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Few U.S. Senate races have captured the public’s attention like the battle in Michigan between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. It pits a 63-year-old former FBI agent and former congressman who has strong backing from President Trump against a charismatic doctor and political newcomer who, if elected, would become the first Muslim U.S. senator in American history.
Trump and Rogers have made El-Sayed’s identity the focus of their stump speeches. The president has called him “a jihadist” and suggested El-Sayed would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate” — derisive rhetoric denounced by critics as Islamophobic. At a recent rally in Grand Rapids, El-Sayed shot back at the president: “I don’t even care that he remembers my whole name because he can just go on and call me ‘senator’ after November.”
Recent polls show El-Sayed with a slight edge on Rogers; a new poll out Wednesday from CBS Detroit and other Michigan TV stations shows him ahead by 7 percentage points.
As Election Day nears, reports about El-Sayed’s faith and background have ricocheted around the internet. Several outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have discussed questions surrounding El-Sayed and his family’s possible “ties” to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Democratic candidate emphatically told Fox News: “I have never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, I never will be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
His campaign told CBS News they consider the topic a “bad faith attack” on his religion and family, meant to distract voters. He is “a dad and a doctor. He has spent his entire career working to keep Michiganders healthy and safe,” a spokeswoman said. The campaign did not respond to detailed questions.
“I’m Abdul El-Sayed, man of faith,” he said in one campaign ad. “That’s a good thing.”
An examination of El-Sayed’s past writings and new documents obtained by CBS News provides a window into his pre-campaign worldview, and sheds light on the controversy. Here’s what we know:
The candidate’s mother
El-Sayed was born and raised in southeast Michigan. His Egyptian immigrant parents separated when he was a toddler. Following the divorce, El-Sayed’s mother, Fatten Elkomy, moved away to Missouri and worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) as a nurse. The FBI raided her offices in Columbia, Missouri, on Oct. 13, 2004, searching for documents and financial records linking the group to overseas terrorist organizations. She described being interviewed by the FBI to her local newspaper.
The IARA, which raised $20 million and did humanitarian work with children in Africa and Asia, was shut down by the Treasury Department and Justice Department that same year, for violating sanctions and providing aid to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. An expert witness in the case told The New York Times last week that the nonprofit was so small, with only 14 employees, that workers likely knew what was going on at the charity. Among the nearly 1,000 exhibits produced at the trial, 13 were letters Elkomy sent, documenting financial transactions between 1999 and 2001, the newspaper reported.
Elkomy was not accused of any wrongdoing.
El-Sayed’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, is a University of Chicago professor who posted on social media years ago that their mother had been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The social media posts were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. In the 14-year-old posts, she wrote in part: “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s when she was in college.”
“My family has long been MB [Muslim Brotherhood], but I have always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively,” she posted on June 24, 2012.
El-Sayed told NBC News that he wasn’t raised by his mother and that her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood were hearsay. “Are you serious?” El-Sayed said when pressed. “I have no ties. We have no ties.”
El-Sayed described his mother as “smart, warm and charismatic” in his 2020 book “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of our Political Epidemic.” His campaign said he is estranged from his mother. But there appears to have been some contact between them. The New York Post reported that his mother attended El-Sayed’s medical school graduation in 2014. And in a 2021 column for his Substack, obtained by CBS News, he wrote he was “off to Columbia, MO to visit my mother for the [Thanksgiving] holiday.”
The candidate’s father
Mohamed El-Sayed, 74, an automotive engineer and former professor at Alexandria University, left Alexandria, Egypt, in his 20s when the government of Anwar Sadat was cracking down on militant students and professors who rebelled after the Egyptian leader made peace with Israel in the late 1970s. Abdul El-Sayed’s book says his father’s “political agitation against Egypt’s increasingly brutal military dictatorship coupled with his proximity to young minds, made him a threat to the regime. He had to leave. There were few options.”
El-Sayed’s father fled to America where he pursued a PhD in mechanical engineering at Wayne State University in Detroit. The politician’s book said his father was drawn to Detroit because “his name, the color of his skin and how he prayed shouldn’t matter. … America was also the home of democracy, that thing he had so wanted for Egypt.”
The candidate’s father-in-law
Abdul El-Sayed met his wife at the University of Michigan, where both were prominent members of the Muslim Students’ Association. Her father, Tayeb Jukaku, has held leading positions with Muslim community groups. Jukaku is a kidney doctor and a past president and current board member of CAIR Michigan, according to federal tax filings of the group. Jukaku also served on the founders’ committee of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), according to their website.
