Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once called Tariq Ramadan’s work “excellent,” even as Ramadan carried Muslim Brotherhood lineage, a U.S. terror-tied visa bar, and later an 18-year rape sentence.
Left-wing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan. Years earlier, as a Rhodes Scholar, he pointed voters and listeners toward a very specific academic model.
In a 2011 podcast, El-Sayed said he drew personal inspiration from Tariq Ramadan, then a prominent Oxford figure. Ramadan is the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. The George W. Bush administration barred him from working in the United States in 2004 over donations to charities linked to Hamas. A Paris criminal court later sentenced him to 18 years in prison for raping three women.
Washington Free Beacon reporting laid out the record and El-Sayed’s own words. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
That choice of “inspiration” now sits beside El-Sayed’s recent denials of any family connection to the Brotherhood and a string of other campaign flashpoints voters keep seeing.
El-Sayed began his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University in 2009. That same year, Oxford appointed Ramadan to a chair in Contemporary Islamic Studies.
Two years later, on the SenseSustainability podcast, El-Sayed explained his reading list. He framed Ramadan as essential for anyone thinking about Islam in the West.
He told the host:
"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. 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."
Ramadan was not a neutral scholar of comparative religion. His family history and public record ran through the Brotherhood’s founding network and later European organizing hubs.
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. After al-Banna’s death, his son-in-law Said Ramadan emerged as a top Brotherhood leader, went into exile, and in 1960 founded the Geneva Islamic Centre. Analysts have described that center as the Brotherhood’s main European headquarters, one of a score of similar outposts built with Saudi financial support. Tariq Ramadan is Said’s son. His brother Hani later led the Geneva center. Public filings obtained by French journalist Caroline Fourest listed Tariq himself as an administrator there, even as he denied an official role.
In 1994 Ramadan wrote a University of Geneva thesis on al-Banna. The Brotherhood later spawned Hamas in the 1980s. That lineage is not a smear invented on the campaign trail. It is the family tree Ramadan himself studied and the institutional map European researchers have traced for decades.
In 2003 the U.S. Treasury Department designated two European charities, the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians and the Association de Secours Palestinien, as terror fundraising organizations. The Bush administration revoked Ramadan’s work visa in 2004, citing his donations to those groups. He had been scheduled to teach at Notre Dame. The bar kept him from working in the United States.
European institutions did not always look the other way either. Erasmus University in the Netherlands dropped him as a visiting professor in 2009 after discovering he worked for PressTV, the Iranian state-controlled outlet.
Ramadan’s public arguments tracked a hard line on several cultural flashpoints. In a 2003 televised debate with then-French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, he refused to endorse a ban on stoning. French journalist Caroline Fourest reported his description of homosexuality as “a disturbance, a dysfunction, an imbalance.” A 2003 article of his on “Jewish intellectuals” drew an accusation of anti-Semitism from prominent French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Voters weighing El-Sayed’s judgment can set that record next to other scrutiny over his ISNA convention appearance and the company he has kept on the trail.
Accusations of sexual misconduct mounted. Ramadan left Oxford in 2017 after claims involving minors. More women later accused him of rape. He called the allegations part of a “campaign of slander clearly orchestrated by my longtime adversaries.”
A Paris criminal court rejected that defense. In March the court sentenced him to 18 years in prison for several counts of rape. Judges found him fit to attend trial. He broke a court order, left France for Switzerland, and did not appear.
That is the man El-Sayed once urged people to read for guidance on “reconciling Islam and Western ideals.”
El-Sayed now faces a different set of questions about his own family’s history. On a Sunday interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, he said his family had no ties at all to the Muslim Brotherhood.
NBC’s Tom Llamas followed up on Wednesday. He pointed to earlier Free Beacon reporting on 2012 and 2013 tweets from El-Sayed’s sister, Eman Abdelhadi. Those posts celebrated their mother’s college activism in the organization and said relatives had been “jailed” for ties 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 had been asked a direct 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 these conversations with my mother” and dismissed the tweets as “hearsay evidence from a tweet.” He added, “This is not serious.”
The same candidate once called Mohamed Soltan, a son of a senior Muslim Brotherhood official, jailed in Egypt over 2013 protests aimed at restoring Mohamed Morsi, his “friend” in a since-deleted Substack post. That pattern of association keeps colliding with the clean break he now sells on television.
It also collides with other campaign headaches, including Jewish outreach that featured activists tied to a group that called Hamas attackers “Palestinian fighters”.
In the 2020 documentary How to Fix a Primary, filmed around his earlier gubernatorial run, cameras caught a bookshelf in what appeared to be the living room of El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku. Reporting described titles and authors that raised the same ideological flags, works connected to Brotherhood-adjacent networks and even writings by an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
El-Sayed said he wanted to “keep the shot secular.” The footage still aired. The books were real. The desire to scrub the frame said as much as the shelf itself.
Michigan voters have watched similar credibility problems pile up. County records undercut his medical-debt claims in one recent fight, and his $700 million medical debt boast collapsed under those records. Separate audio caught him downplaying a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue. Rival Democrats have even told him to cut ties with far-left streamer Hasan Piker as the Senate race tightened.
Each episode is different. The habit is the same: soft-pedal hard associations, then act shocked when anyone asks a follow-up.
Ramadan’s own trajectory supplies the clearest warning label. Grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder. Son of the man who built the Geneva hub. Visa revoked by a Republican administration over Hamas-linked charity donations. Dropped by a European university over Iranian state media work. Sentenced in France to 18 years for rape. El-Sayed still put him on a 2011 recommended list and called the work excellent.
He now tells national television his family has “no ties” while calling sister tweets hearsay and declining to discuss his mother’s activism. His campaign stayed silent when asked to explain the Ramadan praise.
Senate candidates do not get to curate only the flattering chapters of their intellectual history. When a contender elevates a Brotherhood scion barred from America over terror-finance ties, then shrugs off family questions as unserious, voters get to judge the pattern for themselves, especially after resurfaced audio showed him downplaying a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue and after fellow Democrats publicly urged him to ditch toxic allies.
Michigan is not required to treat “excellent” as a synonym for “safe.”
Primary voters can decide whether a candidate who once promoted Tariq Ramadan’s project is the right messenger for constitutional order, secure communities, and honest accounting of radical networks. The record is already on the table.