Barack Obama’s election with the middle name Hussein (invoked to rile Republican crowds during the presidential campaign) should inspire Muslims to pursue public service and other work, even if they speak with accents or their names are perceived as foreign-sounding, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison told the recent annual meeting of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, followed up on CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad’s plea for Obama to hire Muslims to federal posts by urging American Muslims to apply for some of the administration’s 8,000 job openings.

Another speaker, Isha Mehmoud, a student who received CAIR’s civil rights award, expressed mixed feelings about Obama:

I was extremely disappointed, actually, when I have heard about the two women who were wearing the [Hijab] and his campaign did not want them behind him in the video. And I think some of that is part of running for a campaign, and they were trying to make sure he would win. And then maybe, hopefully, now that he has won, he will come out and say something or make a statement committing to civil rights of Muslim-Americans.

Ellison disagreed:

I think the one thing that is in the way of American Muslims doing well under President Obama is the belief that we need him to say positive things about us in order for us to do well.

Ellison spoke about Obama’s middle name last March in an interview with the BBC. His prediction that people wouldn’t get inflamed about it proved incorrect, but he was right to say it wouldn’t stop Obama from being elected.

BBC: Coming back to Senator Obama, doesn’t the idea that a man whose middle name is Hussein can’t get elected to the White House, doesn’t that have some currency?

ELLISON: Hussein just means “handsome.” That’s all it means. It’s a common name, as common as John or James out in the Western countries. People aren’t going to be inflamed about it. There are names outside of the Western world that are extremely common but to us they might sound foreign or Middle Eastern, and so some bigots might think that that’s going to scare us away from a good candidate, but it’s just not gonna.

This week Obama said he plans to use his full name at his inauguration (hat tip: MinnPost) and Ellison went on pilgrimage to Mecca (hat tip: MPR). Obama said:

I think the tradition is that they use all three names, and I will follow the tradition, not trying to make a statement one way or the other.

And Ellison is paraphrased as saying of his Hajj pilgrimage:

[Y]ou forget who you are — black or white and American or African — and where you come from when you are before God circling the Kaaba [the large masonry cubic structure near Mecca] in a two-piece unstitched garment.