Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardiri, former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party in Egypt, took to the Brotherhood's official publication Ikhwan Online this week to praise Abdulrahman El-Sayed's Michigan Senate victory as proof that Muslims could work "from within the political system." Not from within the Egyptian political system. The American one.
The Muslim Brotherhood doesn't usually issue press releases about U.S. midterm elections. They made an exception for this one.
El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate seat with 52.5% of the vote, defeating former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), who pulled 45.6%. The seat opened when Democrat Gary Peters announced his retirement, and El-Sayed dispatched primary rival Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI). He is now the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate.
Al-Dardiri isn't some anonymous social media commenter. He served as the official spokesman for Mohamed Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party — the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm that governed Egypt until the military removed Morsi in 2013. Al-Dardiri now works as a professor in Minnesota. Federal Election Commission records show he donated $500 to El-Sayed's campaign in June. El-Sayed reportedly received more than $25,000 from six donors with ties to Brotherhood-linked networks.
El-Sayed has denied the connection directly. "I have never been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, I never will be a member," he told reporters. Fine. But the Brotherhood doesn't seem to have gotten that memo. When an organization that has spent decades building political influence across the Middle East publicly calls your election a "model" for working within a foreign political system, the denial needs to be a lot more specific than "I'm not a member."
The pattern of Brotherhood-adjacent figures treating El-Sayed's win as an organizational achievement rather than an individual one is alarming. President Trump was considerably less diplomatic, calling El-Sayed a "jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member" during the campaign.
Then there's the timing. Rep. Ilhan Omar celebrated the win with a public "Alhamdulillah" — the same Ilhan Omar who has faced years of scrutiny over her own antisemitism and preference for her home country of Somalia over America. And whose immigration fraud investigation remains unresolved. Within 24 hours of the results being certified on November 4, you had a Brotherhood official writing strategy memos about the victory and Omar publicly thanking God for it.
Al-Dardiri didn't praise El-Sayed's policy platform. He praised the method — working "from within the political system."
That's not an endorsement. That's a blueprint.