“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” Khan read from a sheaf of papers he’d picked up at a bookstore in Lahore. “The thing is, those truths were not remotely self-evident. Not to a young man in Pakistan and not to most people in the whole of human existence,” he writes. “But to me, a student in Pakistan, they were radically charged — as revolutionary as they’d been two centuries earlier when they were fixed to paper.”

Thus began Khan’s long journey to becoming an American, a journey that took him from Pakistan, where his family were poor farmers, to university and law school, to his first job in Dubai, his marriage to Ghazala, the birth of three sons and finally to Harvard, to Washington, to Charlottesville, Va., and into the homes of millions of Americans on national television. Along the way, he sometimes faced grueling poverty but also the kindness of strangers, including American oil company workers he encountered in Dubai.

“Were all Americans like this?” he asked himself after his employer and the man’s wife gave him an apartment to live in, furnished it and stocked the refrigerator. “Did a nation of laws, of equal dignity for all, instill in its people a basic goodness?” he wondered, a question he answered affirmatively when he moved to America and was met with generosity from neighbors and others of all races and creeds.

Khan’s book is also a story about family and faith, told with a poet’s sensibility. Ghazala Khan may have stood silently next to her husband in Philadelphia — out of grief, perhaps — but Khan depicts her as a learned scholar with a master’s degree in Persian, whom he fell in love with instantly but had to woo over the objections of her mother, who was unimpressed by the prospects of a struggling law student. Their faith imbues every facet of their lives; but it is a tolerant, modern Islam, the kind practiced by most Muslims living in the United States and around the world.

The book is a wonderful refutation of Trump’s nativism and bigotry, but it is no partisan polemic. Khan invokes Ronald Reagan’s vision of a shining city on a hill several times in the book, a man Khan calls “my president,” and for whom he says he would have voted had he been a citizen at the time.

“I am an American patriot,” Khan writes near the end of his book, “not because I was born here but because I was not. I embraced American freedoms, raised my children to cherish and revere them, lost a son who swore an oath to defend them, because I come from a place where they do not exist.”

Khizr Khan’s book can teach all of us what real American patriotism looks like, even President Trump.