Last month, the Guardian ran a long profile of the 32 year-old Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor born to Egyptian immigrants, who is campaigning for Governor of Michigan. The article quite unabashedly branded the young would-be politician as “the new Obama”, a “progressive hero” with soaring rhetoric struggling in a state that’s been hit with no shortage of issues and filled with a d
eeply dissatisfied populace. Unlike Obama, El-Sayed is actually a Muslim. A pretty devout one, in fact, who prays several times a day. People talk of a politician who you’d “want to have a beer with”. Since the Koran forbids alcohol consumption, this cancels out El-Sayed.
El-Sayed has been campaigning in regions of his home state that pretty solidly voted for Trump, and are inclined to be pretty hostile to what would be America’s first Muslim governor. In the article, the author, Drew Philp, talked about how in these regions he was introduced by a transgender man, representing the “progressive” image that El-Sayed is pretty blatantly courting. In the regions where he’s campaigning, plenty are wondering how he feels about Sharia law. His response is that he supports the separation of church and state, and wouldn’t take away anybody else’s right to pray. It’s a nice response, but dodges the question. If he’s as devout a Muslim as he claims, then many are wondering how El-Sayed can support secular government. I suppose it’s the same reason that some Jews eat pork and some Christians kill.
While Philp writes nice things about El-Sayed, there are other things that he omits. For example, one of his most enthusiastic supporters is Women’s March organizer and vocal jihad/sharia law advocate Linda Sarsour. His father in-law is a former president and current board member of the Michigan chapter of the terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In med school, El-Sayed received a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship (guess who they’re related to), leading some to suspect that he’s being groomed and funded by the Soros family. Even so, Philp’s portrait does reveal that El-Sayed could very well be a new Obama: a young anti-establishment politician with soaring rhetoric spearheading progressive ideals.