Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once called Tariq Ramadan’s work “excellent,” elevating a Muslim Brotherhood founder’s grandson the U.S. barred over terror-linked donations.
In a 2011 podcast interview, Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed pointed listeners to Oxford scholar Tariq Ramadan as a key influence on his thinking about Islam in the West.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that El-Sayed, then discussing authors who shaped him, singled out Ramadan’s books on reconciling Islam and Western ideals and said much of that work was excellent.
Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. His father, Said Ramadan, was a top Brotherhood leader after al-Banna’s death and founded the Geneva Islamic Centre in Switzerland in 1960 after exile from Egypt.
That lineage matters because El-Sayed has spent recent days insisting his own family has no Brotherhood ties at all.
In 2004, the George W. Bush administration revoked Tariq Ramadan’s work visa and barred him from working in the United States. Officials cited his donations to two charities linked to Hamas.
The Treasury Department had designated those groups, the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians and the Association de Secours Palestinien, as terror fundraising organizations in 2003.
Ramadan had been scheduled to teach at the University of Notre Dame before the visa action shut that door. In 2009 he was appointed to the chair of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, the same year El-Sayed arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the Free Beacon’s reporting about the Ramadan connection.
Ramadan left Oxford in 2017 after accusations of sexual misconduct involving minors. He called the claims a “campaign of slander clearly orchestrated by my longtime adversaries.” More women later accused him of rape.
A Paris criminal court sentenced him in March to 18 years in prison for several counts of rape. Ramadan did not attend the trial. He left France for Switzerland in violation of a court order, even though the court found him fit to appear.
Earlier controversies followed him as well. Erasmus University in the Netherlands dropped him as a visiting professor in 2009 after discovering his employment with PressTV, an Iranian state-controlled outlet. In a 2003 televised debate with then-French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Ramadan’s positions drew sharp scrutiny. French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy accused him of writing an “anti-Semitic text.”
Lorenzo Vidino, director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, has described the Geneva Islamic Centre, founded by Ramadan’s father and now led by his brother Hani Ramadan, as the main headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. French journalist Caroline Fourest has cited public filings listing Tariq Ramadan as an administrator there, despite his denial of an official role.
On a recent Sunday, El-Sayed told NBC’s Kristen Welker that his family had no ties at all to the Muslim Brotherhood. By Wednesday, NBC’s Tom Llamas pressed him on reporting about his sister’s old posts describing family connections to the group.
El-Sayed bristled.
"You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?"
Llamas answered that he understood, but that El-Sayed had been asked a question. El-Sayed replied:
"Yeah, I'm telling you, like, we, I have no ties. We have no ties,"
When Llamas asked specifically about his mother, El-Sayed said he had never had those conversations with her and dismissed the material as hearsay from a tweet, calling it “not serious.”
The Free Beacon has reported that sister Eman Abdelhadi’s 2012 and 2013 tweets celebrated their mother’s college activism in the organization and stated that she has relatives who have been “jailed” for ties to the group. El-Sayed’s pushback tracks the same pattern seen when he brushed off those sister claims as hearsay under direct network questioning.
Years earlier, El-Sayed had not been cagey about Ramadan’s influence. On the SenseSustainability podcast he framed the subject as personal.
"One of my other interests, in the maybe non-academic interests, is the question of Islam in the West. And this is something I'm very interested in for personal reasons,"
He continued:
"And for that reason I would recommend, a third author would definitely be Tariq Ramadan, who's actually out of Oxford, and a lot of his work, he's got several books out talking about reconciling Islam and Western ideals and a lot of his work is excellent."
That endorsement came while Ramadan already carried the 2004 U.S. visa bar and the family history tied to the Brotherhood’s founding line. The Muslim Brotherhood, per the reporting, spawned Hamas in the 1980s.
The Ramadan praise is not the only thread. El-Sayed previously called Mohamed Soltan his “friend” in a since-deleted Substack post. Soltan is the son of a senior Muslim Brotherhood official and was jailed in Egypt for his role in 2013 protests aimed at reinstating Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood-affiliated president. That history is detailed in coverage of how El-Sayed described the jailed Brotherhood-tied figure as a friend.
Separate reporting has also examined donations El-Sayed has taken from donors tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, adding another layer voters can weigh alongside the academic inspiration he once advertised.
When network anchors have pressed the family question, El-Sayed has bristled at the Brotherhood family claims and treated decades-old Egypt history as off-limits even as his own sister’s posts and his own 2011 book list sit in the public record.
Ramadan’s record is not subtle: a U.S. terror-finance visa bar, an Oxford exit under misconduct accusations, and an 18-year French rape sentence he skipped by leaving the country. El-Sayed still held him up as excellent reading on Islam and the West.
Michigan voters can decide whether a Senate candidate who praised that figure, and then waved away family Brotherhood questions as hearsay, has given them the full picture.
