“It is part of my Islamic teaching to make sure we are charitable,” Ms. Omar told me. “A huge part of the Islamic faith is that you can’t sleep with a full belly if your neighbors and those around you aren’t sleeping with a full belly.”

Abdul El-Sayed — who recently lost his race for the Michigan governor’s nomination but started a PAC to support liberal candidates — echoed the sentiment. Dr. El-Sayed calls himself “openly, honestly and unapologetically Muslim” and told me he believes “privilege begets responsibility.” That Islamic value inform his progressive politics.

Nonetheless, both Ms. Omar and Dr. El-Sayed said critics have tried to use their religion against them. “Islamophobia comes with the territory,” Dr. El-Sayed said. They’ve each been hounded by the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who has been traveling the country “investigating” Muslim candidates running for office. This includes disrupting their talks and asking whether they support Hamas.

Ms. Omar refuses to be intimidated. “We say what we want to say,” she said. “They cannot continue to instill fear in us and stop us from achieving critical conversations.”

Unfortunately, many Christian Republican voters are still encouraged to fear Muslims. “Running on Hate 2018,” a report by the nonprofit organization Muslim Advocates, examined 80 campaigns using anti-Muslim messages leading up to the midterm elections and found that almost all of the candidates engaged in these tactics are Republican. The evangelical leader Franklin Graham has said Islam is an “evil” religion. After Dr. El-Sayed lost his race, a message appeared on the Twitter page of Corey Stewart, a Republican Senate candidate from Virginia, that read, “Michigan almost elected a far left ISIS commie.” It was quickly deleted and Mr. Stewart said that it was sent by someone with access to his account. Duncan Hunter , a California Republican who has been indicted on a charge of campaign finance violations, said his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, was a national security risk because of his Palestinian Muslim roots and because his grandfather was involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack. (Mr. Campa-Najjar is a Christian and his grandfather died 16 years before he was born, but who needs facts? Certainly not President Trump, who warned last week, without any proof, that “unknown Middle Easterns” were among the “caravan” of Central American migrants walking toward the United States to seek asylum.)

These are reminiscent of the attitudes behind the anti-Catholic hazing of the 1950s that forced John Kennedy to assuage fears that he was “not the Catholic candidate for president” but instead the “Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic.” But Kennedy won the presidency, and now a quarter of United States senators and six Supreme Court justices are Catholic .

Hana Ali, seeking a seat in the Tennessee legislature, is taking a cue from President Kennedy. She told me she’s running as a Democrat, a proud Tennessean and an American who also happens to be Muslim.