Pakistani American candidate for California legislature talks interfaith dialogue, retail politics

Sara Deen, a Pakistani American who began her political career through religious dialogue, is now running for the 2026 California State Legislature at a time of heightened political polarisation.

Having been elected a school board member in 2022, when culture wars in small towns made international headlines over reading material, LGBTQ+ rights, and Covid protocol, she says she wants to focus on unifying issues, such as cost of living, healthcare, infrastructure, and access to education.

“I think that serving on a school board in a purple district in this political environment has prepared me in a unique way,” Deen, who announced her candidacy in March, tells The New Arab.

“In the legislature, we have a Democratic supermajority. I have the opportunity to serve people fairly,” she said, referring to work she’s done in bringing different parties together on contentious issues, such as helping pass an education bond in a tax-averse area and advocating against book bans amid organised opposition to LGBTQ+ literature.

District 66, where Deen is running for office, is largely coastal and includes the cities such as El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, and Palos Verdes Estates, as well as parts of the cities of Gardena, Los Angeles, and San Pedro. Many of its residents are affluent but there are some who live in abject poverty - in some cases without roofs over their heads.

In the autumn of 2015, months after then-reality TV host Donald Trump descended the golden escalator to announce his plans to run for US president, making the first of many campaign speeches blaming immigrants for society’s ills, Deen was working as a dentist in southern California. She then met a fellow parent while they were both volunteering at their children’s school. He asked her how she was doing.

“He made the mistake of asking me: how are you doing? What do normal people say when they’re asked how they’re doing?” she asked rhetorically. “I didn’t do that.”

She recalls saying, “This is what my family and community is going through.”

The man, whom she didn’t know at the time was a rabbi, responded by saying, “My community has been where your community is today, and it’s my job to help you.”

From there, they struck up a friendship that then extended to both of their families and communities. Deen marched with the rabbi's wife and women of multiple faiths in the Women’s March of 2016.

They wanted to do something more substantial than marching. This led to multifaith prayers, and public discussions in which people were invited to ask questions, often at church congregations.

“When the Muslim ban kicked off, people were curious. What’s a Muslim? What does that mean?” she says, adding that no question, no matter how naïve, bothered her. “When they’re asking it means they’re curious.”

Her interfaith work extended to labour rights and social justice advocacy, roles that got her acquainted with local politicians. It was during this outreach that she came across a school board candidate, Jeff Frankel, and reached out to him.

“If you’re willing to have a conversation and hear about my neighbours and my community, and hear what their kids are going through in the schools, I can probably get 50 lawn signs put out for you,” she recalls telling him in a Facebook message during his 2020 campaign. He then called her back for what turned into a three-hour conversation.

“He gets elected. He does the thing a lot of electeds don’t do after getting elected. He keeps reaching out. I wasn’t a wealthy donor,” says Deen, adding that she was happy her children were in a district with a leader that cared.

Then, five months after getting elected, Frankel died. During his last month, he had tried to introduce Deen to a woman who could talk to her about running for office. Though they didn’t meet while he was alive, they got acquainted at his memorial service.

“He had wanted to prepare me to run for 2022,” Deen says.

Deen won the election, joining the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District board following a tumultuous pandemic era of disputes over vaccines, reading material, LGBTQ+ rights and attacks on teachers.

Putting her medical training to work, she told herself not to judge those who had tried to treat the problem before her.

“I don’t know what kind of information they were receiving, their emotional state. That election cycle, everyone wanted to talk about covid and critical race theory,” she recalls telling herself.

She saw these culture war, wedge issues as a tactic to pit community members against one another, something she wanted to avoid in the Muslim community, even for those who held more traditional beliefs.

“I went to the Muslim community and gave the context about the book ban,” she says. “An example I gave was: You want Palestinian narratives. How can we do that if we don’t accept others?”

Now, as she runs for state assembly, she is not only looking back on her time as a school board member, but also her own family from South Asia.

Her grandfather, a Sunni, served in the Pakistani state legislature in the 1970s, and chose a Shia woman as a running mate, using a slogan of Shia-Sunni brotherhood. Her father was 15 when he decided he would one day immigrate to the US after seeing news of the moon landing.

Her own campaign is unconventional, as someone who hadn’t initially chosen a political life.

“I am someone who never thought I’d run for office. But as a dentist, I got really good at listening to people when they’re not at their best, hoping to find their main pain point, and a as a scientist using an evidence-based approach,” she says. “I wasn’t expected to run for office. My North Star is healing people.”