What Life’s Like for the Muslim Constituents of Congress’s Nastiest Islamophobe

A visit to Nashville’s Little Kurdistan.

Part of the Little Kurdistan mural in Nashville. (Photo by Lauren Egan)

Nashville, Tennessee
A SHORT FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE from Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk and Jason Aldean’s Rooftop Bar—just two of the many country music celebrity–branded establishments that dot Nashville’s lower Broadway—sits Little Kurdistan.

To make that trip from downtown is to encounter the American South at its most glorious. There’s a pitmaster working a smoker on the side of the road, a Waffle House packed to the brim, and people perched on lowered tailgates at the Sonic drive-in soaking in the pristine 75-degree mid-March weather.

Keep driving until you hit Nolensville Road, and you’ll eventually come upon Little Kurdistan. From the outside, it’s utterly unassuming; it looks like any of the other hundreds of roadside shopping plazas found throughout the city. But this one is different. Store fronts are plastered with Kurdish signs advertising halal meat and shawarma. A mural depicting people playing backgammon in the streets of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, wraps around the side of a building. You’ve reached the cultural hub for the 20,000 Kurds who live in Nashville, many of whose families began arriving here in the 1970s after fleeing persecution in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Today, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in North America. And the restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores, and mosques that fill Little Kurdistan’s block-long retail space have become a point of pride—a symbol that the city has transformed from a sleepy state capital into a booming international destination. On any given day, you can hear a mix of Kurdish and Southern accents chatting over plates of grilled kebabs at Edessa Restaurant, or browsing the pastry case stacked full of flakey baklava at Azadi International Food Market and Bakery.

(Photos by Lauren Egan)

For years, this place has been a relatively peaceful, if not sleepy, mosaic; an ethnic neighborhood that blossomed in one of the South’s fastest-growing hubs. But the climate has recently become more tense.

As it happens, Little Kurdistan falls within the boundaries of Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, which is represented by one of Congress’s most virulently anti-Muslim members. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles, now in his second term in the House, has spent the past week spewing Islamophobic comments on social media—and then unapologetically doubling down on them when called out.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles tweeted last week.

In another post, he wrote: “If we don’t cease to import islam, the West falls.”

He shared images depicting Muslims as violent criminals and terrorists and said that “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.”

Forty-eight hours ago, he posted that he doesn’t “care about ‘dangerous rhetoric,’” because the “threat is dangerous muslims.”

Anyone thinking that Ogles might be doing this performatively, to cynically reap the political rewards of some sort of anti-Islam backlash from the war in Iran, need only check out his record: The congressman has a history of disparaging Muslims. And the LGBTQ community. And he isn’t exactly a paragon of decency beyond his rhetoric: He has faced accusations of inflating his resume and has been investigated by the FBI for violating campaign finance rules. And he hasn’t been able to explain where the nearly $25,000 he raised in a GoFundMe campaign for a children’s burial garden went after the garden never materialized.

Such a record wouldn’t normally fly for a congressman representing parts of his state’s biggest city. But Ogles isn’t actually a Nashville congressman, in the strict sense. His district used to be part of a city-centric seat, which for years was represented by Jim Cooper, a moderate Blue Dog Democrat. But following the 2020 census, Tennessee Republicans sliced up the district to dilute Democratic power, placing various parts of it into neighboring Republican-run areas, including the 5th district, which Ogles won in 2022.

Because of that gerrymander, it’s not uncommon for Nashvillians to live in one district, send their kids to school in another, and go to church in a third. It has also meant that an overtly anti-Muslim congressman is representing a host of Muslim constituents—and putting them on edge.

I wanted to know what it was like for them. And so I walked around Little Kurdistan last week speaking to Muslim residents of the 5th district as they popped into markets to buy meats, breads, and labneh for Iftar. No one had any kind words to share about Ogles. They’d all grown fairly accustomed to his anti-Muslim remarks. They told me he was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” and “dangerous.”

