PRESTONSBURG, Kentucky — With its coal-caked hills, isolation and deep poverty, Southeastern Kentucky is probably not the first place that springs to mind when one considers the Muslim experience in America.

But nonetheless a small Muslim community has settled in the Appalachians, making a home forged in the ash-black-smudged margins. Friendships are made and communities are established, even as a wider debate rages around the prejudice of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims immigrating to the U.S.

Bilal Ahmed, 22, is from Elizabethtown, an affluent area near Louisville. But he decided to come to the University of Pikeville near the Virginia border to challenge himself and get out of his comfort zone. He described his freshman immersion in Pikeville as “brutal,” not because of anti-Muslim backlash, but just adjusting to college life.

In fact, after the first semester, Ahmed was so homesick that he filled out an application to transfer. But then exams intervened. Ahmed was taking Biology 151 and stressing over an upcoming exam, so he stepped out of his comfort zone and approached the kid behind him, asking him how he planned to prepare for the big test.

“We started studying in the library together and just hit it off and became best friends from that time on,” recalls Shey Spencer, 23. The two went on to become resident assistants, tutors in organic chemistry, and co-founded a campus chapter of National Society of Leadership and Success.

Ahmed credits his friendship with Spencer, a soccer and tennis player, as convincing him to stick it out at Pikeville, a decision the aspiring eye surgeon is now happy he made. Ahmed’s social circle gradually expanded and, like Spencer, many of his new friends were conservative Christians steeped in Bible Belt culture.

Ahmed has a theory for why he and others have been well-received in Appalachia.

“The foundation of my friendship is that both groups — Muslims and people from Central Appalachia — feel marginalized. Muslims are viewed as terrorists, Appalachians as uneducated and poor,” Bilal says. So the two groups have found common cause aside a mainstream media machine that paints both groups with the same broad brush.

Such cross-creed friendships in the heart of Central Appalachia do not surprise Christopher Green, an associate professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Kentucky.

“Many people outside the area don’t think about it, but Central Appalachia is an incredibly diverse region religiously. You have Baptists, Pentecostal, Holiness, Catholic churches and mainline churches, there is a tremendous diversity of religious experience through Christian denominations,” Green says. Because of this, he says, “There is tremendous respect for people who hold religion close, no matter the denomination.”

Kentucky has three medical schools: one in Louisville, one in Lexington, the other in tiny Pikeville. The medical school has enough Muslim students to have a Muslim Doctor’s Association.