Abdul
El-Sayed Confronts Attacks on His Faith and Family Ties
In the final
weeks of Michigan’s Senate race, the Democratic nominee finds himself facing
both ugly attacks and pointed questions about family members. He has pushed
back forcefully.
Dr. Abdul
El-Sayed, if he wins Michigan’s Senate race, would become the nation’s first
Muslim senator.Credit...Zbigniew Bzdak for The New York Times
By Reid J. EpsteinBrian M. Rosenthal and Michael Kruse
Oct. 21,
2026
In the final
weeks of Michigan’s closely watched Senate race, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s
ethnicity, religion and family have come under renewed attacks and scrutiny.
His
Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, invoked
Dr. El-Sayed’s mother during their first debate, trying to draw a
connection between her and Al Qaeda. President Trump has mocked the
pronunciation of Dr. El-Sayed’s name and has started referring to him by his
middle name, Mohamed. And Republican ads have suggested that Dr. El-Sayed has ties to
terrorist groups or to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement.
Dr. El-Sayed
has forcefully responded to the questions about his identity. Over the weekend,
a
nearly five-minute exchange at a town-hall event with a man who asked him
to “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood” went viral on social media. This week, in a
brief, testy interaction with a reporter from Newsmax, he said,
“I clearly disavow” the movement. And in a new video, Dr. El-Sayed says that he prays daily and
calls himself a “man of faith.”
Now Dr.
El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim senator if he wins, finds himself
confronting both ugly attacks and pointed questions about family members —
particularly his mother and a half sister — and their past comments and
personal histories. Republicans have pushed to make those questions a main
story line in the final days of a Senate race that could determine control of
the chamber.
The focus on
Dr. El-Sayed’s identity, religion and family comes at the end of a campaign
defined by its emotional
and bitter clashes over Israel and the United States’ role in the Middle
East. Dr. El-Sayed has cast himself as a leader of the Democratic Party’s march
away from support for Israel, arguing that the longtime U.S. ally should not
exist as an explicitly Jewish state and calling for an end to its American
military support.
As he
approaches a second and final televised debate with Mr. Rogers on Wednesday,
Dr. El-Sayed is appealing to voters who are not Muslim to see him as a person
of faith whose experience reflects America’s history of religious pluralism.
“A lot of
people question whether or not I can win this race because of my name,” he said
during a speech this month in Cadillac, Mich. “I’ve been a guy named Abdul
Mohamed El-Sayed in Michigan almost my entire life. I would say I’m pretty good
at being named Abdul in Michigan.”
An Open
Letter and Family Scrutiny
The
questions that Mr. Rogers is pushing about Dr. El-Sayed’s ties to the Muslim
Brotherhood relate in part to an open
letter he signed in 2012.
That letter,
which Dr. El-Sayed signed while he was in medical school, asked Mohamed Morsi,
who was then the new Egyptian president from a party that represented the
political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, to “purge the media and police” of
supporters of the dictatorship that had been toppled during the Arab Spring.
(Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first
democratically elected president, established good working relations with
the United States.)
Dr.
El-Sayed’s campaign denied that he had any connection to the Muslim
Brotherhood. When asked recently by reporters, he has disavowed the group. His
campaign aides declined to answer questions about the 2012 letter.
Many of the
Republican attacks on Dr. El-Sayed focus on his mother, Fatten Elkomy, an
Egyptian immigrant.
Dr.
El-Sayed’s parents separated when he was 3 years old. He was raised in
Missouri, Florida and Michigan by his father and stepmother, a Michigan-born
descendant of Abigail Adams. He has featured his grandparents in
advertisements, including one that began airing on Tuesday in which they declared, “We’re
Presbyterians.”
After the
separation, Ms. Elkomy lived in Egypt at first and later in Missouri, where she
worked for a charity that was designated
by the U.S. government as a supporter of terrorist groups, including Al
Qaeda.
The charity,
the Islamic American Relief Agency, was founded in 1985, raised at least $20
million and funded social services for children in Africa and Asia, according
to federal records. It closed
in 2004 after the terrorism designation.
