Ali Zaidi was five years old when his parents moved him from Pakistan to the United States, in 1993. Later he’d marvel at American parents who agonized over the trauma that some trivial relocation—say, from Manhattan to Greenwich, Connecticut—might inflict upon their children. His parents might as well have put him in a rocket and shot him to the moon and no one made any fuss at all about it. His father wanted to study educational administration (“He loved the idea of helping to run the places people came to learn”), and the one place he knew someone willing to teach him worked at Edinboro University, in northwest Pennsylvania. And so the Zaidis left Karachi, a city of more than eight million Muslims, for a rural town of 7,000 Christians. “We went from solidly upper-middle-class to trying to reach into the middle class,” recalls Ali. The people in Edinboro didn’t have a lot of money, but Ali sensed that his family had less of it than most. “The other kids pay a dollar-fifty for school lunch and you pay 50 cents—you know something is going on, but you don’t really know what.” There was no particular reason he needed to figure out what was going on. But, in the most incredible way, he had.

Even as a kid he was interested in politics. That helped. He got that from his parents. “They spent a lot of time talking about society. Good and bad. Justice. About what we owe people,” said Ali. In rural Pennsylvania most people were Republicans. Ali became a Republican, too. “I believe in personal responsibility,” he said. “It’s exciting when people come together because of their faith to do something for their community. To care about something more than themselves.” In high school he volunteered for America’s Promise Alliance, Colin Powell’s foundation to help underprivileged children; he knocked on doors for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. He ran track and excelled in the 400-meter dash. He was bright and ambitious and good at school. On a family trip to Boston he got his first, brief glimpse of Harvard and, without giving much thought to how he would pay for it, decided that was where he’d like to go to college. Faculty members at his high school thought Harvard was a bit of a stretch, and they encouraged him to apply to Penn State or the University of Pennsylvania, recalls Ali. He thought they were trying to lower his expectations. In the end he applied to Harvard, and only to Harvard, because, as he put it, “after you applied to one place, why would you waste money to apply to other places?”

Harvard admitted Ali to its class of 2008 and gave him financial aid. Around the same time, the C.E.O. of America’s Promise passed through rural Pennsylvania and asked to meet with volunteers. Ali went to the meeting, and one thing led to another: before he knew it Alma Powell, the group’s board chairman, asked him to join the America’s Promise board. At the time he thought this was preposterous. The America’s Promise board was filled with the biggest names in Republican politics and the C.E.O.’s of huge corporations. “I thought it was crazy,” recalls Ali. “They’d fly me to D.C. and put me up in a hotel.”

The Iraq War happened. Guantánamo Bay happened. Hostility toward his fellow Muslims found a greater welcome in his party than elsewhere. Yet Ali remained a Republican. Six or seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast he traveled there, with America’s Promise, to help. In New Orleans he saw poverty he’d never imagined. “They had to rebuild these schools, and the kids were effusive,” he said. “The thing that got me was that they weren’t happy because they had just got their school back. They were effusive because suddenly they had a school that worked in the first place.” If you had asked Ali, before he went to New Orleans, what he thought of people who didn’t help themselves, he would have said, “My parents had to start all over again. What’s the big deal? Just suck it up.” The sight of little kids post-Katrina jolted him. “It kind of blew my mind: if you are in kindergarten you should at least get a fair shot. It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.”