Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed drew a direct line between Oklahoma's voter-approved Sharia law ban, the forced removal of Native Americans, and the Oklahoma City bombing, and now Republicans want voters to hear every word.
The remarks, captured on video during a 2022 Council on American-Islamic Relations event, surfaced as the Michigan Senate race between El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers intensifies heading into the fall. In the speech, El-Sayed told the CAIR audience that the "same exact forces" behind some of the darkest chapters in American history were responsible for the state's decision to ban Sharia law, a referendum Oklahoma voters approved by a wide margin.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee posted the video clip, which has given Rogers and national Republicans fresh ammunition in a race already defined by questions about El-Sayed's views on Islamic law, his political associations, and his donor base.
In the 2022 CAIR speech, El-Sayed opened by dismissing the substance of Oklahoma's constitutional amendment.
"When the state of Oklahoma voted in a referendum to amend the constitution to ban Sharia law. What does that mean? I don't know. And yet the voters banned it anyway."
He then placed the vote in a historical sequence that included the forced removal of Native peoples, the destruction of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, commonly known as Black Wall Street, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. As Breitbart News reported, El-Sayed told the audience:
"You all sitting in this room, in this town, we're sitting in a space, in a time when I don't have to tell you that the same exact forces that drove Native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago, and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago. Those forces are alive and well today."
That framing is worth pausing on. El-Sayed did not argue that the Sharia law ban was misguided policy or poorly drafted legislation. He argued that the voters who approved it were animated by the same impulse that produced ethnic cleansing, a race massacre, and domestic terrorism. Oklahoma voters, in his telling, were not citizens exercising self-governance. They were part of a continuous thread of American evil.
The comparison collapses distinctions that matter. The Trail of Tears was a federal act of forced displacement that killed thousands. The Tulsa massacre was a white mob destroying a prosperous Black neighborhood. The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist attack that murdered 168 people. A ballot referendum, by contrast, is the most democratic mechanism available, citizens voting on a question of law. Treating all four as expressions of the same "forces" requires either a very loose definition of evil or a very dim view of democratic self-governance.
The CAIR speech is not the first time El-Sayed's views on Sharia law have drawn scrutiny. A resurfaced 2009 New York Times interview captured him describing his personal commitment to Islamic law in stark terms:
"Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don't want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation."
After that interview resurfaced, El-Sayed's campaign moved to clarify his position. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner said in August that El-Sayed "believes in the separation of church and state" and "opposes any effort by any religious community to test their faith laws into the laws of our country." His defense of his Sharia law views on Fox News drew sharp conservative backlash and became one of the defining moments of his campaign.
But the campaign also confirmed that El-Sayed continues to observe Sharia law in his personal life. The tension is obvious: a candidate who personally follows Sharia law as an "obligation" mocked Oklahoma voters for banning it, and compared their vote to genocide and terrorism.
El-Sayed has also tried to soften his public image through interfaith outreach. On The Progressive Christians Podcast in May, he quoted the Quran, "there's no compulsion on faith", and described the role of a believer as offering "dignity and opportunity to other people, not to compel them to behave in any sort of way." In the same appearance, he compared himself to Jesus Christ:
"Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, was considered radical in his time too. And there is a radical nature to being willing to stand forthright in a time of corruption."
Republican nominee Mike Rogers has made El-Sayed's record and associations the central front of the fall campaign. After the August primary, Rogers was blunt: "Abdul isn't just another liberal. He's an extremist."
Rogers' campaign has also pressed on El-Sayed's donor base. The campaign identified nearly $130,000 in donations from more than 41 CAIR staff and board members. Separately, Rogers' team alleged that El-Sayed's father-in-law contributed at least $300,000 to a super PAC supporting the Democrat's candidacy and held a leadership position in an organization linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Rogers campaign called on El-Sayed to return the contributions.
The campaign framed the issue as one of judgment and transparency, not faith. "This is not about anyone's faith," the Rogers campaign said. "This is about judgment, transparency, and who is financing a candidate for the United States." It is worth noting, as the information itself states, that the donation allegations do not, by themselves, establish that the contributions were unlawful or that El-Sayed supports terrorism.
At a Republican convention in September, Rogers sharpened the attack further, referencing El-Sayed's association with online streamer Hasan Piker. El-Sayed has apologized to Jewish voters but refused to cut ties with Piker, who has publicly stated "I do hate America."
"You don't sympathize with terrorists. You don't sanitize extremism, and you sure don't ask the people of Michigan to send you to the United States Senate while surrounding yourself with people who despise America."
The Michigan race has attracted national attention, and Republican heavyweights have weighed in. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas used a speech at the Republican convention to draw a hard line on Sharia law, calling it "fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution."
"Islamism likewise produces murder and oppression, from the forced wearing of hijabs to the stoning of rape victims, from the systematic murder of homosexuals to honor killings and the barbarism of October 7 and 9/11."
Cruz added: "Sharia law has no place in America... and we need to stand together and stop it now." The remarks, amplified by the NRSC on social media, positioned El-Sayed's CAIR speech as a national campaign issue rather than a local Michigan dust-up.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, has drawn support from some of the Democratic Party's most prominent progressive voices. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied for him in Detroit in July, declaring that he "represents the politics of the future." Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar have also backed his candidacy. Those endorsements tell Michigan voters something about where El-Sayed sits on the national political spectrum, and tough questions about his ties to Piker, his stance on Israel, and his socialist allies have followed him throughout the campaign.
The progressive backing has not insulated El-Sayed from intra-party criticism, either. A Michigan Democratic lawmaker warned Black voters away from El-Sayed, calling the socialist left "more racist than the KKK", a remarkable break within his own party.
The 2022 CAIR video does not show a candidate who misspoke or was taken out of context. El-Sayed built a deliberate historical argument. He told a friendly audience that a democratic vote to keep religious law out of a state constitution belonged in the same moral category as ethnic cleansing, racial massacre, and mass-casualty terrorism. He did not qualify the comparison or soften it. He said the "same exact forces" were responsible for all of it.
That is a revealing statement from a man who now asks Michigan voters to send him to the United States Senate. It suggests that, in El-Sayed's view, Americans who want their legal system rooted in the U.S. Constitution rather than any religious code are not exercising legitimate self-governance, they are perpetuating a legacy of violence.
Voters who believe the Constitution is the law of the land, not Sharia, not canon law, not any religious code, deserve a senator who respects that principle, not one who compares it to the Trail of Tears.
