Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign is trying to keep his personal faith from becoming a general-election weapon after confirming the Michigan Democrat Senate nominee still follows Sharia in his private life.
Roxie Richner, a spokeswoman for El-Sayed, told the Washington Free Beacon that his religious practice does not mean he wants Islamic law turned into American law.
“Abdul believes in the separation of church and state,” Richner said. “While he personally lives by the rules of his faith, as many Americans of various faiths do, Abdul opposes any effort by any religious community to write their faith laws into the laws of our country.”
The question traces back to El-Sayed’s 2009 interview with the New York Times, which the Washington Free Beacon first brought back into the campaign fight.
El-Sayed was then a 24-year-old medical student who had used a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage to buy a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor.
“Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way,” El-Sayed told the Times. “Not because of fear but because of obligation.”
Sharia, or Islamic religious law, prohibits paying or earning interest.
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The old interview now lands in a Senate race where El-Sayed has already survived a costly Democratic primary and is heading toward a November matchup with Republican Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan primary, even as AIPAC spent more than $30 million backing her.
The seat is being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. El-Sayed would become the first Muslim U.S. senator if he wins.
His campaign’s church-and-state defense now has to sit beside years of older comments and footage already being used to test his general-election position.
During his failed 2018 campaign for Michigan governor, El-Sayed denied ever saying he was “Sharia-compliant” during an interview with journalist Laura Loomer, then ended the interview early.
In the documentary “How To Fix A Primary,” El-Sayed pointed toward a bookshelf and warned filmmakers not to include it.
“You’re going to want to not get these things in the shot,” El-Sayed said. “We’re trying to keep the shot secular.”
In 2022, El-Sayed went after Oklahoma’s ballot measure barring Sharia and compared the forces behind it to those behind the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa race massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing.
“The state of Oklahoma voted in a referendum to amend the constitution to ban Shariah law. What does that mean? I don’t know. And yet the voters banned it anyway,” El-Sayed said at the time.
He said those same forces remained active today. “The same exact forces that drove Native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, those forces are alive and well today,” he remarked.
El-Sayed went on to tie the issue directly to white supremacy.
“The reason I wanted to go all the way back to the 1830s is because you can’t understand a Sharia ban without understanding the Trail of Tears,” he added.
“You can’t understand the efforts to uproot Muslim Americans without understanding the Tulsa massacre. You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding white supremacy.”
The same pressure is showing up around deleted YouTube podcast videos from El-Sayed’s past.
CNN’s KFile obtained clips in which El-Sayed urged officials to consider defunding the police, suggested replacing the Second Amendment with a constitutional right to health care and questioned how Americans celebrate Independence Day.
One deleted 2024 video carried the message, “Fireworks just aren’t worth it: hear us out,” according to CNN’s KFile.
El-Sayed suggested in the clip that fireworks could trigger veterans with PTSD or endanger children and pets.
His campaign told CNN that those comments do not reflect his current beliefs.
“Abdul is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander. Cherry-picked comments from old podcasts don’t reflect his beliefs today,” the campaign said.
Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed after the AIPAC-backed primary fight, has nevertheless endorsed him.
“That’s called democracy,” Stevens said Tuesday while defending the decision.
She said Democrats who lose primaries cannot spend the rest of the campaign holding grudges.
“You don’t sign up for a Democratic Party to be salty grapes and… just continue to hold a grudge,” Stevens added.
During an appearance on “America’s Newsroom,” Stevens told co-anchor Bill Hemmer that she remains a “Zionist Democrat” even though candidates like her have struggled in some Democratic primaries.
“I believe in democracy. He won the majority of the votes, and I’m going to continue to stand by my positions,” Stevens said.
She said she is a Democrat endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, described herself as one of the party’s most effective lawmakers and insisted she still belongs.
“I’m a patriot. I love our freedoms. I love this country and, yes, I am still in the Democratic Party, even though folks like me maybe aren’t winning our primaries,” Stevens said.
Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona treated El-Sayed’s pivot toward November as standard political behavior during NewsNation’s “Jesse Weber Live.”
Stanton said Democratic candidates sometimes stress further-left differences in primaries, then adjust their pitch once they have to reach a general electorate.
“That’s a tale as old as politics,” Stanton said. “Of course, that is the case. You’re seeing it with El-Sayed in Michigan.”
Stanton pointed to Stevens’ endorsement as an example of the party unity Democrats need after a primary.
“She lost and she immediately supported El-Sayed to bring us together, to give us the best chance of winning that seat,” he said.
“That’s what needs to happen, is we need to unite after these primaries, because our common goal is to fight for the American people, bring down prices, and actually restore checks and balances to our government.”
Stanton said Democrats would not get there “if Trump is the president and Republicans remain the majority in the House of Representatives.”
