The Acceptable Muslim

I live just four miles from the Michigan border. Close enough that their Senate race runs on my tv and radio whether I asked for it or not, close enough that I know people who will vote in it. Until about three weeks ago, though, I had no opinion at all about Abdul El-Sayed. I had no clue who he was, in fact.

That turns out to be rather useful. I have written twice now about caricatures I bought and later regretted, and both times I had years of my own deep-seated contempt to dig through before I could say anything that was really honest. This time there is nothing there to excavate. I get to watch the caricature being built from scratch, in public, by people who share the very religious tradition I came out of.

El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on August 4 by about a point over Rep. Haley Stevens, in what was reportedly the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history.¹ He is set to face Republican Mike Rogers in November. If he wins, he will be the first Muslim in the United States Senate.

What’s on the record

His father came from Alexandria, Egypt, to study engineering at Wayne State. El-Sayed was born in metro Detroit, studied biology and political science at the University of Michigan, then went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship for a doctorate, and captained the men’s lacrosse team while he was there. He finished his medical degree at Columbia and taught epidemiology on the faculty.²

Then Mike Duggan called. Detroit had come through bankruptcy with its public health functions outsourced to a nonprofit, and the department needed rebuilding from the ground up. El-Sayed took the job at thirty years old, which made him the youngest health officer in any major American city at the time. He started with only a small office and five employees.³

In his first year, he went after sulfur dioxide emissions from Marathon Petroleum’s refinery in southwest Detroit and effectively got them reduced. After Flint, he ran lead testing in Detroit schools. He got free glasses for kids who needed them. He cleaned up a badly broken animal control department. The state even put him on its Childhood Lead Elimination Board. He later ran Wayne County’s health, human, and veterans services department, serving 1.8 million people, where he expanded Narcan access, built out air quality monitoring, and launched a program to buy up and cancel medical debt.⁴

What’s also on the record

Bridge Michigan, a nonpartisan newsroom that ran the same scrutiny on every candidate in the race, found two real problems with El-Sayed.

The medical debt program has settled about $57.4 million for roughly 83,200 people. His first major television ad announced “$700 million medical debt erased.” That $700 million, though, is the two-year target. He repeated the claim at a rally with Bernie Sanders and called it the largest medical debt erasure in Michigan history. Bridge also found his free glasses numbers overstated.⁵

The second problem is the use of the word physician. He has used it on LinkedIn as well as at campaign events. He has never held a medical license in Michigan or New York, and his hands-on clinical work seems to have amounted to a four-week rotation after medical school. Michigan’s public health code reserves that title for people actually licensed to practice medicine. When Mehdi Hasan pressed him on it, he said he had taken his medical education in a different direction and suggested Hasan go argue with Columbia, since the degree came from its College of Physicians and Surgeons.⁶ That was undoubtedly a dodge and it sounded like one too.

I don’t want to just wave these instances off. A campaign ad that inflates a program’s actual results by better than a factor of twelve is no small lie, and a man who bills himself as a physician without a license has already clearly made a decision about what he is willing to let people assume is true. If a Republican did this, I would say so in harder language I’m sure.

Now let’s look at who surfaced these concerns. The license question came from Mallory McMorrow’s campaign, a Democrat running against him in the primary. The interview that pinned him down was Mehdi Hasan, who has never once been mistaken for a conservative. The debt figures came from a Michigan nonprofit doing ordinary accountability journalism. Every round of ammunition was public, documented, and free to anyone who wanted to make a case against him.

What they used instead

Rogers put out a statement after the primary saying he spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, and that never in a million years did he think he would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.⁷

Here’s the thing, though. El-Sayed never said that. PolitiFact rated the claim false. So did Snopes. So did Lead Stories. The line came from Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer who campaigned for him, who said it in 2019 and walked it back within weeks. In April, before those campaign appearances, El-Sayed said plainly on Fox News that he does not think 9/11 was justified. Tom Cotton then repeated the smear anyway, and added that Islamic-Marxists are taking over the Democratic Party, and later had to correct himself.⁸

Let’s examine that alongside the credibility charge for just a second. The accusation is that El-Sayed shades the truth about his own résumé. Fair. The men making the accusations put a fabricated quote about the murder of three thousand people in front of more than a million people, and one of them had to walk it back. Still fair?

Tim Scott’s committee cut an ad calling him Abdulrahman Mohamed Abdul El-Sayed, the most radical Senate candidate in America, and spliced in a clip of him saying “I’m pretty damn dangerous.” The problem is that what he actually said was “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.” They kept the boasting part and threw away the conditional, which was the context of the entire sentence. The NRSC’s own press releases had called him El-Sayed right up until the week he won. Then Scott went on CNN, looked into the camera, and said we should trust the man’s own words rather than anyone else’s. Asked by Manu Raju why the ad reached past the name El-Sayed actually goes by to dig out his full birth name, Scott said it had nothing to do with his being Muslim.⁹ Hmmm.