Both organizations have been the subject of controversy. Supporters of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, say it is a well-established civil rights organization focused on empowering American Muslims through legal advocacy, education and civic engagement. “Our consistent moral stance is the reason that extremist voices on all sides target our civil rights group with conspiracy theories, bigotry and even threats of violence,” a CAIR spokesman said in a statement to CBS News.
Both groups were named as unindicted coconspirators in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation federal terrorism trial which found that U.S. nonprofits had funneled more than $12 million to Hamas. Neither ISNA nor CAIR was charged with any crime. Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent and the lead investigator in the Holy Land Foundation case, told CBS News that “the Muslim Brotherhood operated covertly through nonprofits” that it set up in the U.S. in the 1960s.
“The funding that flowed through the Holy Land Foundation was designed to support Hamas, primarily its social infrastructure that it used to radicalize the population to believe violence was the only solution,” she told CBS News. “They claimed to provide all sorts of aid to the needy and they did, but as with all things Hamas, nothing is provided without a price.”
The Trump administration designated several overseas chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations in January of this year, including those in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
Jukaku has donated more than $300,000 in support of his son-in-law’s Senate bid, according to public records.
Muslim Students’ Association
While a student at University of Michigan between 2003 and 2007, El-Sayed served as a board member and later “Brothers’ Outreach Chair” for the Muslim Students’ Association. The group was originally founded by Muslim students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963. The group spread to campuses across the country, and by the early 2000s, the largest chapter was at the University of Michigan.
The student association defined its mission around student support, religious accommodation, interfaith dialogue, and leadership development. Lorenzo Vidino, the director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said the group encompasses activists from various backgrounds. He says members and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood played a crucial role in its founding in the 1960s. “While MSA was not a ‘pure’ Brotherhood organization, links to it were strong,” he said.
MSA did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The petition
After the Arab Spring, El-Sayed was one of 46 Egyptian-Americans who signed on to a petition to Egypt’s new democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who was a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. The letter called on Morsi to crack down on allies of the country’s prior authoritarian leader.
It read in part: “We, the leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and call on him to purge the media and the police as soon as possible…”
Some signatories have been contributors to El-Sayed’s campaigns, including Amr Abbas, a cardiologist and member of Michigan’s Egyptian-American community, who donated $5,000 to El-Sayed’s gubernatorial primary bid in 2018.
Rogers voted in the Senate to maintain $250 million in annual aid to Egypt after Morsi came to power in June 2012.
The Substack
El-Sayed maintained a Substack column from February 2021 to at least December 2022, shared in emails with 55,000 subscribers. The columns range widely in topic and tone. CBS News viewed 233 posts. Regarding the Middle East, he wrote: “When President Biden claims ‘unwavering’ support for Israel, he is indeed, offering unwavering support to this status quo, which rests on the dehumanization of the Palestinian people who get neither rights or land.”
“Claiming to support a two-state solution while supporting a regime that is actively destroying it isn’t supporting a two-state solution,” El-Sayed wrote in a column following the outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza in 2021. “It’s perpetuating a two-tiered society — freedom and democracy for Israelis, occupation and apartheid for Palestinians.”
In an earlier column, El-Sayed criticized the “unquestioning support for Israel” in the U.S.
“We’re told that it’s because Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” he wrote. “Yet, like Saudi Arabia, Israel’s government is under the control of a small cadre of extremists — and the country has perpetrated shocking violations of human rights and international law against the Palestinians, whose land it has occupied for the better part of a century.”
He added: “Perhaps there are so few democracies in the region because our country has so consistently backed dictators in the region.”
In a column titled “Gaza,” posted on May 20, 2021, El-Sayed was also critical of Hamas, writing: “Hamas is wrong. And its violent co-option of non-violent protest is part of the problem.”
The endorsements
El-Sayed’s Senate candidacy has drawn a wide range of endorsements, including from unions and grassroots groups, among them the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters and the Sierra Club.
The Democratic candidate also has received the endorsement of CAIR Action. Its super PAC, the Unity & Justice Fund, donated $115,000 to a committee supporting El-Sayed’s campaign. And El-Sayed has public backing from Americans for Justice in Palestine, the political giving apparatus of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
Joyce and Stanley Boim, whose 17-year-old son was killed in a 1996 Hamas terrorist attack, sued AMP in Chicago federal court alleging that the organization helped fund the terror that led to their son’s death. The Boims had earlier won a jury verdict against the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), an advocacy group started by Muslim students in 1981. They were awarded $156 million, but IAP shut down before those damages could be paid. The Boims allege AMP is the “alter-ego” of IAP. AMP calls the claim “guilt by association” and is fighting the suit.
El-Sayed’s campaign didn’t respond to questions about the groups’ support.
