Muslims from immigrant backgrounds are finally heeding the advice of their African-American Muslim brethren and getting politically active. Muslim community organizations are holding voter registration drives and citizenship classes. Muslim professionals are organizing political fundraisers and backing presidential candidates.

‘I thought all these people cared about was making more money and sending their kids to the Ivy League,’ my wife mused to me the other day.

It’s amazing how fast fear – in the form of special registration and the rising rhetoric of Islamophobia in this country – will move you.

What we are watching is America at its best: when a community feels marginalized, it finds routes within the American system to enfranchise itself, from civic engagement to political involvement.

And the reason that this America exists is precisely because when other marginalized groups – Jews, Japanese, women, blacks – worked for their own enfranchisement, they also worked for an America where all groups could be enfranchised.

My father went to a dinner of mostly Pakistani-born Muslim activists not long after 9/11 where Rev Jesse Jackson was the guest of honor. The various Muslim speakers from the podium spoke of fighting for civil rights for Muslims. When it was Jesse Jackson’s turn, he stood up and said that there was no such thing as ‘Muslim civil rights’.

‘Civil rights’ are for everybody, he said, and now that Muslims with immigrant backgrounds find themselves subject to special searches at airports and heightened scrutiny from federal law enforcement, and realize they too need the protection of America’s most basic rights, they need to fight for them for everybody.

Here is the question for Muslims as they become a broadly politically active community: are they interested in the American promise only for themselves, or will they seek to expand it for everyone?

Perhaps Muslims should look to the example of one of the people they owe their own freedom in America to - the great civil rights hero Ella Baker, who once told a group of young people: “Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses mankind.”