Muslim

Messages popped up on my WhatsApp account from New York, Gaza, Pakistan and Australia. Friends and colleagues were following Michigan’s Senate race, talking excitedly about Abdul El-Sayed. As the results from Wayne County sealed his victory on Tuesday, I felt something I had rarely felt before in American politics: not a muted relief that someone had lost but genuine joy and hope that someone had won.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, defeated Republican Mike Rogers. He will be the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. As a Muslim American from Michigan, this hit home.

Like many in Michigan’s Muslim community, I knew of Abdul long before he became a fixture in national headlines, from his 2018 gubernatorial campaign to his Friday sermons in local mosques. As Ramadan began this year, I attended one of his town halls for Muslim constituents. Before a few dozen community members and leaders, Abdul pledged to fight for all Michiganders. His sincerity and commitment to that pledge remained evident even as the pressures of the campaign intensified. I have seen him attend funerals for community members near my home and watched him go from person to person, greeting people with kindness. Even in the final days of an exhausting campaign, he responded personally to messages from the community, including mine.

We attended the same university, the University of Michigan, where he once helped lead the Muslim Students’ Association. I later served as a college student body president there. Just days before the election, Muslim alumni (including me) invited him to a football tailgate party with students, parents and graduates. His former teachers and students have spoken to me with pride about the person they knew.

Muslim Americans are often asked to celebrate any politician who occasionally says “salaam” or appears in a mosque before Election Day. Abdul was not an outsider to our community coming to court us. He belonged to it.

During the campaign, I welcomed hundreds of local Muslim community members, out-of-state political candidates canvassing for him and members of his staff into my home. People heard from those closest to him what this race could mean for Muslim Americans. The enthusiasm felt different from the familiar, dispiriting bargain of voting mainly to stop someone worse.

Two years ago, I wrote about why I would vote against genocide in the 2024 presidential election. That decision was shaped by my work with Palestinian healthcare workers, by witnessing the realities in Palestine firsthand and by outrage at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Neither I nor many of Michigan’s Muslims have forgotten. But this time, the ballot offered something other than just a protest vote: a candidate who had opposed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians from the outset while also caring about the range of issues affecting Michiganders.

His willingness to speak truth to power attracted immense hostility from Washington’s elites. President Donald Trump repeatedly mocked Abdul’s name, treating “Muhammad” – his middle name, meaning “the praised one” – as an insult. Political opponents and even some voters insinuated that his faith alone made him suspect, recycling unsubstantiated allegations tying him to groups and movements he did not belong to.

Abdul responded with dignity and directness. When critics made his name the issue, he spoke about groceries, housing, healthcare and affordability. When challenged over his opposition to genocide, he questioned the premise that wanting children to live free of bombs was somehow hateful. He did not accept the proposition that a Muslim must disown his community or Palestine to qualify for public office.

And most importantly, he fought back. Many Muslim voters I spoke to felt they had found someone willing to fight for them, to challenge the presumptions and racism of journalists, pundits and media outlets rather than accept their unjust framing.

His victory speech began with the words his opponents had tried to weaponise: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” He recalled having said “inshallah” – “God willing” – whenever he was asked about winning. Now, he said, it was time for “alhamdulillah”, or “Praise be to God.”

That moment was electric, not because Arabic phrases alone are a sign of solidarity – even former President Joe Biden said “inshallah” in a debate before proceeding to commit genocide against Palestinians and aid the bombing of mosques and burning of Qurans – but because his Muslim identity had survived a countrywide effort by special interest groups and racists to make it disqualifying. His faith, Islam, is a value system he actively chooses every day, a commitment he strives to live out in public life. His being Muslim mattered to me more than his Arab ethnicity or ancestral origins, a simple happenstance of birth.

There was money behind the attempt to stop him too. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC’s) affiliated super PAC spent roughly $30m in Michigan’s Democratic primary, an extraordinary investment to defeat someone who openly opposed US support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. In his victory speech, Abdul thanked AIPAC for the chance to beat it twice. One loss will not dissolve the lobbying group’s power. But Michigan demonstrated that AIPAC spending need not amount to a veto over who can win.

After Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, sceptics suggested that a Muslim candidate outspoken about Palestine could only win in a liberal metropolis, not a state that Trump carried in 2024. El-Sayed travelled from small towns and villages to industrial cities and suburbs, visiting churches and mosques, and he won statewide.

Michigan has long been a centre of Muslim American life, from Dearborn’s famous Arab restaurants and coffee houses to Hamtramck, the first Muslim-majority city in the US. Generations have built mosques, schools, businesses and institutions while enduring suspicion and discrimination. There is irony in Michigan electing a Muslim alumnus of the University of Michigan, which has faced legal challenges over its treatment of antigenocide protesters. Some of the voices that were treated as dangerous on campus found a home at the ballot box for the first time.

Other Muslims across the country made history too. My mentor, friend and colleague Adam Hamawy, with whom I served on a medical mission in Palestine documenting harm to people’s health, won his congressional race in New Jersey and travelled to Michigan to support Abdul. Darializa Avila Chevalier, Aber Kawas, Nabeela Syed and so many others won seats in Congress and state legislatures across the country, refusing to accept that their silence on human rights abuses is the price of participation.

Yet our celebration does not mean we have suspended all judgement. Some Muslims I spoke with vehemently opposed Abdul’s decision to campaign alongside former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama. Their administrations’ policies, from facilitating the genocide in Gaza to conducting drone strikes against civilians in multiple Muslim-majority countries, remain at the forefront of people’s minds. I understood their anger and shared their apprehensions about normalising the killers of children. Yet many of us still voted for Abdul because we believed in his sincerity and because he had repeatedly made clear that he did not agree with every policy of those backing his campaign. I am under no illusion that one senator alone will end the systems and structures of exploitation that fund war machines abroad and fail their own communities at home. Muslim representation risks becoming hollow if mistaken for the only tool for liberation.

And that is precisely why the substance of his campaign matters. Abdul connected the fight against endless war to the fight for healthcare, clean water and a liveable wage. He spoke of a mother trying to keep her children on lifesaving medication and a worker fighting for a union. He insisted that the money spent destroying someone else’s children has a cost for children in the US too. His politics asked whether Americans could both recognise their own self-interest and show humanity towards others.

His election does not make US government policies any more just overnight. It does not bring back a single Palestinian child. It does not absolve the Democrats, Washington or any of us of complicity. And it certainly does not entitle Abdul to six years in the Senate without scrutiny.

But it destroys one convenient lie: that Muslim Americans must choose between being unapologetically Muslim and belonging fully to American public life.

For years, we were told to lower our voices, soften our names and reconsider what we advocate for if we wanted to succeed. On Tuesday, Michigan delivered its verdict. The man they tried to make unelectable will now sit in the US Senate. Alhamdulillah, he does not need to become less Muslim to serve his state – and the rest of us do not need to police who we are to demand a better future for ourselves and the generations to come.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

DEARBORN, Mich. — Campaigning relentlessly across Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed didn’t highlight the possibility that he could become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. But with victory in hand, he savored his triumph over the vitriol aimed at him and his fellow Muslim Americans.

“They tried to demonize people because of how they pray,” he told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “And Michigan — the whole Michigan — clapped back. People don’t want that. They’re sick of it.”

He showed his pride in his victory speech, declaring: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.”

Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath yanked anti-Muslim sentiment into the forefront of American life, those emotions are shared by many Muslim Americans in Michigan and across the country.

They saw a surge of anti-Muslim rhetoric after Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor a year ago, and they saw the attacks intensify as El-Sayed became the new prime target. President Trump called him a “jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists.” Dozens of Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress formed a Sharia-Free America Caucus, depicting Islam’s religious code as a threat to the U.S. Constitution.

But now, after El-Sayed’s defeat of GOP rival Mike Rogers was confirmed early Wednesday, there is a pervasive sense that a broader victory is at hand.

The outcome “represents a historic turning point for American Muslim political engagement and a historic defeat for the politics of hate,” said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Anti-Muslim extremists, Israel lobby groups and even the president of the United States used every smear in the book to paint Dr. El-Sayed as a Muslim bogeyman,” he said. “None of it was true, and none of it worked. Anti-Muslim hate was on the ballot, and it failed.”

