The Islamic Tradition of Building Interfaith Alliances for Immigrants

A few weeks ago, I sat in a room in Miami with a rabbi, a pastor, and the leader of an interfaith organization. We were talking about the same thing everyone in our communities is talking about: what do we do now?

ICE raids. Families separated. A federal refugee admissions target for 2026 set at 7,500 — the lowest number in the history of the program, in a country that once welcomed 125,000 refugees in a single year. People who came to South Florida the same way many of our ancestors came — across water, leaving everything behind — now living in sustained fear.

We were not united by politics or theological agreement. We were united by something older: the conviction that no government can revoke what God has placed in a human being, and that our traditions — each in its own voice — call us to stand with the stranger.

What I want to offer here is a theological case for why participating in an interfaith alliance in support of immigrants is imperative for Muslims. And I want to ground it in the Prophet Muhammad's own biography, because the story is more remarkable than most people know.

Islam's survival was an interfaith project.

In 613 CE — nine years before the Prophet Muhammad’s own migration, or Hijra, from Mecca to Medina — he sent his earliest companions to seek asylum in the Christian Kingdom of Aksum, in present-day Ethiopia. There were sixteen of them at first, including the Prophet's own daughter. A second, larger group followed. By the time of that second migration, the Muslims living in Ethiopia actually outnumbered those who remained in Mecca. The faith's early survival owed as much to East Africa as to Arabia.

When a Meccan delegation arrived in Aksum, demanding the early Muslim converts’ extradition, the king who received them — the Negus, Ashama ibn Abjar — refused to surrender them. The Meccan delegation tried again to seek their extradition, this time by drawing attention to the theological differences between the Christian king and the Muslim refugees. But when the Negus heard what the Muslims recited from the Qur'an about Jesus, he wept, and told the refugees: "Go, for you are safe in my country."

When the Negus died in 630 CE, the Prophet led a funeral prayer for him, in absentia – the first such prayer in Islamic history — calling this Christian king "a pious man" and "your brother." The precedent established by this prayer was not a footnote to Islamic history, but the creation of a tradition of praying for non-Muslims that survives until this day. The survival of this tradition was secured by an interfaith covenant.

When the Prophet finally made his own Hijra, he arrived not at a Muslim city but at a majority-Jewish one. The Charter of Medina that he established was a multi-religious federation — the Jewish tribes were explicitly included as "an equal nation" alongside Muslims, bound by mutual defense, protected in their religious practices. The Ummah, which is the worldwide collective of Muslim believers, in its first constitutional expression, was a community of communities. To strengthen the bonds across these communities the Prophet then established the mu'akhah, or pact of brotherhood, to pair every arriving migrant family with a local family. This was not an act of charity in which local families were expected to take care of the migrants; rather, it was a partnership. The built-in assumption was that the newcomers bring something essential.

In 2026 in America, we are in a moment that requires us to remember these traditions of interfaith covenants, kindness toward migrants, and forging community across communities. Muslims have an obligation in this moment to live into those traditions and to be at the interfaith table — not on the sidelines.

Sadly, I have heard some Muslims choosing instead to disengage, for one of two reasons. The first is fatalism: keep your head down, let others fight this battle. The second is insularity: our concern is for Muslim immigrants only. Both positions, I would argue, fail to live up to our Prophet’s traditions.

The early Muslim community in Aksum survived because a Christian king protected them. The Medinan community was built through covenantal alliance with Jewish tribes. If those early Muslims had practiced a politics of "our people only," there would be no Islam to speak of.

At The East-West Foundation and at Florida International University, we have been asking what the Medina model looks like in practice. Our best answer is not one of theology in the abstract, but rather Know Your Rights trainings in partnership with legal aid organizations, rapid-response networks when enforcement spikes, and practical accompaniment for families in crisis: in other words, the mu'akhah as a living program.

The rabbi, the pastor, the interfaith leader, and the Muslim scholar standing together in a city commissioner's office accomplish something none of us accomplishes alone. It signals that this is not a coalition borne out of temporary political necessity, but a moral partnership, rooted in the wisdom of our traditions, traditions that predate this political moment and will outlast it.

The Prophet arrived at Medina as a refugee, invited by people who were not his own, to build something that had never existed before, as part of a community of communities.

That is still possible. It is the tradition we continue to live out every day.

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Iqbal Akhtar teaches in the Department of Religious Studies and Politics and International Relations at Florida International University and is Founding Director of The East-West Foundation. His scholarship and community-building focus on covenantal pluralism, Islamic diaspora communities, and Jewish-Muslim relations. He is a member of the 2025-2026 cohort of the Interfaith Leadership Network.

The views and beliefs expressed in this post and all Interfaith Alliance blogs are those held by the author of each respective piece. To learn more about the organizational views, policies, and positions of Interfaith Alliance on any issues, please contact [email protected].