At a Senate campaign event in a red-leaning Michigan county this weekend, a young man asked Democrat Abdul El-Sayed if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.
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“Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” El-Sayed replied. “Why are you asking the question?”
The subsequent exchange sparked widespread attention online and became a political Rorschach test.
Thousands of people complimented what they viewed as El-Sayed’s deconstruction of an Islamophobic attack built on guilt by association. Others, including prominent Republicans rooting for his opponent, saw him dodging the question of whether he held allegiance to an Islamist political movement that has some extremist offshoots.
El-Sayed, who would be the nation’s first Muslim senator if elected, has been asked frequently about his faith and attacked for it. President Donald Trump on Friday, for example, called El-Sayed “a jihadist” during a campaign rally in Georgia.
In Caro, Michigan, on Saturday night, at one of that day’s four town-hall-style campaign stops for El-Sayed in a part of the swing state that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024, the Democrat was taking unscreened questions from the crowd when a young man who identified himself as “Tommy” launched the exchange about the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed compared the questions he receives about whether he has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood to the questions John F. Kennedy received on the presidential campaign trail about whether he would prioritize allegiance to the pope.
“His answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic president; he was running to be president and happened to be Catholic,” El-Sayed said. “I am not running to be a Muslim senator. I am running for U.S. Senate and happen to be Muslim.”
El-Sayed is locked in a tight race in a state critical to determining which party controls the Senate. He’s polling slightly ahead of Republican nominee Mike Rogers, a former congressman with ties to Trump.
Republicans have focused heavily on El-Sayed’s Muslim identity since he won the Democratic Party’s tightly contested primary Aug. 4. He is the son of Egyptian immigrants and was born and raised in Michigan by his father and stepmother.
On Saturday, El-Sayed asked the questioner, Tommy, whether he asked anyone else in his life to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood and why he wanted to ask El-Sayed to.
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“Because I have not heard you disavow them yet,” the man said.
“I haven’t heard you disavow them yet,” El-Sayed shot back. “But here’s the thing about it: You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher-order allegiance than to the Constitution.”
The man conceded he did think that, and El-Sayed started a discussion about freedom of religion, how it includes “the freedom to not pray at all” and how all Americans should swear allegiance to a Constitution that protects those rights.
El-Sayed turned the question on the man, who said he identified as a Christian who lives by a Christian doctrine, and asked whether he would disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the nation’s laws. “I do not,” the man replied.
“I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me,” El-Sayed said, right before the man left.
The El-Sayed campaign posted the exchange on social media, where it quickly spread. El-Sayed’s Instagram post had received more than 30,000 comments as of Sunday afternoon.
Jemele Hill, a sports and politics podcaster who grew up in Detroit, reposted the exchange with the commentary that El-Sayed “cooked this dude like fresh bacon,” and said she’d host a conversation with El-Sayed in Detroit on Monday.
But Republicans saw a much different exchange about the Muslim Brotherhood.
“El Sayed’s campaign posted this thinking he somehow looked good trying to dress down a voter,” Tricia McLaughlin, a former spokeswoman for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, posted on X. “Now millions are watching the candidate look like an angry, overly defensive jerk.”
Rogers argued Sunday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that El-Sayed never disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood.
“He didn’t disavow it,” Rogers said. “He goes on this word salad trying to get around the fact that he can’t do it.”
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Bash interrupted to point out El-Sayed did say he disavowed them.
