On the long march to electoral history, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed dodged many pitfalls, including that most fatal one: accommodating people who disagree with your existence. That pit is filled with the Democratic campaigns of yesteryear, those who heard racist attacks about welfare queens or creeping sharia and thought, “Why don’t we meet in the middle?”
On the 2016 DNC stage, former President Bill Clinton, the man who once heaped praise on valedictorian El-Sayed while sharing a commencement stage at the University of Michigan, said, “if you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you." By saying this, Clinton did not reject that odious asterisk on Muslim American citizenship; he blessed it on the largest stage in politics.
Last night in Detroit, I watched El-Sayed take the mic with the fur-coat bravado of someone who had literally bet this moment would come and was ready to collect. “I’ll smoke him by 7. Bet on it,” El-Sayed said of his eventual opponent back in May. El-Sayed indeed won — by a touchdown— and like a brown and Muslim Joe Namath, proceeded to talk his shit.
“You might have noticed,” El-Sayed told an elated crowd, “I always say Inshallah or God willing, whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned. But today, tonight, we can turn that Inshallah into an Alhamdulillah.” It was the Alhamdulillah heard ‘round the world, from Laura Loomer’s X account to dismissive, pro-government TV stations in El-Sayed’s native Egypt.
But as bright as the lights were in Detroit, the moment was nonetheless backlit by the neon bigotry of El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers and allied Republicans. Over four months, they carefully executed a strategy of racial arson in the communities around Detroit, in an attempt to stoke division in the Democratic coalition. In Detroit, Rogers tapped Lorenzo Sewell, a Black Republican pastor, to do faith community outreach on behalf of his campaign. Sewell proceeded to invite Jake Lang — the convicted January 6th insurrectionist who earlier this year protested the BET awards while holding a sign that said “Black Parents are Failures” — to address his congregation on the importance of “outbreeding” the Muslims in neighboring Dearborn.
Very few in the press asked Rogers to “condemn” or “disavow” Sewell, or Lang for that matter. Nor was he asked to condemn John Kennedy III, who accused El-Sayed of “sleeping in a Bin Laden Jersey,” even earning a wry smirk from Rogers. Congresswoman Haley Stevens, El-Sayed’s Democratic primary opponent, endorsed Rogers at the 11th hour without renouncing the gutter tactics he deployed, such as announcing to a televised audience that El-Sayed was “funded by Al-Qaeda.” The “condemn game,” as he took to calling it, was reserved only for El-Sayed.
What is the condemn game anyway? “Will you condemn X?” is an awkward way to start a conversation or to learn about what someone thinks. Any one of the journalists or pundits who asked El-Sayed this question could have instead asked, “what’s your position on X?” Boiled down to its spiritual core, the question signals possession of an awesome power: the ability to confer personhood. It’s a power that supremacists of all persuasions believe they are entitled to. At its worst, when directed at Muslims and other minority candidates, the question conveys that said candidates are currently understood as savages, and their response is a sort of citizenship test into the ranks of the civilized. The whole framework is racist.
El-Sayed’s genius was to opt out of the game entirely, to rewrite the rules, in fact. He chose to confer and insist upon his own personhood, and on the personhood of all who are dehumanized by bigots. Nowhere was this clearer than on the question of foreign policy and the U.S.-Israel relationship in particular. “They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers without being murdered by our tax dollars,” El-Sayed added in his victory speech. “If you believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination, that's not hate, it's love.”
He repeated a frequent argument on the trail that American tax dollars should be spent on schools, healthcare, and infrastructure in Michigan, rather than on “apartheid or genocide or war” abroad. Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed’s detractors in both parties implied that this moral stance was anti-Semitic, that taxpayer subsidies to the Israeli government make up only a tiny fraction of the federal budget and did not deserve such outsized criticism. What they failed to grasp is that weapons aid to Israel requires money, yes, but also a story. And the story — that Israel is a bastion of civilization surrounded by Muslim savages; a “villa in the jungle” — is what justifies the weapons.
Throughout his candidacy, El-Sayed faced enormous pressure to accept the current terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship, defined by virtually unconditional support from leaders in both parties. Many Democratic politicians accept this bargain and its implications for Arab and American Muslims: that we can be part of a pro-democracy coalition at home while our families abroad are marked for death. But El-Sayed correctly rejected this moral cherry picking. Reactionary ideas do not respect borders. We cannot stop them at customs. American Muslim humanity here depends on who we’re bombing over there, and the stories we tell ourselves about why we must do so.
The decade between Clinton’s back-handed appeal and the unconditional welcome extended by El-Sayed was a long, dark winter for American Muslims, where each election season brought ever-more-fervent attacks. There’s no reason to believe El-Sayed’s victory will stop Democrats and Republicans alike from scapegoating Muslims to distract from the country’s numerous crises. But for the first time, one of the many people fighting back will be a United States Senator named Abdulrahman.
