Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a 2009 interview with The New York Times that he felt religiously obligated to follow Sharia-compliant practices, a resurfaced interview reveals.
"Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way," El-Sayed stated at the time. "Not because of fear but because of obligation."
El-Sayed, who was a medical student then, was discussing his decision to seek a Sharia-compliant mortgage for a condo he was purchasing in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sharia law generally prohibits adherents from taking out loans that charge interest. A common alternative for Muslim Americans is a long-term payment plan that adds value to the purchase price instead of charging interest.
El-Sayed's campaign has stated that he believes in the separation of church and state. "While he personally lives by the rules of his faith, as many Americans of various faiths do, Abdul opposes any effort by any religious community to write their faith laws into the laws of our country," campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Washington Free Beacon.
El-Sayed has previously spoken out against bans on Sharia law, arguing that such efforts are rooted in white supremacy. In 2022, he said, "The same exact forces that drove Native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago, and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, those forces are alive and well today."
He has also maintained associations with religious figures linked to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has made controversial statements, including calling Jewish people "termites."