In Tribute to Son, Khizr Khan Offered Citizenship Lesson at Convention

When Capt. Humayun Khan was ordered to Iraq a dozen years ago, his father wanted to talk to him about being an American Muslim soldier sent to war in a Muslim country.

His son, though, was focused only on the job at hand.

“I asked him, ‘How do you feel about the whole Iraq deal?’ ” recalled Khizr Khan, who became a United States citizen after emigrating from Pakistan in 1980. “He said: ‘Look, that’s not my concern and that’s not my pay grade. My responsibility is to make sure my unit is safe.’ And that’s all he would talk about, and nothing else.”

Captain Khan, 27, died on June 8, 2004, after he told his men to take cover and then tried to stop a suicide bomber outside the gates of his base in Baquba. And on Thursday night, speaking about his son at the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Khan gave a voice to Muslim Americans outraged by the anti-Muslim pronouncements of the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump.

In a speech that electrified the convention and turned Mr. Khan into a social media and cable news sensation, he waved a pocket Constitution and challenged Mr. Trump, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

Mr. Trump’s call for restrictions on Muslims entering the country is acutely personal, Mr. Khan said, in an interview on Friday, adding that he had no plans to campaign for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, nor had the campaign asked him to.

Mr. Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Khan’s remarks. In December Mr. Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” More recently, he has pledged to suspend immigration from any country “compromised by terrorism.”

If restrictions on Muslim immigration had been in place decades ago, Mr. Khan said, neither he, a lawyer with an advanced degree from Harvard Law School; his wife, Ghazala, who taught Persian at a Pakistani college before raising three boys in the Washington suburbs; their eldest son, Shaharyar, who was a top student at the University of Virginia and a co-founder of a biotechnology company; nor Captain Khan, who posthumously earned the Bronze Star, along with a Purple Heart, for saving the lives of his men, would have been allowed to settle here.

A third son, Omer, who works at his brother’s biotech company, was born in the United States.

“If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America,” Mr. Khan exclaimed about his deceased son during his speech, his wife by his side. Mr. Khan said that Mr. Trump “wants to build walls and ban us from this country.”

“Let me ask you: Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy,” Mr. Khan said, addressing Mr. Trump directly, while pulling a miniature version of the country’s founding document from his coat pocket.

Mr. Khan said he admires both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, though Thomas Jefferson is his real hero.

Mr. Khan’s odyssey from lawyer and legal consultant to prime-time D.N.C. speaker began in December, when he got a phone call from a writer for Vocativ, an online publication, who wanted his thoughts on Mr. Trump’s statements about Muslims.

Mr. Khan criticized Mr. Trump’s statements as un-American in an article published by Vocativ. A few weeks later, he got a phone call from a Clinton campaign official, who had seen the article and asked if his comments could be used in a tribute for his son at the convention.

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“I said, ‘What a wonderful honor,’ ” he recalled in the interview. “Who am I to say, ‘No’?”

Months later, the campaign asked if he and his wife would come to the convention. “The initial plan was just to go there and stand and talk to the media afterwards,” he said. “Then somebody called and said, ‘Would you like to say a word or two?’ ”

Time was tight and the schedule packed, he was told. The campaign asked whether he needed speechwriting help or any coaching. “I said: ‘I really don’t, I have my thoughts in my head,” he said. “I won’t make it an hourlong speech, just let me say what I want to say. It will be heart-to-heart.”

Nothing from the speech, he said, was the product of the campaign, including his dig at Mr. Trump’s lack of military service. It all flowed pretty easily, because he had been thinking about these things for quite a while, he said.

Mr. Khan expressed great faith in the Constitution and in a political process that bolsters a belief that “an unqualified person will never get to this office.”

“I respect the Republican Party as much as the Democratic Party,” he said. But he added: “I definitely will continue to raise my voice out of concern that the Republican leadership must pay attention to what is taking place.”

Mr. Khan met his wife at Punjab University in Lahore, Pakistan. They moved to Dubai, where their two eldest sons were born, then arrived in Houston, renting a $200-a-month apartment. Eventually they settled outside Washington, where Mr. Khan worked at a mortgage company and law firms.

Captain Khan attended John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Md. In his free time, he taught disabled children to swim. At the University of Virginia, he joined the R.O.T.C. program, and majored in psychology, his father said. He planned to attend law school.

His last conversation with his parents was on Mother’s Day 2004. His mother said: “ ‘I don’t want you to be a hero. I want you to return back to me safely,’ ” Mr. Khan recalled. “Of course I will,” he promised her. “But Mother, you should know I have responsibility for these soldiers, and I cannot leave them unprotected.”

The bomber who took Captain Khan’s life drove an orange-and-white taxi toward the base. Had the captain not warned his men to take cover, “there would have been more casualties,” his brigade commander, Dana Pittard, said in an interview.

Recalling the captain’s potential as he watched Mr. Khan’s speech, Mr. Pittard said, “I had to leave the room, it brought back such a flood of memories.”

After their son’s death, Mr. Khan and his wife, who had moved to Charlottesville to be close to their other sons, had the university’s R.O.T.C. cadets over for dinner once a year. Mr. Khan would give them each a pocket-size copy of the Constitution, just like the one he brandished on Thursday, said Tim Leroux, who used to run the R.O.T.C. program.

University officials let Mr. Khan read an application essay his son wrote for a residential college. In the essay, Captain Khan wrote of how “liberty requires vigilance and sacrifice” and that those who are “beneficiaries of liberty must always bear this in mind, and keep it safe from attacks.”

“That summed up his later life,” Mr. Khan said.