Back in Houston, Khans recount a warm welcome
Khizr and Ghazala Khan and their young children had lived in Houston all of a few hours — their new home near Fairbanks and U.S. 290 bare, lacking even a refrigerator — when they experienced what they would come to view as America’s defining values.
“My neighbors — right side, left side — both brought me an ice chest filled with milk, bread, eggs,” Ghazala Khan said Saturday, shortly before an Islamic Society of Greater Houston event at which the couple was honored. “They didn’ t know me. They didn’ t know that I am a Muslim, they didn’t know that I am from Pakistan, nothing. Just for their neighbor. I told my husband: This is the place where I want to raise my children.”
The Khans catapulted into the national consciousness in late July, when, in the bright spotlight of the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan — a preternaturally calm attorney — confronted Republican nominee Donald Trump and his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants by pulling a copy of the Constitution fromhis pocket and intoning to Trump, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
The Khans, of course, sacrificed their 27-year-old son, Capt. Humayun Khan, onthe battlefield of Baquba,
Iraq, a dozen years ago. That Trump spent the following days denigrating a Gold Star family was viewed, at the time, as a new low for an already divisive campaign.
Khan said he and his wife weighed whether to speak out, but said the moment is too important to keep silent.
“When the values for which we have taken an oath to defend are challenged, we will speak one million times, and we will speak louder, making sure that not only now, that never ever again (are) the foundational values of this country ever challenged, ever questioned,” he said. “The fundamental values of this country are at stake in this election. Our humble effort is to bring all Muslims together and all patriots together so that we can move forward.”
The frenetic pace of the national spotlight has hardly slowed for the Khans, who declared their visit as honorees at the local Islamic Society’s annual fundraiser a “homecoming” to the city where they lived a happy first four years in America, beginning in 1980.
Upon arriving at the Post Oak Hilton, Khizr Khan embraced elders, men he had known when he was a young volunteer tidying up before Friday prayers at the then-fledgling Islamic Society’s headquarters, a house off Richmond Avenue.
“He would sweep the floor, clean the place, vacuum the carpet, just to make sure that the people coming for prayer were comfortable,” said M.J. Khan, a former City Councilman and president of the local society chapter. “Their journey started in Houston and we feel that he is back here home with us.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner said Khan’s words at the Philadelphia convention and the way the Khans have carried themselves since have made him proud.
“I was moved then, and I am moved by the presence by the two of you right here in this city,” Turner said at the event. “In this city, we do not build walls, we build relationships. We recognize that in our diversity is our strength.”
Concerned that the country’s fundamental values are at stake in the November election, Khizr Khan called for“civility in American discourse .”
He also said his family’s newfound prominence has been met with civility and more, describing the two tables covered with cards at their Virginia home, andthe inscribed Bibles and Jewish ornaments that lay among them.
“The level of kindness, the level of affection wehave received from all corners of the United States is overwhelming,” Khizr Khan said.
Ghazala Khan added: “There is noplace for hate in America.” mike.morris@chron.com