Abdul El-Sayed rode a socialist wave into the Senate while bristling at every question about his Sharia devotion.
His media allies call anyone still asking a bigot.
And El-Sayed just revealed one first-day plan that brings every question roaring back.
El-Sayed Already Picked Out the Book for His Big Day
US Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) told NPR he plans to put his hand on the Quran when he takes the oath of office, and he’s already weighing which copy gets the honor.
“I will likely swear on a Quran. Which Quran, we’re not sure,” El-Sayed said.
He floated two options. One is the copy Thomas Jefferson owned, the same book then-Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota held at his own swearing-in back in 2007. The other is a very old Quran at the University of Michigan that El-Sayed described as the first one in the state.
“So, I don’t know, but I’ll swear on the Quran,” he added.
Nobody needs a law degree to sort out the legal side. Article VI of the Constitution forbids any religious test for public office, and no rule forces a senator to touch any book at all. El-Sayed can pick whatever he likes.
But a right and a wise message aren’t the same thing. And El-Sayed picked this message knowing exactly where the questions about him already stood.
The Sharia Answer That Never Quite Added Up
Those questions start with his own words.
In a 2009 New York Times interview, a young El-Sayed said he didn’t want to stand before God someday having done things “the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way.” Then came the line that stuck: “Not because of fear but because of obligation.”
In August, his campaign confirmed he still follows Sharia law in his personal life. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner tried to calm everybody down with a single sentence: “Abdul believes in the separation of church and state.”
Nice line. But El-Sayed has a funny way of showing it. In a resurfaced speech, he lumped Oklahoma’s 2010 ballot measure barring state courts from using Sharia law together with the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa race massacre. About seven in ten Oklahoma voters backed that measure before a federal court blocked it. “Those forces are alive and well today,” El-Sayed warned.
Chew on that for a second. A man who sincerely wants Sharia kept out of American courtrooms doesn’t usually treat a law keeping Sharia out of American courtrooms like the next wave of persecution.
Then there’s the company around him. The Government Accountability Institute reported that El-Sayed took a previously undisclosed 2022 trip to Colombia, where he met with the heads of several nonprofit groups, some of which, according to GAI, carry direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. A former spokesman for the Brotherhood’s political party in Egypt later hailed El-Sayed’s win as a “model” for other Muslims.
El-Sayed has repeatedly denied or deflected any Brotherhood connection for himself and his relatives, and nobody has accused him of a crime. But voters keep noticing that he never seems to land a clean answer.
Jefferson’s Copy Comes With a History El-Sayed Left Out
El-Sayed reached for Jefferson to give his choice a founding-era blessing. So it’s worth taking a closer look at what Jefferson actually learned about the legal system behind that book.
Jefferson bought his copy in 1765, when he was a young man studying law. Twenty-one years later, he and John Adams sat across from Tripoli’s ambassador in London and asked why the Barbary states kept seizing American ships and enslaving American sailors when the young country had never lifted a finger against them.
The ambassador didn’t mince words. According to the March 28, 1786, letter the two men sent to John Jay, the envoy said the practice “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet” and that nations refusing to acknowledge their authority “were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them.”
Jefferson never forgot that meeting. And as President, he refused Tripoli’s demand for more tribute and sent American warships to the Mediterranean in 1801.
Maybe that’s too much history to hang on one book. Plenty of politicians grab a family heirloom for sentimental reasons and mean nothing more by it. But El-Sayed didn’t mention his grandmother’s copy. He mentioned Jefferson, and Jefferson’s story with that book runs straight through a foreign legal code that claimed the right to wage war on Americans.
George Washington took his oath at Federal Hall in 1789 on a Bible borrowed from a Masonic lodge. John Quincy Adams went another direction in 1825 and placed his hand on a volume of American law, a pointed way of saying the Constitution ruled the room. Both men understood that the symbol mattered.
The Oath Asks for Something El-Sayed Already Pledged Elsewhere
Here’s the part the Left would rather skip. The oath every senator takes promises “true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution, given “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.”
El-Sayed has publicly described a separate obligation he says lasts until the day he dies. Most days, a private religious code and American law never bump into each other. But when they do, the Constitution has to win every single round, and no faith gets an exemption.
Classical Sharia rulings prescribe death for apostasy and for blasphemy against Islam, and several Muslim-majority countries still enforce versions of those laws. The First Amendment protects every American’s right to leave any faith and to criticize any prophet. Those two systems can’t share a throne.
None of that proves El-Sayed wants blasphemy trials in Washington, DC. He says he doesn’t. It means the country deserves a straight answer about which obligation comes first, and he still hasn’t given one.
And Democrats treat even asking the question as hate. The Bulwark branded Republican scrutiny of El-Sayed’s Sharia views “Unapologetic Bigotry” in the closing weeks of the campaign. Funny how that standard only runs one direction. In 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein looked at a Catholic judicial nominee named Amy Coney Barrett and told her, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” Nobody at those outlets fainted over that one.
A New Pattern Takes Shape in the Democrat Party
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took his oath of office in January with his hand on the Quran. Now El-Sayed plans to follow him, and both men climbed to power on the hard-left wing of the Democrat Party, pushing government-run healthcare and the rest of the socialist wish list.
Expect El-Sayed to use his new Senate perch against states that try to keep foreign religious law out of their courtrooms. Maybe he’ll stick to Medicare for All and leave the Oklahomas of the world alone. But his own speech suggests he already knows which fight he wants.
Generations of newcomers kept their faith at home and took the country’s law as their own. That bargain holds when immigration numbers stay manageable and leaders press assimilation. It frays fast when Democrat leaders treat every imported custom as untouchable and every honest question as bigotry.
When El-Sayed raises his right hand in January and promises allegiance without any mental reservation, will he finally tell the country which of his two obligations wins the day they collide?
Sources:
“Abdul El-Sayed Reveals Plan for His Oath of Office: ‘I’ll Swear on the Quran,’” Breitbart
“Abdul El-Sayed Campaign: He Still Follows Sharia Law,” Breitbart
“Revealed: El-Sayed Proclaimed ‘Obligation’ To Follow Sharia Law Until the Day He Dies,” Washington Free Beacon
“El-Sayed Compares Oklahoma Sharia Law Ban to Trail of Tears,” Breitbart
“The American Commissioners to John Jay, 28 March 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives
“GOP Closes Campaign With Unapologetic Bigotry,” The Bulwark