A pocketful of patriotism
One man’s story of emigration from Pakistan to America shows us what people sacrifice to find opportunities for their family, writes Linda Chavez
On the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention convention, Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen American soldier, took the stage with his wife, Ghazala, and pulled from his pocket a small copy of the US constitution.
“Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future,” he said. “Let me ask you: Have you even read the US constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.” The crowd exploded in applause.
Few people had ever heard of Khan or knew of the sacrifice he and his wife had made for their adopted country before the couple took the stage. Their son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in Iraq in 2004, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign highlighted Capt Khan’s life and death in a short film that played before his father spoke. But the point was not just to honour the tragic loss of yet another brave American soldier, it was to repudiate the bigotry that had been spewing from Donald Trump’s mouth from the moment he announced his candidacy for president.
Trump had been insulting, taunting and threatening groups he disagreed with for more than a year, pledging to ban all Muslims from entering the US and calling Mexicans “rapists”. Khan had had enough. A Pakistani-born and Harvardtrained lawyer, a Muslim, but, most importantly a patriotic, naturalised American citizen, Khan revered the constitution. He came to Philadelphia to teach Trump a lesson. Trump’s response was to pick on Khan’s wife, questioning why she was just “standing there” with “nothing to say,” adding that the Clinton campaign had probably written Khan’s speech for him. With his moving memoir,
An American Family, Khizr Khan has disproved that calumny.
The book is as much the universal story of the immigrant experience in America as it is the story of one family’s struggles and sacrifice. Like most immigrants, Khan came to America seeking opportunity – in his case the chance to advance his education. When he arrived in Houston in 1979, he didn’t expect to stay beyond the time it would take him to earn and save enough to attend Harvard, which had accepted him for a master of law degree but whose tuition he couldn’t yet afford.
Thus began his long journey to becoming an American, a journey that took him from Pakistan, where his family were poor farmers, to university and law school, to his first job in Dubai, his marriage to Ghazala, the birth of three sons and finally to Charlottesville, Virginia, and into the homes of millions of Americans on national television.
Khan’s book is also a story about family and faith, told with a poet’s sensibility. Ghazala Khan may have stood silently next to her husband in Philadelphia but Khan depicts her
as a learned scholar with a master’s degree in Persian, whom he fell in love with instantly but had to woo over the objections of her mother, who was unimpressed by the prospects of a struggling law student. Their faith imbues every facet of their lives; but it is a tolerant, modern Islam, the kind practiced by most Muslims around the world.
The book is a wonderful refutation of Trump’s nativism and bigotry, but it is no partisan polemic. Khan invokes Ronald Reagan’s vision of a shining city on a hill several times, and says he would have voted for him had he been a citizen at the time.
“I am an American patriot,” Khan writes near the end of his book, “not because I was born here but because I was not. I embraced American freedoms, raised my children to cherish and revere them, lost a son who swore an oath to defend them, because I come from a place where they do not exist.”