egyptian immigrant

When it came to which candidate weathered the most overtly racist attacks, in a midterm election full of the most overtly racist campaign attacks in modern memory, there was no contest.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, was called a “jihadist” by the president. Labeled a representative of “terrible evil” by the vice president. Smeared as an “extremist” by his Republican opponent. They all intentionally mispronounced his name as if it was a poison on the tongue that needed to be expelled.

But the hate offensive didn’t work. El-Sayed, 42, stepped up to the mic late Tuesday and delivered his victory speech as the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate.

“My name,” he said, pointedly using full, guttural Arabic pronunciation, “is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”

It was a clarifying moment for Muslims and for millions of others appalled by the normalization of bigotry handed down from the White House. There is an Allah, after all.

The son of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed prevailed over former Rep. Mike Rogers by seven percentage points in one of the most closely watched races of the midterms.

His victory was one among several historic wins scored by the Democrats as they elected more governors and flipped the House and Senate — including the triumphs of America’s first openly gay senator (Chris Pappas of New Hampshire) and first female Native American governor (Deb Haaland of New Mexico), as well as Texas’ first Latina governor (Gina Hinojosa).

But beyond the political implications, El-Sayed speaks for those of us who have been othered by our “foreign” heritage, the color of our skin, the food we eat, our accents or the way we pray.

He embodies what it means to face blistering attacks on your background and faith, and to come out the other side as more American in your ideals and resolve than your slur-slinging detractors.

If that sounds dramatic, so be it. It’s been a brutal decade for Muslims, Arabs or anyone associated with groups maligned, targeted or in many cases deported by the Trump administration. We needed this win to prove to ourselves, and perhaps the rest of the world, that this is not a nation dominated by narrow-minded exclusionists, despite what MAGA has wrought.

El-Sayed kept his cool on the campaign trail, sticking to Michelle Obama’s motto of “When they go low, we go high.” But he showed Tuesday how to have fun poking at the opposition with one hand while holding an olive branch in the other.

“Donald, I know you struggle with my name, so after JD swears me in in January, you can go on and call me Senator,” he said, rubbing in his victory while calling out President Trump for his brazen, Islamophobic rants.

The senator-elect also indirectly responded to JD Vance’s low blows against him and his campaign, which included the vice president calling him a “psychopath” and claiming he trafficked in “anti-white racial hatred.”

In doing so, El-Sayed addressed Vance with a widely used Arabic word meaning “my love.” Why? Because when deploying it against a detractor, it’s the equivalent of sarcastically calling them “sweetheart.”

“JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” said El-Sayed before throwing a college sports rivalry barb at the Ohio native: “Wolverines 1, Buckeyes 0.”

And as he has always done publicly, El-Sayed openly embraced his Muslim faith while addressing the American people.

He reminded us of the times during his campaign when he said “inshallah” (or “God willing”) to describe his hopes for winning the seat.

“Today, tonight, we can turn that ‘inshallah’ into an ‘alhamdulillah,’” meaning “praise be to God.”

It wasn’t long ago when such words uttered by a Muslim might strike fear in Americans who interpreted them as the calling card of terrorists just before they pulled the pin, flipped the switch or lobbed the bomb (thanks, Hollywood). Now, those words are part of a future senator’s speech to the millions of Americans he’s vowed to represent.

El-Sayed may just be making Arabic halal for the masses. And as the midterm results show, we’re ready for it.

Voters sent a message to Washington rebuking MAGA’s war on DEI, immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community. The Trump-era culture war against folks who look like El-Sayed has not quelled inflation, made housing cheaper, caused gas prices to drop or rendered health insurance affordable. But it may have helped us see each other again, as fellow citizens struggling to keep up.

“As I was campaigning, some of you would come up and ask, ‘How come you don’t hit back? How come you don’t call them racist or hateful?’” El-Sayed said during his victory speech. “They weren’t just attacking me. They were targeting and attacking you. They were targeting and attacking the very idea of America.”

It is about all of us, of course. But Muslim Americans who never thought they’d see the day are basking in El-Sayed’s win.

“We knew that the attacks on Abdul’s Muslim background were a big bull’s-eye for Rogers,” said Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. “What was heartening was to see it backfire.”

I’m not naive enough to think that the racist sentiment used by some Republicans to energize facets of their electorate is now a thing of the past. It’s always there. But you know what else is always there? People who choose progress instead of fear.

“Thank you. You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates,” El-Sayed said during his victory speech.

Mabruk, Abdul. You did it. We did it.

Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, is many things to many people.

He represents change, part of a new generation of outspoken leaders who aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.

He represents possibility: As the son of Egyptian immigrants, his trajectory is the American dream realized.

And he represents a threat to those who fear that his Muslim faith means he can’t possibly love America. El-Sayed is a handy bogeyman for Republican politicians who seek to scare their constituents into voting for them instead of the foreboding Arab name on the ballot.

