The left-wing candidate in the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat, Abdul El-Sayed, compared a move to ban Sharia law in Oklahoma to the Trail of Tears.
"You can't understand a Sharia ban without understanding the Trail of Tears," El-Sayed told the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in October of 2022. "You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding white supremacy."
El-Sayed, whose remarks have not been previously reported, was commenting on a 2010 Oklahoma ballot measure that prohibited judges from considering Islamic and international law in their rulings. He described the initiative as a part of the "history of racism" in Oklahoma and across the country, drawing a parallel between Sharia law bans and the forces behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1921 Tulsa massacre.
"I don't have to tell you that 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, that those forces are alive and well today," he said.
Sharia, or Islamic religious law, forms the basis for the governing codes of Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, among other Muslim-majority countries. In Afghanistan, the Taliban's implementation of Sharia law forbids girls from attending school past the age of 12 and mandates that women cover their entire faces and bodies in public at all times. In Iran, laws are similarly repressive. Morality police in 2022, for instance, beat to death 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for failing to fully cover her hair in public, an episode that sparked nationwide protests.
A federal appeals court ultimately ruled the Oklahoma ballot measure unconstitutional, but seven other states have banned courts from considering foreign or religious laws, including Sharia law. Republican Sens. John Cornyn (Texas) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) introduced a bill in October to "prohibit the application of Sharia Law in the United States."
News of El-Sayed's remarks comes after revelations of other historical comparisons the Democrat has made, specifically between the 9/11 terrorist attack and the war on terror. In since-deleted posts on X and a 2021 op-ed, El-Sayed argued that both were "perpetrated ignorantly" and driven by "tribalistic grievance," the Washington Free Beacon reported last month. In his op-ed, El-Sayed wrote that the war on terror was an "echo of the worst of our history—the decimation of Native Americans, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow segregation, Japanese interment [sic]."
It is unclear whether CAIR—whose leader, Nihad Awad, said he was "happy to see" Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel—paid El-Sayed for his 2022 speech. According to a June financial disclosure report, the candidate received at least $5,000 for a speech to CAIR-Oklahoma at some point within the prior two years.
El-Sayed has spoken to other pro-terror groups in addition to CAIR, which Govs. Greg Abbott (R., Texas) and Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) designated a foreign terrorist organization in late 2025. In May of last year, El-Sayed appeared at an Islamist convention with speakers who have called for the destruction of Israel, praised Hamas leaders, and expressed "euphoria" over the Oct. 7 attack. In September, he spoke at another anti-Israel conference alongside Hamas sympathizers. The far-left candidate headlined an October fundraiser hosted by an Arab-American PAC whose leader called for Israeli Jews to be sent "back to Poland."
El-Sayed did not respond to a request for comment.
