Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once called a man jailed on Muslim Brotherhood-linked charges his “friend” in a Substack essay he has since scrubbed from public view.
In an October 2021 post on his now-private Substack, The Incision, the left-wing Democrat held up Mohamed Soltan as a victim of raw state power in Egypt and described him as “my friend.” The Washington Free Beacon reported that the essay never mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood, Soltan’s father, or the charges that put him behind bars.
That omission matters now. El-Sayed is running for U.S. Senate in Michigan and faces Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary. Voters are being asked to trust his judgment on national security, foreign influence, and extremism. His own words and associations are fair game.
Soltan, an American citizen, was sentenced to life in an Egyptian prison on terrorism-related charges that included belonging to the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, NBC News reported at the time. ABC News described him as “one of the main liaisons” between the Brotherhood and the press during the turmoil after Mohamed Morsi’s fall.
The Substack piece was built around a domestic argument about police and vaccine rules. El-Sayed warned readers about the “bluntest form of government power,” then pivoted overseas.
He wrote:
"Go to Egypt, where the personal whims of a dictator may mean you'll find yourself in the bowels of an Egyptian prison, as happened to my friend Mohamed Soltan, an American citizen."
He linked a Georgetown University School of Foreign Service article that cast Soltan as a political prisoner who spent nearly two years in what Soltan called “an Egyptian dungeon.” El-Sayed offered no further context about the Brotherhood, Soltan’s media role, or the elder Soltan’s record.
Soltan was released and returned to the United States in 2015. He later founded the Freedom Initiative in Washington, D.C., to press for his father’s freedom, and now leads the American Committee for Middle East Rights. The New York Times published his 2019 op-ed identifying him as a “human-rights advocate.”
In that op-ed, Soltan wrote he was “not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.” He also soft-pedaled his father’s politics:
"My father, a respected authority on Islamic jurisprudence, lived most of his life outside of Egypt but was affiliated with a progressive, moderate vision of Islamism."
Salah Soltan is not a peripheral figure. A 2023 Muslim Brotherhood statement identified him as a Cairo University professor of Sharia and the founder and former president of the Islamic American University in Michigan. Lorenzo Vidino, who directs the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, called the elder Soltan “Brotherhood royalty” and described the son as “the polished version of the father.”
In 2011, according to MEMRI translations cited in the reporting, Salah Soltan issued a religious decree that went far beyond politics:
"As someone who has studied Islamic law, specializing in Islamic jurisprudence, I am calling to kill the [Israeli] ambassador, not just expel him,"
He added that any “Zionist, tourist or other, who enters Egypt must be killed,” framing it as payback for bloodshed on Egyptian land. In a 2012 Egyptian television appearance, he said, “Why not? Indeed, we will fight Israel and all those who are behind it,” and claimed God could “obliterat[e] America and any other oppressor.”
Egyptian authorities later charged him among roughly 50 Brotherhood leaders tied to 2013 protests aimed at restoring Morsi. At his son’s 2017 wedding reception in Virginia, an audio message from the imprisoned father told guests, “I am with you,” and “Look amongst you and you will see me in your faces and eyes.”
The United States has treated the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization because of its support for Hamas, the reporting notes. The Brotherhood spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s. That history is why official moves to brand the Brotherhood a terror group keep returning to the center of the debate.
Soltan did not stay at arm’s length from El-Sayed’s political rise. He contributed the maximum amount allowed to El-Sayed’s campaign. In June, the American Committee for Middle East Rights, which Soltan leads, sent $25,000 to a PAC supporting the candidate, according to reporting cited by the Free Beacon.
Those dollars fit a wider pattern already documented in Michigan’s Senate race, including coverage of how El-Sayed takes thousands from donors tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Separate reporting has also examined luxury yacht fundraisers he headlined for an Islamic charity flagged by Congress over Brotherhood ties.
Soltan’s earlier political giving produced similar results. Disgraced former Sen. Robert Menendez and Virginia Rep. Don Beyer both accepted thousands from him and later called for Salah Soltan’s release. The Obama White House worked to free Mohamed Soltan; he visited in 2017.
Neither El-Sayed nor Mohamed Soltan immediately answered questions about the Substack defense or the contributions.
On Meet the Press, El-Sayed said neither he nor his family have connections to the Brotherhood. That claim collides with statements from his own half-sister.
University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi has said her “family has long been MB” and described their mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college” in Egypt. Those remarks are the same family record examined when old posts said El-Sayed’s family had “long been” in the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed’s own paper trail adds more friction. In 2012 he signed an open letter supporting President Morsi and calling on the Brotherhood to “purge” media and police. In 2016 he said he held “dual citizenship” in the United States and Egypt; his campaign now denies that.
Additional footage tied to family religious practice has already drawn scrutiny after the Brotherhood claims surfaced, including video of El-Sayed guiding a sister’s Sharia dowry. He set the Substack account private as older posts and videos drew heat on the trail.
Soltan grew up for a time in Dearborn, not far from the Detroit suburb where El-Sayed was raised. The two men are close in age. Geography and a public “friend” label do not prove a shared ideology. They do make El-Sayed’s decision to spotlight Soltan, without the Brotherhood context, harder to wave away as a casual aside.
El-Sayed appeared at a UAW Region 1 rally in Warren, Michigan, on August 2, 2026, days before the August 4 primary against Stevens. The deleted essay is no longer a forgotten blog post. It is part of the candidate’s public record, recovered through an archive of the original Substack page.
He asked readers to imagine life under a monarch who could jail people on a whim. He chose Mohamed Soltan as his living example. He left out the terrorism charges, the Brotherhood liaison role ABC described, the father’s fatwas, and the cash that later flowed into his own campaign apparatus.
Michigan Democrats can decide whether that is candor or convenience. The archive, the charging descriptions, the MEMRI translations, and the contribution records are all in plain sight. A Senate candidate who lectures about government power owes voters the full cast list when he calls a Brotherhood-tied prisoner his friend.
Voters should demand the whole file, not the scrubbed version a candidate prefers after the fact.
