Six minutes and one second. That was all it took for the 66 years of Khizr Khan’s life to become an American moment.

It was not something that he could have anticipated. For years, he and his wife, Ghazala, had lived a rather quiet existence of common obscurity in Charlottesville, Va. He was known in circles that dealt with electronic discovery in legal proceedings. Another overlapping sphere was the rotating cast of cadets that passed through the Army R.O.T.C. program at the University of Virginia. His wife was a welcoming face to the customers of a local fabric store.

And the last dozen years for the Khans were darkened by their heartbreak over the death of a military son, Humayun, whose body lies in Arlington National Cemetery, his tombstone adorned with an Islamic crescent. Their grief brought them closer to a university and to a young woman in Germany whom their son loved. It also gave them a conviction and expanded the borders of their lives.

Some of their neighbors knew Mr. Khan liked to carry a $1 pocket Constitution around with him. In the Khan home, a stack of them always lay at the ready. Guests showed up and they were handed one, in the way other hosts might distribute a party favor. Mr. Khan wanted it to stimulate a conversation about liberty, a cherished topic of his. He liked to point out that he lives nearly in the shadow of Monticello, home of one of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson. Mrs. Khan liked to say, “We need Thomas Jefferson.”