But for people like me — American Muslims, or anyone with roots in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia or other Muslim-majority regions — El-Sayed embodies the exhausting experience of having to explain yourself over, and over, and over …

We know what’s truly going on when someone discovers our lineage, then apropos of nothing asks, “How do you feel about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack?” In previous eras it was, “What are your thoughts about 9/11? The Iranian hostage crisis? The PLO?”

Regardless of the decade, the underlying question was the same: How American are you, really?

For generations, the insinuation has been that your loyalty lies somewhere else and that you have a predisposed soft spot for groups such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. Beneath that Taylor Swift-loving exterior, there must be a Bin Laden fighting to get out.

It was disappointing but hardly surprising when El-Sayed was asked at a recent town hall in Caro, Mich., if he would “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The questioner, who identified himself only as Tommy, was referring to a century-old Islamist movement with branches that have been designated as terrorist organizations by various countries and U.S. administrations.

It’s worth noting that El-Sayed was born and raised in Detroit, not Egypt or Jordan. He attended the University of Michigan medical school, not a radical madrassa, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he completed a doctor of philosophy in public health (not bomb making).

El-Sayed answered the question without hesitation. “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” he said, then swiftly turned the tables and began interrogating the motives of his interrogator.

“You’re asking the question because implicitly, you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right?” El-Sayed said. “You assume that I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher order allegiance than to the Constitution, correct? Tommy, is that what you imply?”

The candidate spent four to five minutes laying bare the political motives behind what was clearly designed to be a “gotcha” moment.

His opponent in next month’s election, former Rep. Mike Rogers, has claimed without evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood funds El-Sayed’s campaign and that his family members have terrorist links. The attacks are on brand with a wider Republican strategy around sinking El-Sayed. Fearing a blue tsunami might flip the crucial swing state, Rogers and his allies have leaned heavily into Islamophobic attacks against the progressive Democrat.

It’s a campaign tactic endorsed at the highest levels. President Trump has referred to El-Sayed as a “radical jihadist” and claimed he is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, mispronounced his name, infused it with nonsensical babble and called him “Muhammad Al-Fayad.” Trump has defended his racism by stating: “I’m the president. I can call him whatever the hell I want.”

El-Sayed preferred to talk about another president while addressing Tommy’s question at the town hall. He recalled that John F. Kennedy faced similar scrutiny during his 1960 presidential campaign when asked whether his Catholic faith would make him loyal to the pope and Vatican rather than the U.S.

“His answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic president,” El-Sayed said. “He was running to be president that happened to be Catholic. I’m not running to be a Muslim senator. I’m running for the U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim.”

The standoff between El-Sayed and Tommy (who has since been outed as Thomas Teepell, the son of a Republican strategist and a former staffer to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley) has gone viral and is now being referred to as a 2026 election Rorschach test because both the right and left believe they prevailed.

It’s unclear to me how anyone might see El-Sayed’s evisceration of Teepell’s means-to-an-end question as a victory for the right. Perhaps it comes from eight years of watching Barack Obama weather insidious and overt racist attacks with the patience of a Shaolin monk. El-Sayed reacted, therefore they won?

On the left, El-Sayed’s articulate defense was widely applauded, but there were still criticisms that he may have come off as condescending. Liberal podcasters and influencers opined that El-Sayed should have just let it slide — for the 1,000th time.

Such an easy solution when it comes from those outside the sphere of suspicion.

But the reason we’re even having this conversation is because El-Sayed is challenging the norm. His rise to a formidable candidate who is willing to publicly dismantle loaded questions like Tommy’s represents progress wrought by successive generations of immigrants who’ve had to explain themselves ad nauseam.

Our parents and grandparents went out of their way to avoid those kinds of questions by taming their accents, changing their hard-to-pronounce names or eating their “ethnic” lunches outside the break room. The hope was that they’d melt into the proverbial pot with as little friction as possible.

My father, who emigrated from Iraq, did what all his Arab friends did here in L.A. — fit in. They used Brylcreem to tame their thick hair, listened to Johnny Cash and used terms like “guys and gals” as if they’d just stepped out of an Elvis movie.

As the next generation, I made it a point to openly embrace what my dad often downplayed — that we are Arab and Muslim. But given the post-9/11 climate, it came buffered with calming disclaimers: We are not a threat. Al Qaeda does not speak for Islam. And dolma is delicious, dammit.

El-Sayed’s refusal to brush off questions aligning him with terrorists may or may not cost him the election, but it’s a victory for all of us who’ve been defusing suspicion since we were kids.

The clip from the town hall ends with El-Sayed asking Thomas if he’s a Christian who has tried to live by Christian doctrine. Thomas affirmed. Then El-Sayed asked, “Do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?” Thomas responded, “I do not.”

El-Sayed replied, “I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.”