Four words cut to convert a jab at the Senate Minority Leader into a confession of menace, followed by a United States senator telling a national audience to trust the man’s own words.

This seems to me like an argument that refutes itself quicker than a cable news cycle.

The Senate GOP’s super PAC warned that El-Sayed would unleash terror. Rogers ads put him beside September 11 footage and bin Laden.¹⁰ And then Tommy Tuberville, catching an elevator on Capitol Hill after a Senate vote, told a reporter that El-Sayed was “basically a cheerleader for 9/11” and that the country hadn’t changed enough to put “basically terrorists” in office. Asked directly whether he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, Tuberville said: “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”¹¹

I shouldn’t have to say it, but the man has never been charged with a crime. He has never been investigated for anything remotely like these insinuations. He ran a city health department, rebuilt it from five employees, and went to court over a refinery. Tuberville looked into a camera and said he has the potential to commit mass murder, apparently because he is guilty of being a Muslim who won a Democratic primary. Scandalous.

Three Christians and a footnote

Ted Cruz went on Fox and said this: “You see the green-red convergence where the communist and the Islamists, they want Sharia law. They hate Jews. They hate Christians. They hate capitalism. They hate America.”¹²

First of all, there is no evidence El-Sayed supports Sharia law. He calls himself a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. There is no evidence he has said a hateful word about Jews or Christians that I’ve been able to uncover. In the closing days of his primary, canvassing groups calling themselves Jews for Abdul and Muslims for Abdul worked the doors together.¹³

Cruz is Southern Baptist. His father is an evangelical preacher. He clearly seems to be able to disseminate fear and deception like breathing.

Mike Johnson posted that America faces an urgent question about whether we will remain the world’s great superpower or let radical Marxist Democrats destroy the foundations that make us the envy of the world, and that we must fight to keep the country from being overrun by mini Mamdanis. He was reacting to the win of a man who has said he is not a democratic socialist and describes himself as a capitalist, which makes the “mini Mamdanis” line a swing at a label rather than a platform. Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere why democratic socialism and Marxism aren’t the same thing, whatever they share in a word Republicans have been trained to flinch at. Johnson is also a Southern Baptist who talks about his “biblical worldview” more than any Speaker in living memory, and he could have learned what El-Sayed actually believes in the time it took to type the post.¹⁴

Then Trump, in Las Vegas the night the race was called, weighed in. “This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, oh, that’s a little strong. No, he hates Jews and he hates Israel.” He kept going. “He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and there’s not a fricking thing he can do about it.”¹⁵

Read that middle sentence again. Go ahead. Somebody told him it was too strong. He was warned, in the moment, that he was going further than the facts allowed and he doubled down in front of a ballroom and a national broadcast. That is not a man who simply got it wrong. That is a man who was offered the chance to be accurate; to be careful about another person’s soul, and declined it out loud.

The footnote worthy of a note: sitting in Trump’s own cabinet, confirmed by the Senate and sworn in at the White House, is Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz is also Muslim, the son of Turkish immigrants.¹⁶ He is now in charge of a program currently covering roughly 160 million Americans. Cruz has said nothing about Oz wanting Sharia law. Tuberville has not suggested he has the potential to become a terrorist. Johnson has not posted about mini-Ozs.

The difference between Oz and El-Sayed is not so much their religion. Oz spent years publicly distancing himself from his faith, raised his children Christian, and swore his oath of office on a Bible. He votes with the party. The acceptable Muslim, it turns out, is the one who makes his religion as invisible as possible and comes to the right conclusions politically. The dangerous Muslim is the one who prays openly and wins a progressive primary. This was never primarily a theological objection. It is a tribal and partisan one.

. . .

The fruit

Here is what El-Sayed wrote in his Rhodes Scholarship application about why he wanted to study medicine in the first place. He said that his religion teaches that if one saves a life, he or she has saved all of humanity. He has said that morals kept on a mantel stop being morals and turn into things you admire and then walk away from when they get expensive.¹⁷

That is a man who seems to believe his faith obligates him to strangers. I attended enough elder meetings in church to know that if a candidate said that sentence with a Reformed Study Bible in his hand, we would have probably run him for office ourselves.

I am not trying to tell you a Muslim is a better Christian than the Christians. And I am not going to tell you that Medicare for All is specifically what Jesus would have voted for, because Jesus did not vote and the New Testament is not a policy platform. People who read it that way get exactly the results they went in looking for, amazingly, which is how we ended up with prosperity preachers and an evangelical Jesus who wants you to have a boat.

