Ilhan Omar is a former refugee, a Somali-American activist, and a proud Democrat.

On November 8, the 33-year-old is poised to become one of the few Muslim women ever elected to a state legislature in the country.

Omar is on the path towards winning a spot on the Minnesota State Legislature, after defeating a 44-year incumbent during the state’s primary election. Her Republican opponent in the heavily Democratic House District 60B suspended his campaign in August.

Born in Mogadishu, Omar was forced to flee her home when she was about eight years old, after war broke out in Somalia. Her family lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for several years. She was 12 years old when she arrived in in the United States, soon becoming part of a wave of Somalis who settled in Minnesota during the 1990s. Her political conscience was awakened when she was 14, after she began attending local Democratic caucus meetings with her grandfather and acting as his translator.

Omar worked in community health and then as a senior policy aide for a Minneapolis City Council member before deciding to run for Minnesota’s state House of Representatives herself.

In this Interview Omar talk about her remarkable story, her activism, and her faith.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

What was life like for you when you first arrived in America? 

When I first arrived in the country, I really didn’t speak much of the language. I knew two words coming here, and they were “Hello” and “Shut up.” I had a lot of challenges starting school and my dad says I would come home every day crying and feeling bad about the problems I was having with some of the kids. And he would tell me to work hard on learning the language. As soon as you can communicate with people, then you’re able to build friendships, then the otherness of being an immigrant, being Muslim, East African, black, would disappear because you can talk to them and they’ll see you for who you are.

That idea of working to build bridges and relationships stayed with me when I started high school. I had the language ability, but I was confused with the problem a lot of students had, who didn’t see themselves as a family, but saw themselves as a separate entity from each other.

There were tensions between American-born blacks, the African-born blacks, the new immigrants, Latinos, Native Americans, Arab Muslims, East African Muslims. You put a diverse group of kids together without creating programming to build relationships for them, then you’ll have racial and cultural clashes. I knew that we had to work towards creating a cohesive community for ourselves, just to make it easier to survive through high school. It was about finding students who saw themselves as also bridge builders and working with the leaders in the school, the principal, others. We created an atmosphere where we eat together, we do retreats, have mediation set up so we can talk about our issues before it got violent. It made my remaining years of high school a very safe, rewarding experience.

I think it sort of sharpened my desire to continue to work in building bridges and working towards collaborative efforts, figuring out our commonalities so we’re able to tackle persistent issues and learning that not one person has a solution, but as a community, collaboratively, we could figure out a solution.

How did your faith help you during that time?

I think my faith as a Muslim is very important. One of the core values is that you are always trying to build consensus. So when it comes to figuring out if something is permissible or not in Islam, it’s usually a discussion and people have to come to a consensus in order for something to be approved. So this idea of consensus building was innate in me and in the faith I was born to, in the culture I was born to. These ideas were driven by my upbringing and the ideology that I grew up with.

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