosts, Stefanie and Nason Fox, whom they had met at a Seattle vigil for victims of the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

The dinner fell during the eight days of Passover, which her hosts observed. Researching the Jewish holiday’s dietary restrictions, Amanda purchased matzoh meal for the first time and arranged her menu around rules of chametz and kitniyot.

The welcoming dinner table at the Fox home was set for eight with bright Fiesta-ware plates and clusters of white hydrangeas, fat beeswax candles alternating with tall lit tapers.

Guests arrived bearing more flowers and made their introductions either to the Saabs or the Foxes, depending on whom they knew. (The Uber driver, babysitting grandchildren, texted her apologies.)

They filled their plates from Saabs’ buffet: salmon blanketed in caramelised onions with a contrasting bite from horseradish, rosemary-roasted potatoes, carrots with honey and thyme, a leafy salad, almond-garnished asparagus in an orange-yoghurt sauce.

Hussein led the group in an Arabic prayer, then asked Stefanie whether there was an appropriate Hebrew blessing to follow. After praise for the meal, the questions began.

Where’s your family from? (Dearborn, Mich. Both have Lebanese ancestry.)

Does Islam have sects like Christianity does? (Yes, Sunni and Shia are the main ones.)

And, eventually, a lesscharged query: “Can I ask how you make your potatoes so crispy?” (Bottom rack of the oven, lots of olive oil.)

“We’re not theologians,” Hussein said. “We’re not clerics… We try to practice our faith as best we can, and we’ll answer any questions you throw at us as best we can.”

Amanda described meeting Hussein in their mosque’s youth group, though they were friends for years before dating.

Her mother does not wear a hijab, she noted, but Amanda was a typically rebellious 16-year-old who questioned her religion, studied it, and ultimately embraced the covering “to wear my faith outwardly, to remind myself of my inward faith and connection to God.”

She donned the hijab midweek, months into the school year. Her Spanish teacher asked if she was a new student.

As congenial as it was, conversation throughout the two-hour meal was intense and sometimes tearful, covering doctrine and culture and extremism.

Both Amanda and her hosts choked up describing the vigil where they met. A stranger yelled “what are you doing here?” at the hijab-clad woman, steps away from where Stefanie and Nason Fox stood wearing shirts that read “Stop profiling Muslims.” Amanda ran over and embraced the then-strangers.

“I’m just so sorry that you walked down the street and

Partnering with Michael Hebb, a teaching fellow at the University of Washington’s Communication Leadership department, they’re assembling a free online tool kit they hope others will use to hold their own dinners.

“There’s never been a more important time for this,” said Hebb, a former underground restaurateur who specialises in creating conversations on difficult topics, most recently a global project called “Let’s Have Dinner and Talk About Death.”

He thinks Muslim neighbour dinners can scale up the same way, to the hundreds or thousands – or hundreds of thousands.

“If you give people the right tools, you’ll set them up for success.”

At the Fox home, that night’s dinner concluded with Amanda’s macaroons and a kosher strawberry trifle.

Guests embraced the Saabs and one another as they said good night, bearing ribbon-tied goody bags with date-filled ma’amoul and coconut cookies from a Middle Eastern bakery in Dearborn.

If the country is seeing a rising tide of hatred and fear, Nason Fox told Amanda, the dinner had been “a ripple effect” of response, spreading further than any of them might know. “There are so many stories,” she said. “Who’s hearing that and taking it in?” – The Washington Post.

Denn is a freelance writer based in Seattle. For more information on how to host a dinner, go to MuslimNeighbor. com.