Why we love – Ilhan Abdullahi Omar
It’s not every day a member of a “marginalized” group of people is given the chance to make a mark on our big blue orb. But, every time it happens, it is worth celebrating. Rising above social standards and the status quo, against all odds, to achieve one’s dream is worthy of admiration. That is why today, it gives us great pleasure to introduce you to Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar is a 36-year old Somalian-born American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district since 2019. Omar was born in Mogadishu on October 4, 1982, and spent her early years in Baidoa, Somalia. She was the youngest of seven siblings, including Sahra Noor.
She was raised by her father (Nur Omar Mohamed) and grandfather (Abukar) after the death of her mother, Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein when she was only 2 years old. Abukar was the director of Somalia’s National Marine Transport and some of Omar‘s uncles and aunts also worked as civil servants and educators. She and her family fled Somalia to escape the war and spent four years in a Dadaab refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya, near the Somali border.
After first arriving in New York in 1992, Omar’s family finally secured asylum in the U.S. in 1995 and lived for a time in Arlington, Virginia, before moving to and settling in Minneapolis, where her father worked first as a taxi driver and later for the post office. Her father and grandfather emphasized the importance of democracy during her upbringing, and at age 14 she accompanied her grandfather to caucus meetings, serving as his interpreter. Omar then became a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old.
Her political aspirations took her to greater heights as she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016 on the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party line. In 2018, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, marking a number of historic electoral firsts: she is the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from Africa, and the first non-white woman elected from Minnesota, and one of the first two Muslim women to serve in the United States Congress.
In 2014, Omar was named a rising star in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Women’s Hall of Fame. Subsequently, in 2015 she received the Community Leadership Award from Mshale, an African immigrant media outlet based in Minneapolis. Later on, Time magazine named Omar among its “Firsts: Women who are changing the world,” a special report on 46 women who broke barriers in their respective disciplines, and featured her on the cover of its 2017 September 18 issue. Her family was also named one of the “five families who are changing the world as we know it” by Vogue in their February 2018 issue featuring photographs by Annie Leibovitz.
Omar is a proud representative of all women in politics and a role model for all aspiring female politicians.
