Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed told the New York Times in 2009 that he felt an "obligation" to follow Sharia law, a declaration his own campaign now confirms still guides his personal life.
El-Sayed, then a 24-year-old medical student and Rhodes scholar, described his commitment in terms that left little room for ambiguity. The Washington Free Beacon reported the unearthed quote on August 11, drawing fresh attention to the Senate candidate's religious convictions just days after his narrow primary victory.
El-Sayed told the Times:
"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."
That quote matters now because El-Sayed is no longer a graduate student musing about personal piety. He is the Democratic nominee for a United States Senate seat in Michigan, and the question of how his stated obligation shapes his public conduct has gone largely unexamined.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner did not distance El-Sayed from the 2009 remarks. She told the Free Beacon that he "believes in the separation of church and state" but acknowledged he "personally lives by the rules of his faith, as many Americans of various faiths do." Richner added that El-Sayed "opposes any effort by any religious community to write their faith laws into the laws of our country."
That statement confirms El-Sayed still considers himself bound by Sharia in his personal life. The campaign framed it as no different from any believer following religious precepts, a fair point in the abstract, but one that runs into complications when set against El-Sayed's own record of managing how much voters see of that commitment.
In a documentary titled How To Fix A Primary, El-Sayed was captured telling filmmakers to avoid shooting a bookshelf in his home. His instruction was blunt:
"You're going to want to not get these things in the shot. We're trying to keep the shot secular."
The shelf reportedly held a Quran and other Islamic texts, including A Thematic Commentary on the Qur'an by Sheikh Mohammed al-Ghazali, a Muslim Brotherhood member. Al-Ghazali testified in defense of 13 Islamic terrorists during a 1993 Egyptian trial after the killing of a professor who had called for separation of church and state. Al-Ghazali called the slain professor "without doubt" an infidel and said most Islamic scholars would agree such apostates should be killed, though he personally favored a life sentence.
El-Sayed has not publicly addressed why he owns al-Ghazali's book or what he makes of the author's views. His narrow primary win gave Republicans the general-election matchup many in the party preferred, and these unearthed statements help explain why.
El-Sayed's handling of questions about Sharia has followed a consistent cycle: minimize in front of general audiences, speak more freely before sympathetic ones.
During his 2018 campaign for Michigan governor, journalist Laura Loomer pressed him on his Sharia views. El-Sayed denied ever saying he was "Sharia-compliant," cut the interview short, and scolded his staff for not stopping it. The 2009 New York Times quote, of course, says exactly what he denied.
In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, he rejected allegations that he intended to subvert the Constitution and implement Sharia law. By October 2025, speaking to Religion News Service, he offered a softer framing: his faith "orients me to try and be a better person" and to "treat people, all people, with dignity and humanity and respect." He said he wants to "protect the kind of America where everybody can pray how they choose to pray, or choose not to pray at all."
But in October 2022, speaking before the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, El-Sayed struck a different tone entirely:
"You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding white supremacy. 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, that those forces are alive and well today."
El-Sayed equated a 2010 Oklahoma ballot measure that banned Sharia law in state courts to the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa race massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing. That is not the language of a candidate who views Sharia as a private devotional matter. It is the language of a candidate who sees opposition to Sharia's legal influence as an act of bigotry on par with mass violence.
Voters weighing El-Sayed's policy positions, including his concession that his healthcare plan would raise taxes on middle-class workers, now have reason to ask which version of the candidate reflects his actual convictions.
El-Sayed's adherence to Sharia extends beyond rhetoric and personal conduct. It shapes his financial life in ways that connect him to entities with a troubled history.
In 2009, El-Sayed purchased a $123,000 condominium in Ann Arbor using a Sharia-compliant mortgage, a financing structure that avoids interest payments, which Islamic law treats as forbidden. His latest Senate financial disclosure shows that he and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, own between $150,000 and $425,000 in Amana Mutual Funds.
Amana markets itself as Sharia-compliant, excluding investments in companies that earn more than 5% of revenue from what Islamic law deems "haram sources", interest, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, and pork. The fund was cofounded by the late Yaqub Mirza, who served as its chairman.
A 1988 FBI memo identified Mirza as one of several "members and leaders of the IKHWAN", shorthand for the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2002, federal antiterrorism agents raided Mirza's home as part of a wider operation against the Safa Group, a cluster of Islamic entities based in Virginia. No charges were filed, and Amana Funds was spared serious scrutiny.
Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum's Islamist Watch project, told the Free Beacon that the State Department's designation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in January "should theoretically have made Safa (and thus Amana) a law enforcement target again." He added that federal authorities have expressed a lack of interest in Safa since the early-2000s raids.
El-Sayed's financial ties to Amana sit alongside his disclosure of a Dubai rental property and debt to a luxury Emirati developer, a portfolio that raises fair questions about how a candidate running on working-class populism manages his own money.
El-Sayed's wife, Sarah Jukaku, wears a hijab and is rarely seen at campaign events. She did not attend his primary watch party. She operates a private psychiatry practice that does not accept Medicaid, Medicare, or any other insurance.
El-Sayed described their courtship in a 2006 Michigan Daily profile that called him a "particularly devout" Muslim. He explained Islamic courtship rules in straightforward terms: "Islamically, there are no premarital relations of any sort. No touching, no nothing. Given that, the logical solution is to get married." He proposed to Jukaku when she was a college freshman and he was a junior. They married according to Islamic law. The couple has two young daughters.
None of this is disqualifying by itself. Americans of many faiths follow strict personal codes. But El-Sayed has actively worked to keep these details out of public view, instructing filmmakers to frame shots around his religious texts, denying statements he plainly made, and calibrating his message depending on whether he is speaking to a general audience or a CAIR chapter.
That pattern is not about private faith. It is about public candor, and a Senate candidate's willingness to let voters see who he is before they decide whether to send him to Washington.
El-Sayed has already turned to Barack Obama for help unifying Michigan Democrats after a bruising primary. Whether national party leaders will press him on these questions, or simply hope voters never hear about them, will say as much about the Democratic Party's priorities as it does about the candidate himself.
El-Sayed's campaign frames his Sharia observance as a personal matter, comparable to any devout Christian or Orthodox Jew living by religious law. That framing deserves scrutiny because Sharia, where it serves as the basis for civil governance, produces outcomes most Americans would find incompatible with constitutional liberty.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Sharia mandates that women cover their entire faces and bodies in public at all times. In Iran, morality police arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for failing to fully cover her hair; she died in police custody. In Saudi Arabia, the state carries out beheadings by sword, sometimes in a public square.
El-Sayed is not proposing any of that. His spokeswoman explicitly said he opposes writing any faith's laws into American law. But when a candidate declares an obligation to follow Sharia "until the day he dies," denies making that declaration when confronted, then equates a state ballot measure banning Sharia in courts to the Trail of Tears, voters are entitled to ask exactly where the line between personal devotion and public policy sits, and to demand a straight answer.
El-Sayed has shown no reluctance to go on national television and challenge his opponents. Michigan voters deserve to see him answer for his own words with the same energy.
A candidate who tells filmmakers to keep the shot secular while telling the New York Times he is bound by Sharia for life is not protecting his privacy, he is managing a contradiction. Michigan voters should decide whether that contradiction belongs in the United States Senate.