The group
and several leaders ultimately pleaded guilty — not to supporting terrorism, but to a
lesser charge of transferring more than $1 million to Iraq in violation of
federal sanctions. Its executive director, Mubarak Hamed, was sentenced in 2012
to nearly five years in prison.
This month,
five people involved in the case said in interviews that they did not remember
Ms. Elkomy because she was a low-ranking employee and was never accused of
wrongdoing.
“She didn’t
have anything to do with anything,” said Charles Swift, a lawyer who
represented the group.
Among the
945 exhibits cited by prosecutors in a court filing during the case were 13
that pertained to Ms. Elkomy, a detail Republicans have seized on. Most of the
exhibits were letters she sent documenting financial transactions between 1999
and 2001. (Records do not include the letters themselves or any information
about whether the transactions were illegal.)
Image
John F.
Wood, at the time a federal prosecutor in Missouri, announcing an indictment
against the Islamic American Relief Agency in 2008.Credit...Dick
Whipple/Associated Press
Evan
Kohlmann, a counterterrorism consultant who was an expert witness in the case,
said the charity was so small that all of its employees most likely knew about
its activities. He added that the group was part of a global network whose
leaders had been found to have previously sent money to Osama bin Laden. “It
was no secret that they were doing this,” he said.
The Missouri
charity had 14 employees, according to its last tax filing in 2003.
Ms. Elkomy,
who now works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Missouri, addressed the
criminal case years ago in a newspaper interview. She said she had worked at the
charity between 1999 and 2004 to serve orphans and had never seen any ties to
terrorism.
An even
older chapter of Ms. Elkomy’s life has also drawn scrutiny because of years-old
posts on social media by her daughter from a marriage after her divorce from
Dr. El-Sayed’s father. The daughter, Eman Abdelhadi, who is now a professor at
the University of Chicago, posted in 2012: “Had an amazing talk with my mom
about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was
in college #respect.” Ms. Elkomy has said she graduated from medical school at
Alexandria University in Egypt in 1983.
Dr.
Abdelhadi has also made other posts suggesting that family members in Egypt
were part of the Muslim Brotherhood. None have mentioned Dr. El-Sayed.
Image
Republicans
have seized on old social media posts by Eman Abdelhadi, Dr. El-Sayed’s half
sister and now a University of Chicago professor.Credit...Chicago Sun-Times,
via Associated Press
Dr.
El-Sayed’s campaign pointed to his past remarks about his complex family
dynamics. He wrote in one of his books that his father left Egypt to escape the
country’s political oppression and that he had little relationship with his
mother. His aides said that any suggestions that he had connections to overseas
terrorist groups were racist and Islamophobic.
Dr.
El-Sayed’s mother and half sister, with whom he also did not grow up, did not
respond to requests for comment. His aides declined a request for an interview
with him for this article, and declined to talk in detail about his family or
religious practices.
“I was
raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan, rebuilt the health
department in this city, led the health department in this county, and you want
to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in the 1970s?” Dr. El-Sayed, a
former public health official, said in a recent interview with NBC. “Are you serious?”
A Barrage
of G.O.P. Attacks
When the
general election began, Mr. Rogers accused Dr. El-Sayed of being too far left
politically for Michigan. He made a play for disaffected Democrats and described the El-Sayed campaign as “filled with anger,
divisiveness, calls for violence and views that are out of touch with your
values.”
It was a
predictable line of attack against a progressive Democrat who had campaigned
with the provocative streamer Hasan Piker during the primary race.
Then came
the debate this month.
Mr. Rogers
attacked Dr. El-Sayed’s mother and suggested his rival had ties to terrorists.
“Well, if you have someone in your family that might be on the, on the watch
list —” Mr. Rogers said, before Dr. El-Sayed cut him off.
“You going
after my mom?” he asked.
Mr. Rogers
stopped, but his allies did not.
Image
At his first
debate against Dr. El-Sayed, former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican,
suggested his opponent had ties to terrorist groups.Credit...Pool photo by Paul
Sancya
Mr. Trump
began calling Dr. El-Sayed by his middle name, Mohamed, and mocked
the number of syllables in his given name. Ads emerged on television saying that Dr. El-Sayed had “ties to
the Islamist movement.” On CNN, Mr. Rogers said his rival had “a long history
of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.” Republican allies of Mr. Rogers stepped
up efforts to scrutinize Dr. El-Sayed’s political allies and donors.
