Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed argued in 2022 that opposition to Sharia law bans is rooted in white supremacy and compared legal efforts to exclude Islamic law from state courts to some of the darkest chapters in American history, according to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon.
Speaking to the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in October 2022, El-Sayed stated: "You can't understand a Sharia ban without understanding the Trail of Tears." He then invoked white supremacy and said the "same exact forces" were behind Native American removal, the destruction of Black Wall Street, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Oklahoma's effort to bar courts from considering Sharia law.
The remarks drew national attention this week as El-Sayed campaigns for the Democratic nomination in Michigan's 2026 Senate race. The Washington Free Beacon reported the speech and accompanying video of his remarks on August 9, nearly four years after the October 2022 address.
El-Sayed's comparison references Oklahoma's 2010 ballot measure that prohibited state judges from considering Islamic and international law in their rulings. The measure passed with approximately 70 percent of the vote. Similar state-level restrictions on foreign and Islamic law have been enacted in multiple states and have been upheld by courts as constitutional.
The Democratic candidate has also equated opposition to Sharia law with broader patterns of American discrimination. In a 2021 op-ed, since deleted from social media, 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 internment."
