El-Sayed says Michigan rejected anti-Muslim rhetoric in his Senate campaign

Hammoud credits El-Sayed’s platform and coalition-building for broad support

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s U.S. Senate race against Republican Mike Rogers, with the result confirmed early Wednesday. After the victory, the senator-elect said Michigan voters had rejected attempts to demonize Muslim Americans. “They tried to demonize people because of how they pray,” he told The Associated Press. “And Michigan — the whole Michigan — clapped back. People don’t want that. They’re sick of it.”

El-Sayed campaigned relentlessly across Michigan but did not highlight the possibility that he could become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. In his victory speech, he declared: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” With victory in hand, he savored his triumph over the vitriol aimed at him and fellow Muslim Americans.

The election came 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath brought anti-Muslim sentiment to the forefront of American life. Muslim Americans in Michigan and across the country said they had seen a surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric after Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor a year earlier, and watched the attacks intensify as El-Sayed became a prime campaign target. President Donald Trump called him a “jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists,” while dozens of Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress formed a Sharia-Free America Caucus and depicted Islam’s religious code as a threat to the U.S. Constitution.

Those attacks formed the backdrop for reactions that described El-Sayed’s victory as more than an electoral win. Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the outcome “a historic turning point for American Muslim political engagement and a historic defeat for the politics of hate.” He said, “Anti-Muslim extremists, Israel lobby groups and even the president of the United States used every smear in the book to paint Dr. El-Sayed as a Muslim boogeyman.” Awad added: “None of it was true, and none of it worked. Anti-Muslim hate was on the ballot, and it failed.”

Excitement over El-Sayed’s victory was palpable in Dearborn, a city near Detroit with a sizable Arab American population. Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said residents showed up at the ballot box in huge numbers. “What a beautifully American story,” Hammoud said. “One of our brightest and best earned the support of the majority of Michiganders who participated in yesterday’s election. And regardless of the direction in which he prays, they’re sending him to the U.S. Senate.”

Hammoud, who has known El-Sayed for more than a decade, said that although the win was important for many Arab Americans, people voted for him because of his platform, not his identity. He cited Dearborn support for independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, noting that Sanders is Jewish, caucuses with Democrats and ran on a progressive platform. In El-Sayed, Hammoud said, residents of Dearborn “finally saw themselves and a candidate who appealed to them, but it had to do with far more than just his ethnicity or his religion.” “It was honestly because of the policies and building a coalition with this community in an honest way,” he added.

Zaynah Jadallah, 26, who canvassed for El-Sayed in Dearborn, said most residents told her they already planned to vote for him before inviting her in for water or food. She credited his name recognition to grassroots campaigning and his pride in his Egyptian heritage. “He’s always been proud of his identity. He never shied away from it or from saying his name,” Jadallah said.

Yasmin El-Sayed, who is not related to the senator-elect, brought her two daughters from New York to the Detroit watch party. She teared up after the victory speech. “Having grown up in a post-9/11 world, being Muslim, being Arab myself, never in a million years did I think we would see what we saw today,” she said.

El-Sayed depicted his election as a victory for all those “who don’t see themselves reflected in our government or who’ve been told that they don’t belong for some reason or another — not just how they pray but who they love, how they identify, the color of their skin, where they grew up.” “I didn’t run to be the first Muslim senator. I ran to be the next senator of the state of Michigan who happens to be Muslim,” he said. “But I also know that democracy is constantly about the conversation about who we are, who we want to be.”

“Michigan proved just how big we are. Rejected a hateful, spiteful campaign that had nothing to say about the issues and only wanted to point to my name and my face,” El-Sayed said. “I want all of those folks out there who have been told that America’s not big enough for them to reflect on that. America really is big enough for all of us.”

Mohamed Gula, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, said he was elated by El-Sayed’s triumph after a year of “extremely Islamophobic and disgusting rhetoric being used as a campaign strategy.” Gula said the result showed that hate would not be used as a campaign issue. “I saw this as not just Muslims standing against Islamophobia as never before,” Gula said. “I saw Americans saying hate will not be used as a campaign issue … we are not going to accept hate.” “For Abdul to come out last night and use his full name meant the world to someone who grew up in post-9/11 America, where the Muslim American community was seen through a national security lens,” Gula said. “Our children, years from now, will be able to run for office,” he said, “to be seen as who they are.”

Sharia, the religious code that provides Muslims with guidance on how to lead righteous lives, was among the most frequent targets of the anti-Muslim rhetoric. At the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, some of the loudest cheers came after GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared, “Sharia law has no place in America.” Muslim American civic leaders and scholars in Texas and other states responded forcefully to anti-Sharia rhetoric that dates back more than 15 years. They defended Sharia as practiced in the United States as positive guidance that shares elements with the codes of other faiths, such as the Ten Commandments and the collective body of Jewish law derived from the Torah. They rebutted Republican claims that Sharia is a coercive code that threatens the Constitution and the judicial system.

Gula noted that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton were among the leaders of the anti-Sharia campaign. Abbott lost his bid for reelection in Tuesday’s voting, and Paxton was defeated by Democrat James Talarico in the race for a U.S. Senate seat.

Asma Uddin, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law, has argued that many American politicians depict ordinary Muslim religious practices — prayer, choice of apparel, family counseling and mosque attendance — as evidence of political danger. “What I find especially exciting is that El-Sayed won in a political climate where being visibly Muslim can still be a liability,” she said. His victory “gives us real reason for optimism. It suggests that anti-Muslim attacks don’t necessarily carry the political weight that those deploying them assume they do.”