‘Shawarma law’: Abdul El-Sayed never shied away from Islamophobic provocations

The successful Democratic contender for a Michigan Senate seat parried the many insinuations lobbed by Republicans

Abdul El-Sayed said he did not expect to be “a main character of this midterms”, but the first Muslim elected to the US Senate in history will take his seat in January after a vitriolic campaign that cast him as the central villain of the president and his party.

By October he told the Associated Press he was “not shying away” from those rightwing fixations. “What are you implying?” El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, replied when a town hall attender asked if he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, in a now-viral exchange.

On Tuesday, Michigan voters helped the pugnacious progressive cap off a transcendental blue wave nationwide, defeating his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, by about seven points, 52.5% to 45.5%.

“My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed,” he said at the beginning of his victory speech in downtown Detroit on Tuesday night, as the crowd erupted in cheers. He then thanked the voters of Michigan, for taking a “chance on the unlikeliest of candidates”.

He won with majorities among Black voters and Jewish early voters, and with a larger share of the vote than Kamala Harris or senator Elissa Slotkin in 2024 in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, despite Republican attacks on his faith and objections from some Jewish leaders to his stance on Israel. Now he takes that mandate to Washington as one of the most visible Democrats to have emerged from this election cycle.

“He is a charismatic, social media-savvy politician, so he will come to DC with a lot more initial interest than most freshman politicians,” said Matt Grossmann, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. “He won’t be able to say he had some sort of unique vision that worked above all others, but he will be able to say people said he couldn’t win in a swing state, and he did. I think that will matter.”

The test, according to Shekar Narasimhan, founder and chair of the AAPI Victory Fund, a Super Pac focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander political power, is less about identity than delivery.

“I think the onus on Abdul is less about being the first Muslim senator. Obviously, there is a weight for that, but it’s more about how he represents Michigan given the $165m that was thrown at him in both the primary and the general election,” Narasimhan said. “I think he does have to carry an agenda, and I think the caucus is going to give him some leadership position to be able to carry it out.”

For many Arab and Muslim Americans, the result was vindication. Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, called voters’ rejection of the attacks on El-Sayed “tremendous” for “every little boy named Abdul, every little girl named Zainab”, arguing that the question at stake was whether the country supports an inclusive democracy.

Donald Trump and other Republicans repeatedly used Islamophobia to target his faith. At a rally in Port Huron on 25 October, the president baselessly called El-Sayed a jihadist and a Muslim Brotherhood member, said he was “on the side of the terrorists”, and claimed he would “have to go through a metal detector” before entering the Senate. John Kennedy, the senator from Louisiana, said El-Sayed “sleeps in a Bin Laden jersey”, while Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, called him a “jihadist leprechaun”, and JD Vance called him “evil”.

Campaign mailers paid for by the Senate Leadership Fund, a prominent Republican Super Pac, and seen by the Guardian would link El-Sayed with Sharia law, with text that said his specific views “dictates how women dress”, “requires women have a guardian” and “prohibits women from divorcing”.

El-Sayed dismissed those attacks, quipping that he supported “shawarma law”.

On election night, Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, said voters chose El-Sayed “regardless of the direction in which he prays”. He called it “a beautifully American story”.

Some Jewish leaders, such as the Detroit community director for the American Jewish Committee, Amy Sapeika, said El-Sayed’s rhetoric, and even his victory speech, made many in the community “feel excluded as Jews and as people who support Israel”.

While exit polls and preliminary analyses show that a majority of Michigan Jews voted for El-Sayed, his margins in heavily Jewish communities trailed other Democrats in the state, such as the governor-elect, Jocelyn Benson. In West Bloomfield, where a synagogue attack took place in March, Rogers’s share of the vote rose to 46% from 42% two years ago, when he ran against Slotkin for the Senate.

El-Sayed would reach the same parity with Black voters as Slotkin’s win in 2024, where he won about 86% compared to her 85%, according to an exit poll by NBC.

On Israel, El-Sayed has not changed his position since being elected. On election day morning, Trump said on Fox & Friends that roughly $4bn in annual US military aid to Israel would be “cut off at the end of the year”, citing “lunatics like an El-Sayed”. El-Sayed, who campaigned on ending the aid, welcomed the announcement and called for an end to arms sales as well.

While Congress appropriates the aid, Grossmann said Trump had “basically credited Abdul with changing his position on aid to Israel”, giving him an early win. Narasimhan called the announcement “a good starting point”. He said efforts by Bernie Sanders and other Democrats to restrict offensive weapons were “as far as he’s going to get in this environment on Israel”.

Asked on CNN on Thursday about working with the president and vice-president, El-Sayed made clear he was not softening his tone. He said he would “take every opportunity” to “differentiate between what JD Vance says and what JD Vance does”, and that he finds the pair “odious” in how they behave outside their official roles.

But he also said he would work with them. “I’ll work with anybody to serve the people of the state of Michigan,” he said. “If they’re serious about doing that, let’s get some stuff done.”