In Dearborn, talk of ‘a beautifully American story’

Excitement over El-Sayed’s victory was palpable in Dearborn, a city near Detroit with a sizable Arab American population. The mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said residents showed up at the ballot box in huge numbers.

“What a beautifully American story,” Hammoud said. “One of our brightest and best earned the support of the majority of Michiganders who participated in yesterday’s election. And regardless of the direction in which he prays, they’re sending him to the U.S. Senate.”

Hammoud, who has known El-Sayed for more than a decade, said although his win was important for many Arab Americans, people voted for him because of his platform, not his identity. He cited support in Dearborn for independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Sanders, who is Jewish and caucuses with Democrats, ran on a progressive platform.

In El-Sayed, residents of Dearborn “finally saw themselves and a candidate who appealed to them, but it had to do with far more than just his ethnicity or his religion,” Hammoud said. “It was honestly because of the policies and building a coalition with this community in an honest way.”

When Zaynah Jadallah, 26, canvassed for El-Sayed in Dearborn, she said most people told her they already planned on voting for him before inviting her in for water or food. She credited the name recognition to El-Sayed’s grassroots campaigning and his pride in his Egyptian heritage.

“He’s always been proud of his identity. He never shied away from it or from saying his name,” Jadallah said.

Yasmin El-Sayed, no relation to the senator-elect, took her two daughters to the Detroit watch party from New York. She teared up after the victory speech.

“Having grown up in a post-9/11 world, being Muslim, being Arab myself, never in a million years did I think we would see what we saw today,” she said.

In a time of suspicion of government, a message of representation

El-Sayed depicted his election as a victory for all those “who don’t see themselves reflected in our government or who’ve been told that they don’t belong for some reason or another — not just how they pray but who they love, how they identify, the color of their skin, where they grew up.″

“I didn’t run to be the first Muslim senator. I ran to be the next senator of the state of Michigan who happens to be Muslim,” he said. ″But I also know that democracy is constantly about the conversation about who we are, who we want to be.”

“Michigan proved just how big we are. Rejected a hateful, spiteful campaign that had nothing to say about the issues and only wanted to point to my name and my face,” he added. ″I want all of those folks out there who have been told that America’s not big enough for them to reflect on that. America really is big enough for all of us.”

Mohamed Gula, CEO of the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, said he was elated by El-Sayed’s triumph after a year of “extremely Islamophobic and disgusting rhetoric being used as a campaign strategy.”

“For Abdul to come out last night and use his full name meant the world to someone who grew up in post-9/11 America, where the Muslim American community was seen through a national security lens,” Gula said.

“Our children, years from now, will be able to run for office,” he said, “to be seen as who they are.”

A debate over the place of sharia law — and its very definition

Among the most frequent targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric was sharia, the religious code that provides Muslims with guidance on how to lead righteous lives. At the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, some of the loudest cheers came after GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas declared: “Sharia law has no place in America.”

Muslim American civic leaders and scholars — in Texas and other states — responded forcefully to the anti-sharia rhetoric that dates back more than 15 years.

They passionately defended sharia — the way it’s practiced in the United States — as positive guidance that shares elements with the codes of other faiths, such as the Ten Commandments and the collective body of Jewish law derived from the Torah. They rebutted the claims of GOP critics that sharia is a coercive code that threatens the Constitution and the judicial system.

Gula noted that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton were among the leaders of the anti-sharia campaign. Abbott lost his bid for reelection in Tuesday’s voting, and Paxton was trounced by Democrat James Talarico in the race for a U.S. Senate seat.

“I saw this as not just Muslims standing against Islamophobia as never before,” Gula said. “I saw Americans saying hate will not be used as a campaign issue … we are not going to accept hate.”

Asma Uddin, a professor at Michigan State University’s College of Law, has argued that many American politicians are depicting ordinary Muslim religious practices — such as prayer, choice of apparel, family counseling and mosque attendance — as evidence of political danger.

“What I find especially exciting is that El-Sayed won in a political climate where being visibly Muslim can still be a liability,” she said. His victory “gives us real reason for optimism. It suggests that anti-Muslim attacks don’t necessarily carry the political weight that those deploying them assume they do.”

GaNun, Cappelletti and Crary write for the Associated Press. Cappelletti reported from Washington and Crary from New York.

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.