But anger toward Ogles wasn’t the dominant emotion they expressed—rather, it was fear. They told me they were worried that Ogles’s comments would lead to their kids getting bullied in school and provoke federal agents to harass their communities. They recalled the ICE raids that took place in their neighborhoods last spring (south Nashville is also home to a large Latino population; across the street from Little Kurdistan is another strip mall called “Plaza Mariachi”) and feared that something similar could happen again. Rather than speaking out against Ogles, many said they didn’t want to draw much attention to him, believing that it would only stoke more anti-Muslim sentiment.

In a way, I found this even more jarring. It was a reminder that, despite the hope and promise of this country, many Americans feel they cannot move about their lives freely without being targeted by the very people elected to represent them.

A historical marker outside of Little Kurdistan. (Photo by Lauren Egan)

Nearly everyone I spoke to for this newsletter asked that I not print their names out of fear that they’d become a target. Even family friends that I’ve known for a decade didn’t want me to publish their comments, worried that it would make them vulnerable. When I reached out to community organizers, imams, and the only Muslim member on the city council, they directed me to Sabina Mohyuddin, the executive director of the Nashville-based American Muslim Advisory Council, who has become the de facto spokesperson for the city’s Muslim community.

“This district probably has the largest number of Muslim communities living in it compared to any other congressional district in Tennessee,” said Mohyuddin, who sounded worn out and exhausted by the situation when we spoke on the phone. “[Ogles] doesn’t have any kind of record of serving his constituents.”

“This kind of rhetoric, it makes it unsafe for our community. It further normalizes this kind of discrimination and hateful, painful comments. And it allows for people to feel like it’s okay, it’s an acceptable conversation,” she added. “We’ve seen an increase in bullying in schools, discrimination, threats against our community.”

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WHETHER OGLES WILL PAY ANY PRICE for his recent rhetoric is an open question. One price he could pay is with his fellow House Republicans in Washington, D.C. They could decide that they don’t approve of a member of their conference engaging in open bigotry. GOP leaders could tell him to knock it off. They could remove him from committees. Not so long ago, they did just that when another member questioned why the language of white supremacy had become verboten.

But so far, Republicans appear comfortable letting Ogles keep tweeting.

Another price Ogles could pay would be with voters.

Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that the 5th district would be one of their top targets in the 2026 midterms.

As Democrats see it, Ogles is an especially vulnerable candidate. He’s struggled to raise money for his re-election and he’s drawn a primary challenge from former Tennessee agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher, a well-connected and respected dairy farmer.

Much of the establishment Democratic political scene in Nashville has been buzzing with excitement about Chaz Molder, a small-town mayor who is expected to be the Democratic nominee for the seat and has the backing of the DCCC. Molder is a Sunday school teacher and father of three who married his college sweetheart and rarely criticizes Trump directly. He’s steered clear of hot-button culture war issues, and has instead talked about the need for fiscal responsibility and being accessible and responsive to his constituents.

But even in a politically friendly environment, he would have a tough race ahead of him. Donald Trump won the district in 2024 by 18 percentage points and the Cook Political Report rates the district as R+8. This leaves Molder with a strategic choice: try to win over disaffected Republicans by striking a more moderate posture or try to turn out progressive-minded voters by going hard at Trump—and, by extension, Trumpism. The play-it-safe mentality Molder has chosen to this point has left the district’s Muslim voters feeling underwhelmed.

In a social media video posted last week, Molder criticized Ogles for his tweets—but not for their substance: He framed the problem not as an attack on a religious minority but as a deliberate attempt by the congressman to divert attention from other issues.

“What Andy Ogles said today was outrageous,” Molder said in a flat voice. “But sadly we’ve learned to expect that from him. He wants to distract us from his multiple personal scandals, his vote to sabotage health care for rural Tennesseans, and of course today’s historic rise in gas prices. He’s been a disappointment and an embarrassment. We can do better.”

When I talked to local organizers, many told me that Molder should have spoken out more forcefully. It was not too much for someone asking for their vote, they said, to defend the fundamental, constitutional idea that they were accepted in America.

“It’s not a hard thing to say,” said Shun Ahmed, a community organizer born and raised in Nashville after her parents immigrated from Iraq—that “someone deserves the right to exist and thrive.”

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