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.
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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.
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.