CAIRO – Amid rising anti-Muslim sentiments, American Muslims are mobilizing across different states to register their votes, seeking to have a voice in coming presidential elections.

“People are losing their sleep,” Naeem Baig, the president of the Islamic Circle of North America, told New York Times on Thursday, June 2.

“The political environment is creating a divide in America” by race, language, gender and religion.

Mamoun Kund, a 51-year-old Sudanese-American, is one of Oakland Muslims who sat after Friday prater at the Islamic center to register his vote.

The step was late 11 years since he has become an American citizen.

“I hear talk about Muslims, Hispanics and women,” Kund said.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he added. “Americans aren’t like that.”

The situation was the same across different states, after the United States Council of Muslim Organizations, a national umbrella group, announced plans to register a million voters.

“When your existence in society is in danger, you try to mobilize your community,” said the organization’s secretary general, Oussama Jammal.

“You have to be part of the entire society.”

According to a study conducted by the Institute for Social and Policy Understanding, a nonpartisan think tank, only 60 percent of Muslim citizens were registered voters, compared with at least 86 percent of Jews, Protestants and Roman Catholics.

“A lot of Muslims didn’t participate in elections because they didn’t see a lot of difference between the parties,” said Emir Sundiata Alrashid of the Lighthouse Mosque in Oakland, where a voter-registration drive was held last month.

The situation changed after Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Drives were held on a recent Friday at 21 mosques and Islamic centers in the Bay Area and Sacramento and at seven places in the Los Angeles area.

“Muslims are a big campaign issue, as big as the climate, the economy and immigration. We’re spoken about as if we’re not there,” said Rusha Latif, an organizer of the Rock the Muslim Vote campaign.

“We want to amplify our voices.”

Fear

Many analysts cited Muslims’ fear as the main motivator to galvanize their votes.

“The average Muslim is a little desensitized to politicians’ making negative comments about us,” said Corey Saylor, the director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“This time it’s so pervasive and mainstream and, frankly, threatening that a lot of people feel the need to do whatever they can.”

Jehan Hakim, California president of the American Association of Yemeni Students and Professionals, said, “So many family and community members are really, really scared.”

Hakim, who organized mosque voter registration drives in Oakland, said her four children wanted to move to Canada.

The change in tone has been gradual. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, “the conversation in the mainstream media was that American Muslims are part of America — we’re in this trouble together,” said Baig of the Islamic Circle of North America.

The situation was getting worse after, Trump calls for closing mosques and barring Muslims.

“People coming to his rallies are cheering what he says,” Baig said.

“We are beyond a state of shock.”

Emir Alrashid of the Lighthouse Mosque drew parallels between the Muslims’ current situation and the Japanese’s after Pearl Harbor.

“We’re going through the same struggles the Japanese did about their loyalty to the country after Pearl Harbor,” he said.

“Just because you share an ethnic group or religion, you shouldn’t have to pass a loyalty oath to be considered a loyal American.”

“People might be born in America, but they feel like a lot of times they’re looked at like ‘other,’ ” Alrashid, who was born in the United States and served six years in the Marine Corps, added.

“People see a Muslim sister at a grocery store, and they don’t think she’s an American citizen. They automatically seem to think she’s ‘one of those Muslims,’ even here in the Bay Area,” he said.

“I can only imagine how it is in Utah or Mississippi.”