The most bombed hotel in the world has a ballroom.
I learned this in Belfast in March while staying at the Europa Hotel, which absorbed more than 30 bomb blasts during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence that killed over 3,500 people. Lasting until 1998, this period of historic carnage is better known as the Troubles. On one of our final nights there, a high school dance spilled out across that ballroom floor and into the hotel hallways. Teenagers in oversized tuxedos and sparkly dresses danced to pop songs, laughing in a way that teens do when they have no idea they are living inside a miracle.
That was their parents’ generation’s gift to them: the agonizing choice to pursue peace before justice.
That was their parents’ generation’s gift to them: the agonizing choice to pursue peace before justice. To release prisoners with blood on their hands and sit across tables from people who had buried their children. Seeing those kids, I understood something new about what it means to stay in the room.
I was in Belfast as part of a delegation convened by the Carter Center, studying the Troubles as a lens for preventing political violence in the U.S. The delegation was made up of about 30 Americans across generations, sectors, faiths, and political ideologies. I came as the Assistant Director of the Emerging Leaders Network at Interfaith America, where I support young faith and community leaders working to bridge divides in their cities and towns. I also came as a Muslim American who has spent most of my life wrestling with what it means to belong here.
The morning after 9/11, I got on the school bus and a classmate asked me: “Since you’re Muslim, don’t you know where they’re gonna bomb next?” In 2004, my brother stopped to pray outside his car before canvassing for a political campaign in south central Wisconsin. A resident threatened him before calling the police to report him for suspicious behavior.
These moments, alongside too many others, told me something I spent decades believing: being Muslim and being American were incompatible. I have been unlearning it ever since by reclaiming my faith, refusing to shrink, and trying to build a country where my niece and nephew don’t feel what I felt on that school bus.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 about the “Talented Tenth.” He believed an educated fraction of Black Americans had a responsibility to lift the rest of the community. The concept was rightly critiqued as elitist and placing an unfair burden on individuals rather than confronting the systems that made such a concept necessary.
In any divided society, there are people positioned to be the one in the room, whether by circumstance or preparation.
But something underneath it stays with me: the recognition that in any divided society, there are people positioned to be the one in the room, whether by circumstance or preparation. The only Muslim. The only child of immigrants. The only person at the table holding two worlds at once and refusing to abandon either.
Those of us who can do this work have an obligation to do it. It’s not because we are better or braver, but because our presence makes it possible for others to wait. My mother and father should not have to sit across from someone who fears their faith or believes our family doesn’t belong here. But I can. And if I can, I should.
On our first night in Belfast, a journalist named Alex Kane said something that has stuck with me: “You can’t reject, ignore, or sideline part of your own community and then act surprised when they rise up against you.” He was describing a mechanical failure, not delivering a lecture on tolerance. This is what happens when people feel cast out and find other rooms, other leaders, and other stories about who is to blame.
My biggest learning from Northern Ireland is that bridgebuilding isn’t only a moral imperative. It is self-interest, properly understood.
My biggest learning from Northern Ireland is that bridgebuilding isn’t only a moral imperative. It is self-interest, properly understood. When whole communities feel sidelined, they do not stay sidelined quietly. The problem is structural and how we often fail to communicate it properly: mutually assured prosperity or mutually assured destruction. Those are the options.
So, what does this actually look like here in the U.S.? It starts before alignment, persuasion, or any attempt to change a mind. It starts with understanding. It means attending a city council meeting in a neighborhood that isn’t yours or showing up with curiosity at a mosque open house or parish fish fry. It also means paying attention to where common ground already exists.
Across my home state of Wisconsin right now, residents from sharply different political backgrounds are finding each other in opposition to data center development in their towns and in support of restricting private equity ownership of single-family homes and apartment complexes. These are not small issues. They touch land, water, housing, and the question of who gets to shape a community’s future. They can also be entry points. Relationships built around shared local concerns create the trust that makes harder conversations possible later.
An Irish restorative justice expert named Debbie Watters said simply: “No one is too hard to reach.”
An Irish restorative justice expert named Debbie Watters said simply: “No one is too hard to reach.” I am the person I am because someone believed that about me. I am trying to be that person now — for my niece and nephew, for the young people who haven’t yet heard a better story, for the Milwaukee I live in, and for the America I refuse to stop believing in.
The room can be rebuilt. I intend to stay and help build it.
Ali Khaleel is Assistant Director of the Emerging Leaders Network at Interfaith America.
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