GOP attacks on El-Sayed’s Muslim faith come to a head in heated town hall exchange

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — The Muslim Brotherhood has become a flashpoint in Michigan’s Senate race, with Republicans trying to cast Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed as sympathetic to interests connected to Islamic terror and El-Sayed arguing that he is being unfairly accused of the same “dual loyalties” that former Presidents John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama once were.

El-Sayed this weekend denounced the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement founded in Egypt in 1928 — first in a heated exchange with a voter, and later when speaking with reporters — after Republicans have sought to highlight his family’s ties to the group and his past comments about it.

“I do want to talk about why they want to make this their closing argument,” El-Sayed told reporters after a rally Sunday in Flint. “They want to speak to a certain implicit dual loyalty. This has a long history in our politics, that notion that people might pray a little bit differently, have a dual loyalty. It was the same thing they did to JFK when he ran for president, the notion that because he was Catholic that he somehow had dual loyalties. They did the same thing to President Obama simply because his father was of Muslim origin, even though his father is an avowed Christian.”

He added: “This is nothing new. This is what they do when they have no message about the real issues in people’s lives.”

GOP attacks on El-Sayed

Republicans have increasingly drawn attention to El-Sayed’s Muslim faith in the closing weeks of one of the most important Senate races on the 2026 midterm election map.

President Donald Trump, at a campaign rally Friday night, referred to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” and falsely declared that the Democratic former public health official is a “jihadist.” Those comments have become staples of recent Trump rallies and social media comments.

El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, said Sunday on CNN that he has “never called him a terrorist” and said he does not “speak for the president.”

But Rogers accused El-Sayed of aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist movement with global offshoots that once wielded significant political power in Egypt, where it was founded. The movement officially rejects the use of violent means to secure its goals. However, offshoots of the group have been linked to attacks in the past.

Trump signed an executive order in November that initiated a process by which certain chapters or other subdivisions of the Muslim Brotherhood could be considered for designation as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

“You know, he wants to play the victim. This is not about that. This is about the way you think, not the way you pray,” Rogers told CNN’s Dana Bash. “This is about your ideology and how dangerous it is.”

El-Sayed’s town hall exchange

The GOP efforts to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic extremism, burst into the open this weekend at a town hall in Caro.

An attendee repeatedly pressed El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood, saying he had yet to hear the candidate reject the organization.

“Abdul, will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” the man shouted from the crowd.

El-Sayed, after disavowing the movement, blasted the man for implicitly assuming his “dual loyalty.”

“You assume … that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution,” El-Sayed said. He later added, “For me, that Constitution is the guiding light.”

The audience member walked out after the exchange as the crowd cheered for El-Sayed.

Family history scrutinized

The GOP attacks come after old tweets from El-Sayed’s half-sister resurfaced online, including a post from 2012 in which she described having “an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”

El-Sayed has said he does not know what his mother was doing in Egypt during the 1970s, explaining he was 3 when his parents divorced and didn’t see his mother for years. He was primarily raised in Michigan by his father and stepmother.

El-Sayed in 2012 also signed an open letter supporting then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who had been elected earlier that year with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood after the overthrow of the country’s authoritarian government.

A year earlier, he penned a Huffington Post op-ed calling on the United States to support young Arab protesters in Egypt, and downplaying concerns that supporting democracy there would lead to Muslim Brotherhood control of the nation.

During a recent debate, Rogers pointed out that El-Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a non-profit that the Treasury Department in 2004 designated as an organization supporting terrorism.

“Are you going after my mom?” said El-Sayed.

“I was going after that organization that was indicted for funneling money to Al Qaeda,” Rogers said. “Look, that’s your mom. My mom worked at a small chamber of commerce. I’ll put my mom up any day for that.”

El-Sayed responded he is a “dad and a doctor” who wants to “get money out of politics, put money in your pocket and pass Medicare for All.” He said Rogers “wants this to be about anything but his own record.”

El-Sayed in recent days also addressed his sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, being placed on the federal Terrorism Screening Database — a situation she challenged as part of a 2016 class action lawsuit. It’s not clear why Jukaku, who was once president of UCLA’s Muslim Student Association and is now a home-school teacher and writer in California, was added to the list.

“She did nothing wrong and was captured on that and then sued and got off,” El-Sayed told Fox News when asked about his wife’s sister being placed on the terrorist watchlist, which was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. “You’ve got this system where folks are guilty until proven innocent because they’ve got different kinds of names, because of the infrastructure that people like Mike Rogers set up.”

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CNN’s Jeff Zeleny and Aleena Fayaz contributed to this report.