The Muslim Brotherhood has become a flashpoint in Michigan’s Senate race, with Republicans attempting to portray Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed as sympathetic to interests linked to Islamic terrorism and El-Sayed arguing that he is unfairly accused of the same “dual loyalties” that former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama once had.
El-Sayed this weekend denounced the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement founded in Egypt in 1928 — first in a heated exchange with a voter, then in an interview with reporters — after Republicans sought to highlight his family’s ties to the group and his past comments about it.
“I want to explain why they want to make this their closing argument,” El-Sayed told reporters after a rally Sunday in Flint. “They want to talk about some implicit dual loyalty. This has a long history in our politics, this notion that people might pray a little differently, have dual loyalties. It’s the same thing they did to JFK when he ran for president, the idea that because he was Catholic he somehow had dual loyalty. They did the same thing to President Obama simply because his father was of Muslim background, even though his father is an avowed Christian.”
He added: “This is nothing new. This is what they do when they have no message about the real issues in people’s lives.”
Republicans have increasingly called attention to El-Sayed’s Muslim faith in the final weeks of one of the most important Senate races on the 2026 midterm election map.
President Donald Trump, at a campaign rally Friday night, referred to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” and falsely said the former Democratic public health official was a “jihadist.” These comments have become staples of recent Trump rallies and social media commentary.
El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, said on CNN on Sunday that he had “never called him a terrorist” and said he did not “speak for the president.”
But Rogers accused El-Sayed of aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a global Islamist movement that once wielded significant political power in Egypt, where it was founded. The movement officially rejects the use of violent means to achieve its objectives. However, offshoots of the group have been linked to attacks in the past.
Trump signed an executive order in November that began a process by which certain chapters or other subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood could be considered for designation as foreign terrorist organizations.
“You know, he wants to play the victim. It’s not about that. It’s about the way you think, not the way you pray,” Rogers told CNN’s Dana Bash. “It’s about your ideology and how dangerous it is. »
The Republican Party’s efforts to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic extremism came to light this weekend at a town hall in Caro.
One attendee repeatedly pressed El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood, saying he had yet to hear the candidate reject the organization.
“Abdul, are you going to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood? » shouted the man in the crowd.
El-Sayed, after disavowing the movement, castigated the man for implicitly assuming his “dual loyalty.”
“You assume… that because I am Muslim, somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution,” El-Sayed said. He later added: “For me, this Constitution is the common thread. »
The spectator walked out after the exchange as the crowd cheered for El-Sayed.
The GOP attacks come after old tweets from El-Sayed’s half-sister resurfaced online, including a 2012 post in which she described having “an incredible discussion with my mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early ’70s while she was in college.”
El-Sayed said he did not know what his mother was doing in Egypt in the 1970s, explaining that he was 3 years old when his parents divorced and he did not see his mother for years. He was primarily raised in Michigan by his father and stepmother.
El-Sayed also signed an open letter in 2012 supporting former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was elected earlier that year with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood after the overthrow of the country’s authoritarian government.
A year earlier, he wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post calling on the United States to support young Arab protesters in Egypt and downplaying concerns that support for democracy there would lead to control of the country by the Muslim Brotherhood.
During a recent debate, Rogers pointed out that El-Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a nonprofit that the Treasury Department designated in 2004 as an organization supporting terrorism.
“Are you chasing my mother?” » said El-Sayed.
“I was going after this organization that was indicted for funneling money to Al Qaeda,” Rogers said. “Look, she’s your mother. My mother worked at a small chamber of commerce. I’d take her in any day for that.”
El-Sayed responded that he is a “father and a doctor” who wants to “take money out of politics, put money in your pocket and pass Medicare for All.” He said Rogers “wants it to be anything but his own record.”
In recent days, El-Sayed also spoke to his sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, who was listed in the federal terrorism detection database — a situation she challenged in a class-action lawsuit in 2016. It’s unclear why Jukaku, who was once president of the UCLA Muslim Student Association and is now a homeschool teacher and writer in California, was added to the list.
“She did nothing wrong and was captured and then put on trial and got away with it,” El-Sayed told Fox News when asked whether his wife’s sister had been placed on the terrorist watch list, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. “You have this system where people are guilty until proven innocent because they have different types of names, because of the infrastructure that was put in place by people like Mike Rogers.”
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