The questioning room at Los Angeles International Airport was full of Muslim travelers.
Every single one.
Hussam Ayloush sat with his teenage son, Ali, exhausted from their long trip back from Syria and Turkey. They just wanted to go home.
An agent had just asked for his phone number.
“Are we friends?” Hussam said, his voice calm but firm. “Are we going to be corresponding?”
Hussam is a U.S. citizen and the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations office in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations.
He knew his rights.
More importantly, he knew his son was watching his every move.
He could have chosen silence, waited them out, and gone home.
Instead, Hussam made a different choice. He turned to the agents and pointed out the obvious.
“I walk through the airport where maybe five percent of travelers are Muslim,” he began, “and I come into this room where you are questioning people, and 100 percent of them are Muslim. You don’t think that is wrong?”
The agents had no answer.
So, Hussam explained to them that what he was experiencing wasn't random. He cited a staggering fact from a recent CAIR analysis of a leaked government watchlist: 98% of the more than 1.5 million people on it have Muslim or Arab-sounding names.
Hussam knew he wasn't just speaking for himself. He was teaching his son a lesson in real time, one built over three decades of fighting these exact battles.
The courage he modeled for his son that day was a muscle he'd been forced to build since his first days in America.
* * *
Hussam Ayloush was born in Lebanon to Syrian parents who had fled the Assad regime. He arrived in the U.S. in 1989 to study aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, with every intention of one day returning home.
But it was on campus in Austin that he found his true calling.
His first exposure to organized activism came through the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
There, surrounded by the stunning diversity of the Muslim American community, he had a profound realization.
“When you come from your own country, you’ve only seen people like you,” he says. “You miss out on the richness of what the Muslim ummah brings together.”
He saw that the prevailing Islamophobia of the time was not necessarily pure hatred, but was rooted in ignorance. That insight changed his perspective from anger to empathy.
It gave him patience.
It also taught him a lesson that would define his life’s work.
“Change does not happen through wishful thinking,” he says. “Change does not happen through individual work. Never. The real ripple effect happens when we work together.”
After college, he took a job in the aerospace field in California, but his heart was still in collective action.
In 1994, he heard about a new organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Their model captivated him: they empowered the community to fight for its own rights, one action alert at a time.
Convinced of its mission, Hussam and a few friends started their own unofficial CAIR chapter, making copies of faxes from the national office and distributing them at local mosques.
His grassroots energy caught the attention of the national organization.
After struggling to find a full-time director for their new Los Angeles office, the board turned to Hussam, the volunteer aerospace engineer.
He was hesitant, but they saw a leader.
He accepted.
The same year, his first son, Omar, was born, forcing another, even more profound turning point.
* * *
“I remember sitting with my wife,” Hussam recalls, “and we had to decide: are we Muslims temporarily residing in America until we go somewhere else? Are we the diaspora? Or is this our country, with all its flaws, and we need to make it better for our children?”
They chose to stay and fight.
That decision transformed him from a diaspora Muslim into an American Muslim, fully invested in the future of his community and his country.
At CAIR, Hussam began to build power from the ground up.
One of his first cases involved a Muslim woman who was hired by a major national bank, only to be fired on her first day for wearing her hijab.
She called CAIR, heartbroken.
Hussam, new to the role and without a single lawyer on staff, organized a simple phone-in campaign.
The community flooded the bank’s headquarters with calls. Within days, the vice president of the bank called him.
The woman got her job back, with back pay. The bank issued a formal apology and mandated new training on religious accommodation for all its managers.
For Hussam, the victory was electrifying.
“It made me realize we have more power than we believe,” he says. “What we did was leverage community power to highlight existing laws.”
He spent the next few years building on that momentum, empowering youth, forging alliances, and challenging Islamophobia in every corner of the public square.
But just as the community was beginning to find its footing, the world changed forever.
* * *
After 9/11, the landscape fractured.
The progress they had made seemed to vanish overnight. Politicians who had once courted the Muslim community now wanted nothing to do with them.
“When we invited them to our annual banquet,” Hussam remembers, “almost every single one of them not only said they couldn’t make it, but they asked us to remove their names from the list of invited guests.”
The abandonment was widespread.
Hussam quickly discovered how some liberals would turn their backs on the community, revealing that their support was rooted in a racist savior complex that spoke of inclusion while backing policies and rhetoric that still targeted the Muslim community.
That moment, he says, was when they realized they needed to build real power, not rely on the fickle support of supposed allies.
Through years of relentless grassroots organizing and coalition building, they transformed that dynamic completely.
Today, the tables have turned. Hussam says their biggest challenge at the annual banquet is handling the sheer number of requests from politicians who now compete for a two-minute speaking spot.
With Muslims winning seats in Congress and taking leadership roles in major cities, the community can no longer be ignored.
“In some cities, you're not going to win an election unless you get the support of grassroots leaders and activists in the Muslim community,” he explains. “We have enough of the votes to tip the balance.”
But that public power did not erase the personal scrutiny.
The fight for dignity continued, especially for his own family. Traveling across the Canadian border years ago, they were pulled into a three-hour ordeal in secondary inspection.
His brother-in-law, a white American, had been waved through moments earlier despite having no ID on him. For Hussam and his family, it was a harrowing ordeal.
He watched as agents confiscated the family’s Qur’an from their car. Unsure what it was, one agent was assigned to photocopy every single page. It was a moment of absurd, bureaucratic bigotry that solidified the stakes. This wasn’t just about activists like him; it was about the trauma inflicted on children and families for simply being Muslim.
That long history—of small victories and devastating setbacks—is what his son Ali witnessed that day at the airport.
It’s why Hussam chose to challenge the agents, not with anger, but with logic and an unshakeable sense of his own dignity.
He needed his son to see that you can confront injustice without losing your humanity.
He needed him to understand that your rights are only real if you are willing to demand them.
* * *
After three decades of fighting these same battles, what prevents the personal frustration from turning into professional burnout?
For Hussam, the answer is purpose.
He believes every Muslim is an activist, called to enjoin the good and forbid the evil.
Activism, he explains, is his form of worship.
“Allah has told us He is going to test us with some hunger, some fear, some discomfort,” he says. “And then, at the end, He gives glad tidings to those who persevere.”
The key to avoiding burnout, he says, is to understand that you are rewarded for the effort, not the outcome. “The results are in Allah’s hands.”
His advice to the next generation is born from this deep well of experience.
First, he tells them, believe in your own power.
“You will only be treated as a second-class citizen if you think you are one,” he says.
Second, get involved politically. Democracy does not defend itself. Use your voice, your vote, and your resources to support good candidates and challenge injustice.
Finally, he reminds every Muslim traveler of their rights.
For U.S. citizens, he is clear: be patient, but do not be intimidated.
They can ask who you are and about your trip. They can search your luggage. But if they cross the line into your political or religious beliefs, you have the right to ask for a supervisor and refuse to answer.
“They cannot deny you the right to entry back into your country,” he says.
His ultimate message is one of hopeful, pragmatic struggle. He knows injustice only prevails when good people stop fighting it.
He is determined to never stop.