I went to Arlington National Cemetery this month to visit the grave of Humayun Khan, the Muslim soldier killed in Iraq whose father spoke at the Democratic Convention. I walked among four hundred thousand white marble headstones to Section 60, the fourteen-acre plot for the fatalities of America’s recent wars. Khan, a handsome man with penetrating eyes, died when a suicide bomber driving an orange taxi sped toward his base. He shouted “Hit the dirt!” to his men while he tried to stop it. The bomb detonated. Khan was twenty-seven. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. His grave-site locator is 7986. He is buried between Jeremiah Savage, who died in Iraq, and Robert Mogensen, who was killed in Afghanistan—all three within seventeen days in May, 2004.

Khan’s headstone is not the only one at Arlington marked with a star and crescent. Nor are Muslims unusual in the U.S. military. Almost four thousand Muslims are now on active duty, Major Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, told me. Another two thousand are estimated to be reservists or in the National Guard. It’s not a new trend. Yusuf Ben Ali, an Arab of North African descent, was among the Muslims who served in George Washington’s Army. Muslims fought in the War of 1812 and the Civil War (on both sides).

Among the more than five thousand Muslims who fought for America in the First World War, the name Muhammad was so common that it was spelled forty-one ways in military records, according to Amir Muhammad, the author of “Muslim Veterans of American Wars” and the co-founder of the Islamic Heritage Museum, in Washington, D.C. These soldiers could trace their origins to Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Persia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. Muslims also fought and died in the Second World War, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. There are so many Muslim vets that the Muslim American Veterans Association is opening its twelfth regional post this month.

Among the followers of the major Abrahamic faiths, however, Muslims have faced the most pervasive discrimination in the American Services. Talib Shareef, an African-American Muslim, served for three decades in the Air Force, spanning five major military campaigns. “When I went in, they didn’t understand Muslim worship, fasting, or Sabbath on Fridays,” he told me. “We had to pray in closets, because there was no space for Muslim prayer. I had to fight for those rights.” His uncle, a Marine, won a Purple Heart in Vietnam. Five of Shareef’s six children have served in the Army, Air Force, Air National Guard, or Marines. Shareef is now the imam of Masjid Muhammad, the Nation’s Mosque, in Washington, D.C.

Throughout the Second World War, Muslims had few options to register their faith. Dog tags allowed “C” for Catholic, “P” for Protestant, or “H” for Hebrew. Muslims fought in the U.S. military for more than two centuries before they were allowed to have their own chaplains—in 1993. Those chaplains are still few in number; many Muslims have access only to chaplains of other faiths.

Military culture has also often been indifferent to Muslims' needs regarding the essentials of observing their faith. Sultan Muhammad, who served in the Army from 1983 until 2015, was assigned to El Salvador in 1998, after Hurricane Mitch, the deadly storm that caused twenty thousand deaths in Central America. The U.S. deployment overlapped with both Christmas and the holy month of Ramadan. Christians had churches, but Muslim troops had no place to worship. “We had building materials, so I asked if we could build a place, a shed, to pray,” Muhammad told me. “They said no, because they wanted to use the materials to build reindeer for a Christmas display.”

The past fifteen years, since the September 11th attacks, have been especially rough. “After 9/11, I broke down in tears,” Fatima Ahmed, who is of Egyptian heritage and served in the Navy, told me. “I thought we were going to be rounded up and put in Japanese-style internment camps. I was terrified I’d be locked up.” Ahmed considered herself utterly American. She was inspired to enlist after seeing the movie “G.I. Jane,” starring Demi Moore. But she also fasts during the holy month of Ramadan. She recalled one supervisor who taunted her by regularly ordering pizza and having it delivered to the office to eat in front of her.

“The challenge was always being seen as if you didn’t belong—and not knowing if people you interacted with didn’t trust you, because of your religion,” she said. “It’s the feeling you can’t be American enough—when you can’t get more American than serving in the military. It’s the raw hatred that some people have, out of complete ignorance. When they see ISIS, they think that’s what Muslims are, what all of us are, which is incredibly wrong.”

Hossein Hosni, who is Arab-American, served in the Navy. He is now a firefighter with Engine 286, Ladder 135, in Queens. “I went from serving my country to serving my city,” he told me. “When my father came to this country, from Egypt, he had seven dollars in his pocket, and he ended up being able to buy a house in Queens. He was grateful. A lot of Muslims are grateful. A lot are trying to do the right thing.”

Hosni’s sister, Nora Ahmed, served for a quarter century in the Coast Guard Reserve. That duty overlapped with her work at the New York Police Department, where she is now a sergeant. She is also the president of the Policewomen’s Endowment Association, which represents both active and former female officers of the N.Y.P.D. Ahmed was working in New York’s Seventy-eighth Precinct on September 11th. “It was very difficult,” she told me. “As your country is being attacked, you’re also in a predicament because there’s so much hate toward your place of origin and ancestors. We went straight into twelve-hour tours. I was worried for my family, because of hate crimes. I was unable to secure them or comfort them, as I had to secure and comfort the rest of the citizens of New York City.”

Isolated attacks by lone wolves have shaped public perceptions far more than the military service of thousands of Muslims. In 2009, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, opened fire at Fort Hood, killing thirteen and injuring thirty-two. In late 2015, a married couple of Pakistani descent killed fourteen and wounded twenty-two in San Bernardino, California. Two months ago, Omar Mateen, a security guard, killed forty-nine when he opened fire at a gay night club in Orlando. In all three cases, the shooters were believed to be influenced by the propaganda of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. In December, sixty-one per cent of Americans had an “unfavorable” opinion of Islam, according to a poll by Shibley Telhami, of the Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland.

“I’m Muslim and American—I have a love and belief in both passionately,” Ahmed told me. “Most Muslim Americans are like everyone else. We get up. We serve. We pay taxes. We are stakeholders in our community. It baffles me when people make the divide. I guess, historically, you can swap out Muslims for other communities—Irish, Italians, blacks, Mexicans. Unfortunately, we’re the flavor of the month. And the Presidential campaign isn’t helping.”