As a 24-year-old medical student, Abdul El-Sayed sat down with The New York Times in 2009 to discuss buying his first home. He had chosen a Sharia-compliant mortgage for a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor. The arrangement avoided interest, which Islamic law prohibits.
El-Sayed explained his decision. “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. Not because of fear but because of obligation,” he told the outlet.
That statement, unearthed this week, now sits beside his narrow primary win last week as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan. He would be the first Muslim elected to the chamber if he prevails in November against Republican Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed’s campaign says the commitment remains personal. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Washington Free Beacon that he “personally lives by the rules of his faith, as many Americans of various faiths do,” while opposing any effort to write religious law into the laws of the country. She added that he “believes in the separation of church and state.”
The same language of personal faith appears in more recent comments. In October 2025, he told Religion News Service that his faith “orients me to try and be a better person” and to “treat people — all people — with dignity and humanity and respect.” He has also said he wants to “protect the kind of America where everybody can pray how they choose to pray, or choose not to pray at all.”
Yet the record shows moments when the subject of Sharia itself produced sharper reactions. During his 2018 run for Michigan governor, El-Sayed denied ever saying he was “Sharia-compliant” in an interview with Laura Loomer, then ended the conversation and scolded staff for allowing it.
A documentary about that campaign, How To Fix A Primary, captured him directing filmmakers away from a bookshelf in his home.
The shelves held the Quran and reportedly a volume by Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali, a Muslim Brotherhood member who once testified that refusal to implement Sharia is apostasy and that an Egyptian professor killed for advocating church-state separation was “without doubt” an infidel. “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 October 2022, speaking to the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, El-Sayed linked a 2010 ballot measure that sought to ban Sharia law in state courts to the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa race massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
“You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding white supremacy,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you that 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, that those forces are alive and well today.”
His personal life has long reflected the same framework. A 2006 Michigan Daily profile described him as a “particularly devout” Muslim. He proposed to Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab, while both were still in college because “Islamically, there are no premarital relations of any sort. No touching, no nothing. Given that, the logical solution is to get married.”
They followed a traditional two-step Islamic marriage and lived apart, remaining chaste, for the first year. “Getting ice cream is the number one thing we do together,” he said at the time. Jukaku rarely appears at campaign events and was absent from the primary watch party. The couple has two young daughters. El-Sayed has not publicly addressed whether he expects them to follow the same rules on courtship, marriage, and modesty.
Financial disclosures show he and his wife hold between $150,000 and $425,000 in Amana Mutual Funds, which screen out companies earning more than 5 percent of revenue from interest, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, or pork.
The late cofounder and chairman of those funds, Yaqub Mirza, was identified in a 1988 FBI memo as one of several “members and leaders of the IKHWAN,” the Arabic term for the Muslim Brotherhood. Federal agents raided Mirza’s home in 2002 as part of an investigation into the Safa Group. No charges resulted, and Amana itself faced little further scrutiny.
Familial connections extend further into the network examined at a Senate hearing last week. El-Sayed’s father-in-law previously served as president of CAIR Michigan and sat on the founders committee of the Islamic Society of North America.
Both organizations appeared in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation case, the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history, in which the foundation and five leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator. A 1991 Muslim Brotherhood document recovered by the FBI described the group’s work in North America as “a grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
In Michigan, some imams have framed the Senate race in religious terms. One, speaking at an American Muslim Diversity Association mosque in Sterling Heights in July, urged congregants to vote for “a legitimate Islamic objective,” cited a fatwa from the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and named El-Sayed as the candidate who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator. He also mentioned Rep. Rashida Tlaib as a “sister” already representing the community in Congress.
El-Sayed’s own account of returning to faith after a period of distance revolves around his Egyptian grandmother and the character of the Prophet Muhammad.
The Daily Wire reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign for comment. No response was received prior to publication.
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