When I ask guests to tell their “creation story,” I’m really asking:
How did God write you into the larger story of our time?
With Dalia Mogahed, that story stretches from a Qur’an‑soaked home in Cairo, to a tiny international elementary school in the town where we raised our own two children, Madison, Wisconsin, to the chance discovery of Malcolm X’s autobiography—and finally to a vocation at the intersection of faith, data, and public life.
Listening to her, I realized I wasn’t just hearing about “Muslims in America.” I was watching what it means to move from being a Muslim in America to being an American Muslim—and how the Qur’an, read personally and wrestled with, can ignite a life of justice and bridge‑building.
Two movements in her story stood out for me:
- Her shift in belonging: from outsider to someone with words for her place in the American story.
- Her shift in faith: from inheriting the Qur’an to wrestling with it as a source of justice and liberation.
1. From “a Muslim in America” to “an American Muslim”
Dalia was born in Cairo into a family that was, in her words, “very scholarly and very committed to education and progress.”
- Her grandfather was a scholar of Islam and a professor at Al‑Azhar University, often called “the Harvard of the Muslim world” for religious studies. He taught at the girls’ college—a quiet but powerful statement about women’s education.
- Her mother was the only woman in her aeronautical engineering class at Cairo University. Of some 10,000 students in that program, she was the sole female. The old cliché “it’s not rocket science” doesn’t apply; she actually was doing rocket science.
Religion was not an add‑on in that household. It was the atmosphere.
As a child, Dalia stayed during the week with her grandparents because her mother had a two‑hour train commute each way to the university where she taught. In that home:
- Her grandfather, if not at the university or the nearby mosque, was almost always reciting Qur’an.
- “It was the soundtrack of my childhood,” she told me. “I feel like I absorbed it into my DNA.”
At five, everything changed. Her mother received a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—a “peace grant” written into the Egypt–Israel treaty after Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the Camp David Accords. One little‑known clause committed the U.S. to fund Egyptian students’ study in America.
Her father came because she came, finding funding on his own. But the doorway into their new life was a direct result of a peace treaty that many in Egypt considered a betrayal. As she put it:
“I would never have been here… except for that decision that Sadat made.”
Whatever one thinks of that treaty politically—and Dalia was careful to note that many Egyptians felt Sadat had “sold out the Palestinian cause”—her very presence in Madison was a living example of how high‑level, imperfect decisions can ripple unexpectedly into personal stories.
In Madison, she landed in Shorewood Hills Elementary, a school that served the children of international students and faculty. For a five‑year‑old immigrant learning English, it was a gift:
- Being from “some other part of the world” was the norm, not the exception.
- The school held International Day, celebrating different cultures.
- Diversity was not yet politicized; it was simply life.
That changed in middle and high school. Outside the Shorewood Hills bubble, “different” started to mean “doesn’t belong.” She describes never feeling squarely part of any one community. Like many immigrant kids, she lived in between.
Then, at 15, she stumbled across a book in the school library that changed everything: The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
“It was a life‑changing moment where I went from being an Egyptian or a Muslim in America to being an American Muslim.”
Malcolm did at least three things for her:
- Ignited her soul with a passion for justice. “You can’t read that book and walk away unaffected,” she said.
- Revealed Islam’s American story. Through Malcolm, she learned that:
- Muslims have been present in what is now the U.S. since the beginning—many enslaved Africans were Muslim.
- Islam had shaped parts of American history long before most of us realize.
- Gave her language for an identity she had felt but couldn’t name.
She discovered that there was such a thing as an American Muslim identity—that she wasn’t merely a foreign transplant but part of a longer, deeper narrative. Islam wasn’t an imported add‑on to America. It already had roots in the soil.
As someone who has never quite “fit” anywhere—born in Canada, abducted to Sweden as a child, dropped into a custody battle before the Supreme Court of Sweden—I resonated deeply with this.
I know what it is to feel like an outsider everywhere, and to find grounding only later in the conviction that we are created in the image of God, held by a God whose names shift across languages (Allah, God, Gud, Bog, Dieu) but whose oneness remains.
Malcolm gave Dalia a place in the American story. The Qur’an, read with new eyes, would give her a path.
2. Wrestling with the Qur’an: Justice, Liberation, and Hijab
Malcolm’s story didn’t just shift her sense of belonging. It drove her back to the book that had shaped her grandfather’s life, this time not as background music but as a text to grapple with personally.
As a teenager in Madison, soaking in liberal ideas about race, feminism, and social justice, she turned to the Qur’an with a question:
Could this revelation speak meaningfully to the concerns of a 15‑year‑old girl in late‑20th‑century America?
She describes the process as “almost like a debate”:
- On one side: Madison’s progressive concerns—racial equality, feminism, social justice.
- On the other: the verses of the Qur’an she had heard since infancy.
“The Qur’an just won,” she told me.
Sometimes that meant agreement:
- Racial justice: The oneness of God (tawḥīd) undermines racial hierarchy. It’s the very message that drew Malcolm X away from the Nation of Islam’s racial theology and into mainstream Sunni Islam.
- Gender justice: She found in the Qur’an a clear affirmation of the equal value of men and women before God, even if cultures have often warped that.
- Social justice: Care for the poor, the orphan, the vulnerable is everywhere in the text.
Sometimes it meant reframing her assumptions. But in all cases, the process wasn’t passive.
She wasn’t simply inheriting the Qur’an as something on the shelf, or as a sound she absorbed in her grandparents’ home. She was wrestling with it.
That wrestling led her, at 17, to a visible decision: she began to wear hijab—the headscarf and modest dress prescribed for women in Islamic law.
