By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-08-19 03:16:13 | Updated at 2026-08-20 03:47:58
1 day ago
Far-left Democrat Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed cited the Quran as the inspiration behind his politics and compared himself to Jesus during a podcast interview in May.
El-Sayed — who abides by Sharia law in his personal life — made the comments in an appearance on the The Progressive Christians Podcast, citing Islam as the force behind his politics while also denying attempting to “push a certain ideology.”
El-Sayed said:
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. There’s this verse in the Quran, Lā ikrāha fī d-dīn, which literally means there’s no compulsion on faith. So if you’re not doing a certain thing out of your faith, compelling people to follow a certain set of faith or set of laws out of your faith — like faith is kind of the thing itself.
So there is no compulsion in religion. 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, but to try to create a level freedom where people have the right to choose how they want to live their lives, if they want to pray at all, how they want to pray, who they want to love, how they want to engage in the world.
Later in the interview, El-Sayed was asked what he thinks about being called a “radical” for promoting socialist policies like “Medicare for all,” with the interviewer asserting that such policies are viewed by “progressive Christians” as “very similar to the teachings of Jesus.”
“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,” he replied in part.
This is not the first time El-Sayed has invoked Jesus while justifying his socialist agenda. Last week, he told leftist podcaster Jennifer Welch the teachings of Jesus were “about upending the system against the richest and most powerful and the ways that they used their power and their money to subjugate other people. Like, that was the essential teaching.”
The argument is often used by leftists and “progressive” Christians to justify allowing government redistribution of wealth in the name of compassion. However, in the Christian faith, Jesus came, not to “upend the system,” but to completely fulfill Mosaic law, live a sinless life, and then die on the cross to pay for the sins of the world, so that those who have faith in him and repent may be reconciled with a holy God and live with Him eternally.
“Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed thinks he’s the second coming of Jesus Christ, here to save America with an extreme socialist agenda,” Republican National Committee (RNC) spokesperson Hunter Lovell told Breitbart News. “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’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.
While El-Sayed has claimed he is “not a socialist,” he is running on a platform backed by socialist lawmakers Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). He has also campaigned with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who claimed America “deserved 9/11.”
A Senate counterterrorism expert also warned that his candidacy “raises homeland security concerns because of family ties to Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups and connections to a Midwest voter-engagement organization the expert said is tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),” Fox News reported.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