This push
came to a head on Saturday night when, at a town hall in Caro, a small town in
northeast Michigan, a man who was reportedly a Republican operative asked Dr.
El-Sayed if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.
Dr.
El-Sayed’s campaign was so pleased with his response — “Sure, yes, absolutely,”
followed by a colloquy about the Constitution and his loyalty to it — that it posted the exchange on social media, where it spread
widely.
Republicans
argued that Dr. El-Sayed had bullied the questioner, and kept pushing the
discussion about the candidate’s faith.
On Monday,
Dr. El-Sayed posted a video that showed images of churches and a menorah
while portraying himself as another religiously observant person.
“I pray
every day,” he said. “We need a few more people of faith in Washington. I’m
Abdul El-Sayed, man of faith.”
‘We Kind
of All Knew Where This Was Headed’
From the
start, Dr. El-Sayed had few illusions about the role his faith and ethnicity
would play in his Senate campaign. Many other Muslim candidates for
lower-profile offices had faced baseless accusations of mixed allegiances or
ties to terrorist groups.
“We kind of
all knew where this was headed,” Dr. El-Sayed said in an interview after his
campaign event this month in Cadillac.
Dr. El-Sayed
wrote in his 2020 memoir, “Healing Politics,” that he was “raised in a
conservative Muslim household.” He went to Sunday school, fasted during Ramadan
and refrained from eating pork.
And in
interviews, he has said he attends a mosque, prays five times a day and does
not drink alcohol. At Michigan, he was president of the Muslim Students
Association and married his wife while they were undergraduates.
“I believe
in an Islam that emphasizes God and my responsibility in his creation,” he
wrote. “The Islam I practice doesn’t judge people; it seeks to empathize with
and empower them.”
For a while
during his Senate race, Dr. El-Sayed ran advertisements stressing his
guy-next-door bona fides. He was captain of his high school football team and gave
a commencement speech upon graduating from the University of Michigan.
For other
Muslim elected officials, Dr. El-Sayed’s experience in recent weeks is
reminiscent of what they have gone through in their campaigns.
Sam Rasoul,
a Palestinian American who has been in the Virginia House of Delegates since
2014, was asked during a televised debate when he ran for lieutenant governor
in 2021 if campaign donations he received from Muslims meant he would be loyal
to all of Virginia.
Four years
later, a different Muslim candidate, Ghazala Hashmi, was elected as Virginia’s
lieutenant governor after facing similar attacks. She said she had texted with
Dr. El-Sayed during his Senate campaign to offer encouragement.
Image
Lt. Gov.
Ghazala Hashmi of Virginia, a Muslim politician who has also faced attacks over
her background, said she had texted with Dr. El-Sayed during his Senate
campaign to offer encouragement.Credit...Mike Kropf/Richmond Times-Dispatch,
via Associated Press
“There’s
such a heightened level of anti-Muslim rhetoric that has grown over the past
couple of decades,” said Ms. Hashmi, who is now one of two Muslims who hold
statewide office in the United States. “Islamophobia is something that is a
part of the political system here.”
Onstage at
campaign events, Dr. El-Sayed often stands not in front of signs with his
campaign logo, as he frequently did during the primary, but in front of a giant
American flag. He proactively talks about what Mr. Trump, Vice President JD
Vance, Mr. Rogers and others are saying about him.
“They think
my name and my faith are enough to get people to stop paying attention to the
issues,” he said this month in Ionia. “My name is not the reason you can’t
afford gas. My name’s not the reason you can’t afford your groceries.”
Susan C.
Beachy contributed research.
Corrected
on
Oct. 21,
2026
:
An earlier
version of a picture caption with this article referred incorrectly to Mike
Rogers. He is a former congressman, not a current one.
We
acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error,
please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn
more.
Reid J. Epstein is
a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
Brian M. Rosenthal
is an investigative reporter who has worked at The Times since 2017.
Michael Kruse is a
politics correspondent for The Times.
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