The left-wing Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed launched a new ad campaign last week highlighting his family's "roots in mid-Michigan." The ad features his step-grandparents, Judy and Jan Johnson, lauding his work as Wayne County health director.
Absent from the spot was any mention of the candidate’s maternal half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, the self-described "queer Muslim activist" and professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago who has advocated for a "stateless, communized society" and called to abolish the police. Abdelhadi was arrested for allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper at an anti-ICE protest last year.
Abdelhadi focuses on "gender and sexuality in American Islam." A self-described "Queer Muslim" and "community organizer" who uses the pronouns "she/they," she has been at the center of far-left protests on campus.
The university announced an investigation into her conduct after she condemned the school as a "colonial landlord" and "police force," adding, "like, fuck the University of Chicago, it's evil. Like, you know?" Months later, in October, she was arrested and charged with felony aggravated battery after prosecutors said she "knowingly and intentionally" spit on a state trooper while protesting outside of an ICE facility near the university.
Abdelhadi is the author of the "funky, commie, queer novel" Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune alongside her "bestie," coauthor M.E. O'Brien, a "trans communist" who wrote the 2023 book Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care. The novel is a fictionalized "oral history" of "sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes" who band together to create a "radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse." It depicts a "communized" New York in which police are abolished and the nuclear family is replaced by "caretaking relationships within the commune." It also depicts a Middle East in which Israel is destroyed by a "Final Intifada."
Abdelhadi included herself in the book as a character who helps rioters storm the campus of her "former employer." In a 2024 Vox interview, she called it "very much a theory book in disguise."
"It would be really painful if the state and the market fell," Abdelhadi said. "But is there a future beyond them that might be even better? … We really wanted to imagine a plausible near-future that people could place themselves in and place themselves as the heroes of a revolution and as the inheritors of a better world." Around the same time, in August 2024, Abdelhadi wrote on X, "I wrote an entire novel about transitioning out of capitalism to a stateless, communized society." She also tweeted, "I'm over capitalism, over wage slavery. Over it."
News of Abdelhadi's radicalism comes as El-Sayed faces congresswoman Haley Stevens in a contentious primary to determine who will challenge Republican nominee Mike Rogers in November's general election. El-Sayed is running to Stevens's left but he has said he is "not somebody who is a socialist" and "just believe[s] that capitalism has to be regulated." While Abdelhadi said she was "a proud little sister" when El-Sayed launched his campaign, he has not mentioned her in social media posts or on the campaign trail. He does, however, appear to be aligned with Abdelhadi on some issues.
Both El-Sayed and Abdelhadi, for example, decried the police at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020; El-Sayed said "We do need to defund the police" while Abdelhadi called to "abolish the police," including on school campuses, and wrote, "Good morning, jummuah mubarak and fuck the police." She also denounced a group of "well-dressed upper middle class gays" who held a vigil in New York City in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting because they "lauded the NYPD for 'protecting New Yorkers.'"
Both El-Sayed and Abdelhadi have also criticized Democrats for being insufficiently hostile toward Israel. El-Sayed was part of the "uncommitted" movement in Michigan, pushing Democrats to vote against then-president Joe Biden in the state's 2024 presidential primary over "his disaster in Gaza." Abdelhadi took aim at socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders for condemning Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack.
"The level of disappointment. Hard to believe I still had a Bernie 2020 sticker in my office less than a year ago," she wrote in response to a July 2024 tweet from Sanders pledging to "do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected." Eight months prior, on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, she responded to a Sanders tweet that called the attack "horrifying," writing, "What a disappointment. If you can't stand with a ppl that have been held in an open prison for 16 years finally fighting their oppressors, how can you claim to stand for justice?" Abdelhadi was quoted in the Washington Post in late October 2023 arguing that the Biden White House's support for Israel "destroyed 20-years … worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever."
El-Sayed did not respond to a request for comment on whether Abdelhadi would appear with him on the campaign trail or in an ad. An automated response from Abdelhadi's University of Chicago email address read, "I am traveling abroad, and I will only be checking and responding to emails intermittently between July 18th & August 5th."
Abdelhadi was born in 1989 to El-Sayed's Egyptian mother, Fatten Fathy Mohamed, and Mohamed's second husband, Tawfik Abdelhadi, according to the Michigan Enjoyer. Mohamed and El-Sayed's father, Mohamed El-Sayed, divorced in 1988, and both remarried within months. Abdelhadi has said her "mother is from Egypt and her father is from Palestine, and they met in the United States." She "spent her early childhood in Egypt while also living shortly in Saudi Arabia."
El-Sayed has also recounted spending his "summer holidays with relatives in Egypt" as a teenager, traveling there alone to visit his grandparents and extended family. He identified himself as a citizen of both the United States and Egypt on his academic résumé but now claims he made a mistake. His campaign told the Washington Free Beacon in January that he was "told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt" but was "unable to find any documentation to verify this claim."
El-Sayed and Abdelhadi have also condemned the treatment of Muslims in the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
El-Sayed wrote a piece marking the 11-year anniversary of the attacks headlined, "Health of Muslims, Arab Americans another victim of 9/11." It argued that the "discrimination and marginalization" of American Muslims after the attacks led to "ethnicity-related stress" that produced measurable health consequences, including a higher proportion of premature and low birth weight babies. It did not include a 2008 study El-Sayed coauthored on the topic, which found "no difference" in the rates of premature or low birth weight babies among Muslim mothers before and after Sept. 11, the Free Beacon reported.
Abdelhadi, for her part, appeared on the Chinese state media network CGTN in 2021 to discuss the "impact of 9/11 on Muslim Americans." She said "right-wing politicians and others … sort of compete with each other to see who can be more xenophobic towards Muslims," something she said "just reflects a broader culture of xenophobia and white supremacy in this country." Two years later, in 2023, she told the Chicago Sun-Times that "anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiments are 'deeply rooted' in American culture."
Abdelhadi has also argued that U.S. politicians use "women's oppression in Muslim societies to justify American intervention."
"Treating gender inequality as a problem unique to the Muslim world accomplished two goals," she wrote in 2016. "First, it helped the Right escape accountability for women's oppression within the United States. Second, it lent their profit-driven imperialism a moral weight." More recently, Abdelhadi conducted an interview for In These Times headlined "New Book Helps Organizers Become Better Lovers and Comrades" and penned a poem called "Parallel Lives" for a collection titled Homosexual Intifada: A Queer Palestinian Anthology.
