President Barack Obama's visit to the mosque in Baltimore County yesterday helped build a stronger, more cohesive America and sent a signal to the Muslim majorities elsewhere in the world — in roughly 50 Muslim-managed nations — to treat Christians and other minorities with dignity, and encourage them to retain U.S. business relations and sustain our economic base of exports.

Here at home, the renewed cohesion will encourage every American to feel safer and live his or her life without fear or apprehension, thus each one of the 323 million people living in the United States could add to each others' prosperity and that of our children. As the Quran says, the best among us are those who leave a better world for the next generation. Prophet Muhammad defines that good deed as planting a tree, knowing full well that the benefit of its shade and fruit will not accrue to you, but to someone else in the future.

Our founding fathers laid the groundwork for such a society: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And Martin Luther King Jr. furthered the work toward it, expressing “a dream that [his] four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

We clearly have more work to do, however, and remain divided on too many fronts in this country — politically, racially and religiously.

President Obama's visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore in Catonsville served as a public recognition and acknowledgment that Muslims are Americans in every sense of the word; we love this country, live for it and would die for it. America is our home — and this visit makes us feel more at home. Inclusion creates a sense of belonging and deeper affection for one's homeland, whereas alienation causes people to retreat into their cocoons; everyone loses with alienation. Muslims have always welcomed the stranger, for once we were strangers.

As a Muslim, it pains me to see the Christians, Hindus, Jews and others mistreated in places where they are minorities. They have the same aspirations within their homelands as American Muslims do here in the United States. It is time for our country to lead the world by example.

As an American Muslim, I welcome this gesture from the president. He has restored America's dignity and respect through dialogue and cooperation and treating other countries as equals in the community of nations. He knows that causing other countries to feel equal is not a sign of weakness, but rather one of the strengths of our nation and essential to the spread of genuine democracy around the world.

America has led the world in every aspect of life: science, medicine, technology, research, culture, fashion and freedom. Now President Obama has led the world in social sciences by delivering the idea of pluralism to the society — i.e., respecting the otherness of others and accepting the God-given uniqueness of each one of us. As we start practicing this value, conflicts will fade and solutions will emerge.

America is unquestionably the land of the free and the brave. American Muslims love it and have consciously freed Islam from cultural strings and retained the true spirit of the religion. Islam is a beautiful system devised to restore sanity and common sense in a society through simple basics like being truthful and trustworthy, imbuing a sense of security in fellow beings, standing up for justice, practicing non-judgmentalism, believing in dialogue to resolve conflicts, jettisoning arrogance and adopting humility and kindness as lifestyle.

Prophet Muhammad laid that foundation and was an embodiment of those principles, and for that, his Ummah (community) comprising Jews, Christians and Pagans called him Amin (trustworthy). Unfortunately, a few in the world today have made Islam to be a political system, which it is not. Sadly all religions have become political systems of “you or me,” rather than spiritual systems of “us in this together.” American Muslims believe in living their lives, and letting others live theirs in peace. We expect President Obama's actions to further this goal here and abroad.

This is the kind of leadership we need.

Mike Ghouse (www.TheGhouseDiary.com) is executive director of the American Muslim Institution in Washington, D.C., and a director at the America Together Foundation.