What I will say is that when I started pulling apart the theology I had spent decades inside, the creedal machinery is what came apart first. The Greek metaphysics, the substitutionary transaction, the inherited guilt and so forth. Whole foundational doctrines turned out to be Latin translation errors with sixteen centuries of touch-up paint on them. What survived, for me, was the ethical teaching, which is the part I had been quietly conditioned to treat as something closer to illustration than instruction. The sheep and the goats are separated by what they did. Fed, clothed, visited, welcomed. Nobody in that scene is asked what they believed about the hypostatic union. And the ones who are turned away are the ones who are certain they belong, which is the detail that should keep anybody up at night who has ever been so supremely confident.

So I left. Albeit not quietly and not without significant cost. And having left, I have no active stake at all in how this comes out. I am not defending Christianity, per se, and I’m not defending any particular version of Christian political engagement here. Which is why I can say without it sounding like apologetics: the test Jesus gave for spotting a false prophet was fruit. Not creed, not pedigree, and most certainly not the connotation of somebody’s name.

So we ought to look at the fruit on both sides. One man spent his thirties testing school water for lead and putting glasses on poor kids, then overstated his results in a campaign ad. The other men invented a quote about three thousand murders and pushed it to a million voters, edited a sentence into its opposite meaning on national television, stood at a podium describing the contents of a stranger’s heart after being warned they were going too far, and told a reporter a public health official has the potential to become a terrorist.

I don’t know about you but I know which of those I was taught to call out as truly bearing false witness. I learned it in the same space where I learned the Ten Commandments, and it was not a close call then either.

There is also a whole story about this very thing, by the way. A man asked Jesus who counted as his neighbor, obviously hoping for a definition small enough to live with. The answer put two religious professionals on the road, both of whom crossed to the other side, and a Samaritan who stopped. The Samaritan was the punchline in that story for a reason. Jews and Samaritans had despised each other for centuries by that point, over a rival temple, a different scripture, and generations of mutual contempt serious enough that observant Jews would sometimes walk miles out of their way to avoid Samaritan territory. He was the one the audience had already been taught to distrust on sight, which is the only thing that makes the parable work at all.

Now I am not accusing anybody’s grandmother of hating Muslims. What I am describing is a machine and a deliberate silence. The machine takes a man’s record, including his real and documented failures, and throws every piece of it away in favor of his name and his prayers. The silence is the sound of churches that would organize a boycott over a beer can saying nothing at all while a sitting senator tells a national audience that a Muslim public health official has the real potential to become a terrorist.

None of this costs anything politically. Eighty-two percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2024, up from seventy-six in 2020.¹⁸ That number is the reason Cruz and Johnson can say what they said and lose nothing. There’s no bloc large enough to make them pay for it.

The strangest part, though, is how easy the honest version would have been. Rogers could have held up the Bridge Michigan reporting, said his opponent inflated a program’s results by a factor of twelve and claimed a professional title he has no license to hold, and asked Michigan whether that is who they want in the Senate. That is an actual, real argument and it might have worked too. This isn’t to say I’m inclined to give the GOP actionable advice but that doesn’t matter. They didn’t want the argument anyway. They wanted the name and everything it supposedly entails.

Notes

1. Henry J. Gomez, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, notching a Midwest victory for the left,” NBC News, August 5, 2026. El-Sayed overcame roughly $65 million in outside spending, much of it from AIPAC in support of Rep. Haley Stevens. The Senate Leadership Fund has said it will invest $45 million in the general election race against Rogers. See also Mary Ellen McIntire, “Republicans rush to define El-Sayed as Democrats try to move past bitter primary,” Roll Call, August 5, 2026.

2. Britannica, “Abdul El-Sayed”; Ballotpedia candidate profile, 2026. El-Sayed earned a full blue as captain of Oxford’s men’s lacrosse team and was an assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Epidemiology from 2014 to 2015.

3. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed El-Sayed Health Officer and Executive Director of the Detroit Health Department in August 2015, making him, at thirty, the youngest health officer in a major U.S. city at the time. The department had been privatized to a nonprofit in 2012 amid the fiscal crisis that culminated in Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy filing. See University of Michigan School of Public Health, “After Bankruptcy: The Detroit Public Health Department,” event biography.

4. On Marathon: Abdul El-Sayed, “Detroit health chief: Don’t let Marathon up pollutants,” Detroit Free Press, January 6, 2016; “Marathon says it’ll cut emissions after backlash,” The Detroit News, March 28, 2016. On school water testing: Candice Williams, “DPS testing for lead, copper in drinking water,” The Detroit News, April 5, 2016. On board appointments: El-Sayed served on Michigan’s Childhood Lead Elimination Board, the state Public Health Advisory Commission, and the HHS advisory committee for Healthy People 2030.

