The Unfinished Promise of Equality
By Faisal Kutty
Jul/Aug 26
250 years ago, a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and declared that all white men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This sentiment would only later expand to include the rest of humanity. The words were revolutionary. The reality was far from it.
The Declaration of Independence was both a soaring moral promise and a profound contradiction. It proclaimed universal equality while slavery remained embedded in the republic’s economic and political foundations. Indigenous peoples were described as obstacles to civilization. Women were excluded from political participation. The new nation announced liberty to the world while withholding it from scores of thousands who lived within its borders.
And yet, despite those contradictions, the Declaration endured because generations of Americans refused to treat its failures as proof of its emptiness. Instead, they treated them as unfinished obligations. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass confronted the hypocrisy of Independence Day while still insisting the Constitution contained anti-slavery principles worth redeeming. President Abraham Lincoln described the Declaration as a moral standard meant to apply to all people and all times. The Civil Rights Movement forced the United States to confront the distance between its constitutional ideals and its social realities. Each generation expanded the circle of those entitled to belong fully within the American promise. That struggle remains unfinished.
Reviving Hate
As the U.S. celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence, Americans find themselves once again wrestling with an old temptation: defining who truly belongs in the political community and who remains suspect, conditional or expendable. The targets change across generations. The logic does not.
In recent months, Americans watched elected officials, and political candidates revive rhetoric portraying Muslims and immigrants as civilizational threats. In a post on X, Florida Representative Randy Fine said, “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Around the same time, legislation branded as the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act” was introduced in Congress. In Georgia, campaign advertisements warned darkly of a supposed “Sharia takeover.” In Texas, Republican primary voters were asked to weigh in on whether “Sharia Law” should be prohibited.
None of this emerged in a vacuum. America has seen this all before.
History Repeats Itself
Years ago, American Catholics were once accused of harboring secret loyalty to Rome and of being antithetical to constitutional democracy. In that same period, Jews were treated as perpetual outsiders whose allegiances could never fully be trusted. Japanese Americans were forcibly interned during World War II under the language of national security. Black Americans were denied equal citizenship for generations while the Constitution itself was invoked to justify exclusion. Each era produced its own vocabulary of hate, its own rationale for treating certain groups as exceptions to the nation’s stated ideals. The language changes. The structure remains.
The current “Sharia threat” narrative follows precisely this historical pattern. There is no evidence that Islamic law is replacing American constitutional governance. American courts remain bound by the Constitution, statutes, and precedent. Religious principles, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise, hold no independent sovereign authority in American courts. They never have. They never will.
Yet the rhetoric persists because it serves a political function. It transforms demographic change into cultural panic. It converts complexity into threat. It invites citizens to see neighbors not as fellow participants in a pluralistic democracy but as alien forces from which the nation must defend itself.
The danger is not merely rhetorical. Dehumanization has consequences.
When entire communities are collapsed into caricature, democratic norms begin to erode. The First Amendment protects the right to express hateful or offensive views. But constitutional protections do not transform dehumanization into civic virtue. Democracies do not collapse only through coups or authoritarian decrees. They can also weaken gradually when political discourse normalizes the idea that some citizens stand outside the circle of equal concern.
This is why the current moment matters far beyond one politician, one campaign ad, or one legislative proposal.
The Declaration of Independence was radical not because the colonies demanded self-governance. Many societies have done that. Its radicalism lies in its assertion that legitimacy itself depends upon the equal dignity of human beings. That principle remains among the most powerful moral claims ever articulated in political history. It has inspired abolitionists, anti-colonial movements, women’s rights advocates, labor organizers, and civil rights leaders around the world.
But the Declaration’s promise survives only if Americans continue to enlarge rather than narrow the meaning of belonging.
The Muslim Monolith
Today, Muslims in the U.S. are judges, soldiers, teachers, physicians, police officers, journalists, academics, and public servants. They are politically, ethnically, and theologically diverse. Yet American political discourse often treats Muslims as a monolith, flattening 2 billion people into a singular and threatening abstraction.
That flattening is not merely inaccurate. It is historically illiterate.
Islamic law itself contains centuries of disagreement, debate, and interpretive diversity. On issues as simple as dogs, Muslim scholars have long differed. Some legal schools viewed dogs as ritually impure, while others, particularly within the Maliki tradition, treated them as pure animals. The Quran itself recounts the story of the Companions of the Cave whose dog loyally guarded them (Chapter 18).
In his book Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari‘ah in the Modern Age, Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl described Islamic law as a moral enterprise shaped through reasoning and interpretation rather than rigid command. In her book The Axis of Good: Muslims Building Alliances with Other Communities, former Islamic Society of North America President Ingrid Mattson argued that contemporary Muslim communities navigate inherited texts through lived realities and changing social conditions.
Islamic tradition also preserves a famous narration in which the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) tells of a prostitute who encountered a dog dying of thirst. She gave the animal water, and God forgave her because of that act of compassion (Sahih al-Bukhari 3221, Sahih al-Muslim 2245). The moral of the story is one of mercy, not exclusion.
That moral imagination stands in sharp contrast to political rhetoric that asks Americans to choose between dogs and Muslims, as though an entire religious community can be weighed against an animal species and dismissed in a single sentence.
America’s founders themselves understood that democracy would require constant vigilance against factionalism and manufactured fear. President and constitutional architect James Madison warned that political leaders would attempt to inflame divisions for personal gain. President George Washington cautioned against the corrosive effects of factional politics. They understood that constitutional government depends not only on institutional design but on civic restraint.
A Country in the Balance
America’s 250th anniversary, therefore, arrives at a moment of testing.
Will the country continue moving toward a broader understanding of equality, or retreat into a politics of suspicion and exclusion? Will constitutional principles remain universal, or become conditional upon identity, religion, and/or cultural conformity? Will the language of liberty continue expanding the circle of belonging, or will fear once again redraw its boundaries?
These are not abstract questions. They shape immigration policy, religious freedom, educational debates, campaign rhetoric, and most crucially, the everyday lives of millions of Americans.
The United States has never perfectly lived up to the Declaration of Independence. But its greatest moments have come when Americans insisted the country move closer to its ideals rather than abandon them. The abolition of slavery, the defeat of segregation, the expansion of voting rights, and the protection of religious liberty all emerged from struggles to force the nation to honor its own principles more fully.
That is the challenge of democratic maturity.
A confident constitutional order does not require scapegoats. A resilient democracy does not preserve itself by manufacturing internal enemies. And a nation founded on universal equality cannot remain true to itself while treating entire communities as permanently suspect.
250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the American experiment remains woefully unfinished. The question is not whether the country has failed its ideals in the past. It has. The question is whether Americans still possess the civic courage to keep enlarging them.
The answer will determine whether the next chapter of American history honors the promise of 1776 or retreats from it.
Faisal Kutty, J.D., LL.M., is a lawyer, law professor, and regular contributor to The Toronto Star and Newsweek. You can follow him on X @faisalkutty.
Want more like this? Subscribe to the Islamic Horizons magazine and support authentic journalism by Muslims for Muslims.