This wasn’t about family pressure. It wasn’t about cultural expectations. It was about conscience:
“I did so out of conviction, out of a desire to put my conscience over conformity. It was no longer about fitting in; it was going to be about standing out, about standing firm and being visible in the way I believed my identity should be visible now.”
She made that choice over the summer between high school and university. So she walked onto the engineering campus at UW–Madison in the fall as a visibly Muslim woman in a sea of (mostly male) engineering students:
- Few women in the program.
- Fewer still wearing hijab.
- “A banner,” as she put it, that she carried into classrooms and hallways.
With visibility came a new burden: representation.
- When test scores were handed back, alphabetized in public on a table, anyone could see anyone’s grade.
- On days when her exam was “bloodied” with red marks, she didn’t just feel personal disappointment. She felt she had “let down the Ummah”—the global Muslim community.
- “I had to realize,” she said, “that wearing hijab does not mean I’m representing a billion people. I’m representing one human being, which is me.”
That’s a lesson many minorities—religious, racial, ethnic, gender—need but rarely get: the freedom to be human without carrying the weight of representing everyone who looks or prays like you.
What struck me listening to all this was how consistently she processed her experiences through the word of God.
Where some classmates might see a bad grade as a purely personal failure or a reason to give up, she was asking:
- What does submission to God look like here?
- Am I enslaved to others’ expectations of me, or to my ego—or am I actually being liberated by surrendering this to God?
This is what she meant later when she reflected on the first revelation given to Muhammad in the Cave of Hira:
The angel Gabriel appears and commands him: “Read.” Muhammad, who is illiterate, responds in terror, “I cannot read.” The command comes again and again, until finally it is completed:
“Read in the name of your Lord who created…”
For Dalia, that phrase—“in the name of your Lord”—is the key.
“Oftentimes, when we are looking at our lives and being asked to read our lives, we cannot read our lives. Reality feels extremely disjointed and confusing, makes no sense. But it’s only through reading in the name of our Lord that it makes sense.”
We cannot rightly “read” our lives, our history, or our world if we do not read them through the lens of revelation.
Without that, in her words, “it makes no sense.”
That’s a conviction I share, even though my scriptural canon includes the Bible and the Bahá’í writings alongside the Qur’an. Whether I’m reading Genesis, Revelation, or the newsfeed, I find that if I don’t read “in the name of my Lord,” I misread everything.
Additional Takeaways from Dalia’s Story
There’s far more in our conversation than I can fully unpack here, but three quick additional lessons are worth highlighting.
1. Dialogue is not a luxury; it’s fire prevention.
Dalia and her husband moved to Pittsburgh to start graduate school on September 11, 2001.
- They watched the planes hit the towers on TV the morning they were supposed to drive.
- They postponed the trip by a day, then drove through rural America with her hiding in the car at gas stations—“the first time in my life I was afraid someone would know I was a Muslim.”
- Civil‑rights groups were urging Muslims not to attend mosques that first Friday because of credible threats.
They debated whether to go. They went.
- The parking lot was full.
- Inside, half the congregation were people of other faiths who had come simply to stand in solidarity.
That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because that Islamic center had spent decades building relationships and hosting dialogues with neighbors.
Her metaphor has stayed with me:
Dialogue is “fostering an environment of lush greenery so that you don’t start a forest fire with a match when something goes wrong.”
Those “unexciting” evenings in church basements and community rooms matter. They can determine whether a crisis becomes a conflagration or an opportunity for solidarity.
2. Sovereignty through surrender
Dalia made a bold claim:
“Human liberation, human sovereignty… could only be achieved through the surrender to God.”
We will either:
- Surrender to God, or
- Become enslaved to what He created—ego, money, drugs, other people, even “an addiction to love.”
“There are only those two options,” she said.
That’s not far from Jesus’ “No one can serve two masters,” or Paul’s language of being “slaves of righteousness” instead of sin. It’s also deeply compatible with Bahá’u’lláh’s insistence that true freedom is found in obedience to divine law, not in doing whatever we like.
The question is not whether we will serve. It’s whom.
3. Who speaks for Islam?
After years in corporate America and a season focused on motherhood, 9/11 pulled Dalia back into public work. Eventually she joined Gallup and became executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.
At the height of the “war on terror,” while pundits and extremists claimed to speak for Muslims, Gallup did something simple and revolutionary:
They asked everyday Muslims what they actually thought, using rigorous survey methods.
The result was the book she co‑authored with John Esposito: Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.
As she put it:
“We weren’t hearing from the Islamophobes or the extremists. We were now listening to the silenced majority. They weren’t silent—they were silenced.”
That work eventually led to advising the Obama White House, testifying before the Senate, and later focusing on American Muslims at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.
Today, alongside ongoing research, she hosts the Qur’an Conversations podcast—another way of letting the “silenced majority” of believers engage their own sacred text, not just inheriting it.
For those of us trying to build vibrant communities, her trajectory is a reminder:
- Data, rightly used, can amplify truth and counter caricatures.
- Revelation, rightly engaged, can liberate and orient lives.
- And one person, grounded in both, can do a surprising amount of good.
You are created in the image of God.
And God loves His creation.
Dalia’s story is one more proof that when we read our lives “in the name of our Lord,” even a five‑year‑old Egyptian girl on a peace‑grant scholarship in Madison can grow into a voice of clarity and compassion in a confused time.
Sneak Peek: Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
On upcoming episodes, I’ll be joined by:
- Stephen Ferrara, spiritual author, teacher, and former CEO, who shares how he found meaning and peace after the loss of his son and later his wife.
- Gregory Coles, writer and language scholar, who explores the intersection of faith, sexuality, and belonging—and how the words we use shape the stories we tell about who we are.
If you’re interested in how real people wrestle with grief, identity, and truth in light of God’s image in them, you won’t want to miss these conversations.
