Abdul El-Sayed’s Oxford years: PhD, political awakening and sporting distinction

Michigan senator-elect’s former peers recall his time at university in Britain – and his love of coronation chicken sandwiches

In the cold, twilight days of 2008, inside the University of Michigan’s fortress-like Fleming Administration Building, one student was given a particularly adulatory send-off.

Mary Sue Coleman, president of the university at the time, convened a ceremony for the latest Rhodes scholar heading off to the University of Oxford: Abdul El-Sayed. “There is no doubt among anyone who crosses his path that he will achieve all he sets out to accomplish and more,” she declared to a room full of the university’s leaders, calling the medical PhD student the “epitome of the engaged intellect”.

She even recalled Bill Clinton’s response to a speech made by El-Sayed in 2007, with the former US president remarking: “I wish every person in the world could have heard you speak today.”

For those who ran into El-Sayed months later in autumn 2009 when he finally crossed the pond, these words of praise rang true. “He always seemed very driven,” says Elias Rothblatt, who played lacrosse alongside Michigan’s senator-elect more than 15 years ago. El-Sayed was captain of Oxford’s lacrosse team and student hacks at the time described him a “defensive master” in the sport.

Rothblatt, 36, who works in fintech, says El-Sayed was a “very fierce competitor” on the field and a “wonderful” captain. “He had a great sense of humour. He struck a really good mix of being friends with other people on the team but also setting the tone and helping lead the team and keep things, keeping serious.”

Off the field, Rothblatt says El-Sayed was equally “fun and friendly”. He says: “It was always a pleasure to run into him. He was with his wife sometimes and she was wonderful too.” El-Sayed also had a fixation on a resolutely British sandwich: the coronation chicken. Speaking to the Times, Ricardo Chasebi, owner of a now-closed cafe in Oxford’s covered market, recalled El-Sayed’s order as a grilled ciabatta filled with coronation chicken, cheddar, peppers and red onion that was topped with lettuce and tomato.

He eventually placed El-Sayed’s version on the menu, naming it “The Abdul”. The senator-to-be was so keen on Chasebi’s sandwiches that he would call ahead from the airport and say: “I’ll be in Oxford in two hours, don’t shut until I get there.” El-Sayed even handed Chasebi a copy of his doctoral thesis, where he thanked the cafe owner in the acknowledgments for “nourishing my stomach and my soul”.

Rothblatt has tried “The Abdul” sandwich. “It’s good,” he says. El-Sayed also had a penchant for Nando’s, organising meetings there with his fellow Rhodes scholar cohort.

While he eventually settled into Oxford life, things didn’t start smoothly for El-Sayed. He did not enjoy his course at first and flew back to Michigan two weeks before his first term ended. And based on a recent outburst, where he told a Sky News reporter: “You know how many votes I want to get in the UK? Zero”, you might assume he was, at best, apathetic about his time in Britain. But this is not the case. In his memoir, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, El-Sayed wrote: “My classmates in Oxford taught me more than I could learn in any classroom.” And in several articles El-Sayed wrote for the Guardian, he expressed an appreciation for Britain and, in particular, its political system.

In one piece, where he declared that UK democracy has the “upper hand” on the US, El-Sayed expressed his awe at a parliamentary hustings in Tower Hamlets, east London, before the 2010 general election where all of the candidates were of Bengali heritage, reflecting the demographics of the local area. He opined: “As an Arab-American, the likelihood of ever having the opportunity to vote for an Arab-American candidate for national office during my lifetime is minimal.”

But this week, he did have the opportunity to do so, being able to cast the ballot for himself. He was joined by more than 2.5 million others who followed suit and elected El-Sayed as the country’s first Muslim senator.

Rothblatt is “very excited” to see what El-Sayed will do in the Senate. “I think he’s going to do a fantastic job. Back then, he was a talented, ambitious person who had some really good ideas about what he wanted to do in the world. Now he’s continuing to bring those to life,” he says.