Image source : Ilhanomar.com
Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to the US Congress, is a contributor to a book of critical essays on the Trump presidency called What We Do Now: Standing Up For Your Values in Trump’s America, published in 2017 by US house Melville House.
Omar joins the Detroit-born Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, as one of the first two female Muslim Democrats in Congress representing respectively Minnesota and Michigan. At some point Omar will surely be approached to write her own story since it is quite a tale.
Born in Somalia, the family fled the country’s civil war when Omar was eight-years-old. They lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years before coming to the United States, eventually settling in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1997.
In 2016, she was elected a Democrat member of the Minnestoa House of Representatives, making her the first Somali-American legislator elected to office in the United States. With her victory in the mid-Term elections she is also expected to become the first woman to wear the hijab in Congress. In coming weeks, it will be interesting to see if she is approached by a US publisher.