5. Bridge Michigan, “Fact check: Abdul El-Sayed overstates claim he erased $700M in medical debt,” June 2026. The Wayne County program, launched under El-Sayed in 2024, aims to retire up to $700 million in debt for 300,000 residents over two years by purchasing it at a bulk discount. As of Bridge’s reporting it had settled roughly $57.4 million for just over 83,200 people.

6. Bridge Michigan, “Who is Abdul El-Sayed? What to know about Michigan Democrats’ US Senate winner,” August 2026. Michigan’s public health code defines a physician as an individual licensed or authorized to engage in the practice of medicine. The question was first raised publicly by Mallory McMorrow’s campaign in May 2026. The exchange with Mehdi Hasan aired in July 2026.

7. Statement from the Rogers campaign, posted to X and Instagram, August 5, 2026.

8. PolitiFact, “No, Abdul El-Sayed didn’t say U.S. deserves 9/11,” August 7, 2026; Snopes, August 2026; Lead Stories, August 2026. Hasan Piker made the remark during a 2019 livestream and retracted it that August. El-Sayed said on Fox & Friends, April 7, 2026, that he does not think 9/11 was justified: “Of course I oppose rape. Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified.” On Cotton’s repetition and subsequent correction, see Mediaite, August 6, 2026.

9. National Republican Senatorial Committee, “Abdul El-Sayed is the Most Radical Candidate in America,” press release and digital ad, August 5, 2026. A subsequent NRSC ad on August 7 likewise used his full birth name, which the committee had not used in its own materials before the primary; see NOTUS, “Republicans Are Running Ads Attacking ‘Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’,” August 6, 2026. El-Sayed’s full line was “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.” On the Capitol Hill exchange between Scott and CNN’s Manu Raju, see Mediaite, August 2026.

10. On the Senate Leadership Fund statement and the Rogers ad imagery, see CNN, “The GOP’s ugly response to Abdul El-Sayed,” August 6, 2026.

11. Tommy Tuberville, quoted by Brian Karem, Salon, “Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan causes a GOP meltdown,” August 6, 2026. Karem reports the exchange took place as Tuberville was boarding an elevator on Capitol Hill. Tuberville had previously drawn criticism for sharing a post juxtaposing an image of Zohran Mamdani with 9/11 footage and writing “the enemy is inside the gates” in March 2026.

12. Cruz made the remarks on Jesse Watters’ Fox News program on the night of August 4, 2026, referring to both El-Sayed and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Quoted in CNN, “The GOP’s ugly response to Abdul El-Sayed,” August 6, 2026.

13. On El-Sayed’s self-description as a capitalist, see coverage of his August 2026 primary win. On the joint canvassing, see Religion News Service, “Abdul El-Sayed could be the first Muslim senator. Here are 5 religion takeaways from his campaign,” August 5, 2026.

14. Speaker Mike Johnson, post to X, August 5, 2026. On El-Sayed’s response to the socialist label and Mamdani’s rejection of the “mini-Mamdani” characterization, see amNewYork and Anadolu coverage of Mamdani’s August 5 press conference. On the distinction between democratic socialism and Marxism, see “I Was Wrong About AOC,” Drink Wisely, August 2026.

15. Remarks by President Trump at Red Rock Casino Resort, Las Vegas, August 5, 2026. Quotations follow the event transcript (Trump Archive); the White House posted video of the full remarks the same day. See also Washington Examiner, August 5, 2026, and Roll Call, August 5, 2026, quoting the same passages.

16. Dr. Mehmet Oz, official CMS biography, cms.gov; Presidential Prayer Team profile, February 12, 2026, confirming Oz is Muslim. On Oz’s “secular Muslim” self-identification during his 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race, his decision to raise his children in his wife’s Christian faith, and his swearing the CMS oath on a Bible rather than a Quran, see Türkiye Today, “Dr. Oz swears on Bible despite touting ‘secular Muslim’ identity in 2022 Senate race,” October 7, 2025. Oz was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in at the White House in April 2025. Only about 10 percent of American Muslims identify as Republicans, according to 2022 research from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

17. On the Rhodes application, see Britannica, “Abdul El-Sayed.” The remark about morals on a mantel comes from an interfaith roundtable of pastors, imams, and a rabbi in Detroit in late July 2026, days before the primary, reported by the Associated Press and CBS News Detroit, August 2026.

18. NBC News exit polling, 2024: white born-again and evangelical Christians, 27 percent of the electorate, voted 82 percent for Trump against 17 percent for Harris, compared with 76 percent in 2020 and 81 percent in 2016. See Baptist News Global, “How Trump and Harris fared with faith voters in 2024,” November 12, 2024; “Evangelicals and the Exit Polls,” First Things, January 2025; and PRRI, “Religion and the 2024 Presidential Election.”