- GOP US Senate candidate Mike Rogers and allies have claimed Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood
- There is no evidence that El-Sayed has explicit ties to the group, although he has occasionally weighed in on Egyptian affairs
- Critics argue the attacks are harmful to US Muslims. Rogers says he ‘vehemently condemns hate against all religious groups’
Shortly after Michigan Democrats selected Abdul El-Sayed as the party’s US Senate nominee, Republican Mike Rogers invoked the Muslim Brotherhood to claim his general election opponent is “an extremist.”
El-Sayed “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rogers claimed in an Aug. 5 statement.
There is no evidence that El-Sayed has ties to the organization or pledged support, although he has occasionally weighed in on Egyptian affairs and politicians associated with the group, according to a Bridge Michigan review.
But in the weeks since his primary win, Republicans have continued to try to link El-Sayed directly to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has historically advocated for political systems entwined with Islamic law. The US this year designated some chapters as terrorist organizations for supporting Hamas.
It’s among a series of similar attacks targeting El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim of Egyptian descent who was born and raised in Michigan.
Some critics have emphasized El-Sayed’s full Arabic name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. President Donald Trump last month claimed “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.”
El-Sayed’s religion has also been a frequent topic of discussion on social media, according to analyses by the Washington Post and the Center for the Study of Organized Hate.
Islamic organizations have called the attacks racist, Islamaphobic, and harmful to the Muslim residents of Michigan, which is home to one of the largest Arab American populations in the US.
“You don’t see any other group that is portrayed as having collective guilt or collective criminality like the Muslim community has,” said Amy V. Doukoure, lead staff attorney for the Michigan chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI), a civil rights and advocacy organization for US Muslims.
“Just by tying him, even if it’s a false tie, to bad actors or whatnot, they are able to stigmatize him, because that is how they’ve been stigmatizing our community for decades.”
In a statement, Rogers communications director Alyssa Brouillet said Rogers “vehemently condemns hate against all religious groups, including the Muslim community.”
But she argued El-Sayed has repeatedly made comments that leave cause for concern, including his statement about an attack on a Jewish synagogue in Bloomfield Hills he recently apologized for.
Asked about the attacks against him, El-Sayed said Rogers and other opponents, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance, “want America to be small like them” and said his campaign offers an opportunity “to demand an America that’s big enough for all of us.”
“They’re going to keep trying to divide us because they got no answers around the problems that unite us,” El-Sayed said. “We’ve got answers around the problems that unite us, and we’re going to focus there.”
He later told MSNOW that “if there’s any jihad, it’s going to be the one against medical debt.”
The claims
Muslim Brotherhood claims continue to appear elsewhere on Rogers’ website, in campaign materials alleging El-Sayed’s “defense of terrorism” and in an ad campaign by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“In 2011, (El-Sayed) urged the United States to back Egypt’s revolutionary movement while dismissing concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood taking power,” reads a StopAbdul.com website created by Rogers’ campaign.
The Republican National Committee and other conservative groups have alleged El-Sayed has “disturbing associations with Islamic extremism” and have criticized his family members’ ties to Islamic organizations.
In a recent post on the social media website X, Rogers highlighted an article from the conservative Washington Free Beacon alleging El-Sayed’s father-in-law is “among the top leaders” of an Islamic organization that serves as a “public facing group for the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Michigan Republican Party Chairman Jim Runestad has downplayed those attacks, telling reporters the Rogers campaign asked the party not to refer to El-Sayed by his full name and telling Bridge that a wide gulf in policy positions between the candidates makes religion a moot point.
“Him being Muslim or being Arab or any of that — that’s irrelevant to me, and I think it is to Mike,” Runestad said. “There are so many issues that are important to the people of the state of Michigan. That’s going to be the focus.”
The context and the facts
Though the scope and the scale has magnified in the 2026 cycle, it’s not the first time El-Sayed has faced this type of scrutiny.
When El-Sayed ran for governor in 2018, then-GOP candidate Patrick Colbeck faced widespread bipartisan condemnation for suggesting El-Sayed had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and that Muslim politicians were trying to “push Islam into our churches,” among other claims.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded nearly a century ago in Egypt and has historically sought a greater role for Islamic principles in government.
Rogers and allies who have resurrected the Muslim Brotherhood claims this election cycle have pointed to a 2011 opinion column that El-Sayed wrote for HuffPost about a political revolution in Egypt.
In the piece, El-Sayed, then an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, urged the Obama administration to support protesters and downplayed concerns that “supporting democracy in Egypt might throw it to the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Even if that happened, the “ensuing state would look nothing like Iran,” he argued.
But El-Sayed did not pledge support for the Muslim Brotherhood, as detractors claim. Nor did he do so in a 2012 group letter defending then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood and had been elected earlier that year.
Similar claims that El-Sayed’s father-in-law is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood are based on past roles with the Islamic Society of North America and CAIR, two of the largest organizations representing Muslims in the United States.
Both were named “unindicted co-conspirators” by federal prosecutors in the USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development case. As a result of the case, five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation were ultimately convicted of sending millions of dollars to Hamas.
Neither ISNA nor CAIR were ever indicted in the case, and a 2010 Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision found the rights of another group implicated in the case, the North American Islamic Trust, were violated by naming the group as an unindicted co-conspirator without giving its members a chance to defend themselves against the claim.
CAIR has called efforts to tie the organization to the Muslim Brotherhood “pure McCarthyism” and on its website notes its inclusion in the Holy Land Foundation case was “an unproven allegation with no weight and no consequence” and “the legal equivalent of gossip.”
In January, the US designated the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization, citing its support for Hamas. That designation was not in place in 2011 or 2012, when El-Sayed urged support for Egypt’s political revolution.
The broader implications
The negative impacts of faith-based attacks against El-Sayed extend well beyond the candidates themselves, said Doukoure of CAIR-MI, citing a recent anti-Islam protests in Dearborn led by far-right activist Jake Lang as one example of how stereotypes can harm the Muslim community.
Islamic groups and religious leaders have seen a significant uptick in harassment and threats of violence since El-Sayed’s nomination, Doukoure told Bridge. After the Lang protest, CAIR-MI alone reported three death threats in three consecutive days to local law enforcement, she said.
“What would help de-escalate this is for mainstream politicians to call it what it is, which is blatant un-American racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia,” Doukoure said.
Asked to back up his Muslim Brotherhood claims, Rogers’ campaign condemned hate against any religious group and instead criticized El-Sayed for his comments in the wake of an attack on a Jewish synagogue and his association with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, an Israel critic who has made several controversial comments of his own.
In a Sept. 1 Michigan State University survey of likely general election voters, 37% of respondents said they are less likely to support a candidate who is Muslim.
That result is “consistent with a lot of research that shows that this is one identity that voters are still willing to explicitly take into consideration,” said Matt Grossmann, the director of MSU’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research.
The contentious Democratic primary and the prevalence of foreign policy issues in the race may have further emboldened El-Sayed’s critics to capitalize on those voter sentiments this cycle, he continued.
“Once people see that an attack is making some difference, then they up the attack sometimes and see how far they can go,” Grossmann said. “It might just have more potential purchase now than it has in the past.”
The bottom line
As in 2018, claims that El-Sayed is personally connected to the Muslim Brotherhood aren’t backed up by the available evidence.
He has weighed in on Egyptian politics and in 2011 urged US support for a political revolution there, but he has never pledged support to the organization itself.
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