Abdul El-Sayed said on Meet the Press on Sunday that neither he nor any of his family members have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that spawned Hamas. But the far-left Senate candidate’s half-sister has suggested otherwise, boasting on social media that her family "has long been" Muslim Brotherhood and that some have been "jailed" over their membership in the group.
Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, wrote openly about her family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in social media posts in 2012 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon found.
"My family has long been MB," Abedlhadi wrote on June 24, 2012, days after Egypt elected Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi as president. "I have had family jailed for being a part of it," she wrote on July 3, 2013. "Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe" she said.
Abdelhadi’s Egyptian family is seemingly the same as El-Sayed’s. Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, emigrated from Egypt in the late 1970s and married El-Sayed’s father. After they divorced, Elkomy married Abdelhadi’s father, who was Palestinian.
Those revelations seemingly contradict El-Sayed’s assurances in an interview on Meet the Press that neither he nor his family have connections to the Brotherhood, which was formed in Egypt in 1928 and spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s.
"You don’t have any ties, and your family doesn’t?" asked Kristen Welker.
"No," El-Sayed said twice.
El-Sayed’s familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood run through his mother, Elkomy, who at one point worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was sanctioned for funding al-Qaeda. The Treasury Department named the group a specially designated terrorist organization in 2004 for providing financial and logistical support to terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and Hamas. Court documents filed by U.S. officials named Elkomy more than a dozen times in connection with the cash transfers.
Elkomy divorced El-Sayed’s father in the mid-1980s, after El-Sayed was born, and gave birth to Abdelhadi—who has a different father—five years later.
Abdelhadi lived with their mother, while El-Sayed lived with his father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University. According to Abdelhadi, their mother adhered strictly to her Arab roots.
"She insisted on never speaking to us in English or responding if we spoke to her in it," Abdelhadi wrote on X.
El-Sayed, who has twice claimed to have "dual citizenship" in Egypt, has faced growing questions about his views on the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and other adversaries.
"He's so close to the people who are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood," Republican candidate Mike Rogers said during last week’s Senate debate. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, is on the board of the Islamic Society of North America, known as the public face of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. The group was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the landmark 2007 terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
El-Sayed also expressed support for the Muslim Brotherhood after Morsi’s 2012 election. He signed an open letter that year with other Egyptian-American leaders that called on the Muslim Brotherhood to "purge the media and police."
In addition to denying links to the Brotherhood, El-Sayed evaded questions about whether he would vote to designate it a terrorist organization, most recently in a Fox News interview last week. Fox News host Martha MacCallum pointed out that senior leaders in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood called for violent attacks on the United States and its partners after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
"Any organization engaged in political violence or calling for political violence is engaged in terrorism," El-Sayed told MacCallum.
The Trump administration designated the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest branch, as a terrorist organization in January over its plans to help Hamas. And a bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), has introduced legislation to designate the entire organization as a terrorist group.
It is unclear which El-Sayed family members on his mother’s side are Brotherhood members and whether El-Sayed himself has met any of them. El-Sayed has written and talked about visiting Egypt during summers in his childhood. Around 2 percent of Egyptians are members of the Muslim Brotherhood, also known as Ikhwan, though around one-third of Egyptians have a favorable view of the group.
Abdelhadi, who was arrested for assaulting a police officer at an anti-ICE protest in Chicago last year, indicated in her social media posts that she remained in close contact with her Brotherhood relatives and hosted one Brotherhood-linked relative during a visit to the United States.
"Asked my Aunt about the MB when she was visiting the US, was surprised by respect for civil liberties, women, religious minorities," she wrote on June 24, 2012.
"Conversations with my #MB family in Egypt revealed respect for individual liberties & secular state," she wrote on July 5, 2013.
It is unclear whether El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood on his father’s side of the family. In his autobiography, El-Sayed wrote that his father emigrated to the United States in 1978 in part because he "had to leave" Egypt over his "political agitation" against Egypt’s military dictatorship. El-Sayed has also said his father left Egypt because he believed "he could express his religion in America better than he could in Egypt at the time."
El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first senator known to have Muslim Brotherhood family members.
