8 things Islamophobic attack ads won’t tell you about El-Sayed

By MNTV Staff Writer

To much of the country, Abdul El-Sayed arrived as a set of labels: the democratic socialist doctor, the Bernie Sanders ally, the Muslim candidate President Donald Trump has smeared as a “jihadist.”

But the 41-year-old Democrat who could become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate — and who turns 42 on Oct. 31, days before Michigan votes — has a backstory that rarely makes the attack ads.

He was a three-sport jock who captained lacrosse at Oxford. At Bloomfield Hills Andover High School, the son of an Egyptian immigrant captained the wrestling, football and lacrosse teams. He kept playing lacrosse at the University of Michigan, and later, as a Rhodes Scholar, captained Oxford’s men’s lacrosse team — earning a “full blue,” the university’s highest athletic honor. A Muslim kid from metro Detroit leading Oxford onto the lacrosse pitch is not the image his critics tend to paint.

Bill Clinton pointed him toward public service. El-Sayed graduated from Michigan in 2007 Phi Beta Kappa and with highest distinction, and gave the student commencement address. The keynote speaker that day was former President Bill Clinton, who, by El-Sayed’s account, urged him afterward to consider a life in public service.

He’s a doctor who doesn’t practice. El-Sayed earned a DPhil in public health at Oxford and an MD from Columbia, backed by prestigious Rhodes and Soros fellowships, and once considered becoming a neurosurgeon. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. But he never completed a medical residency and is not licensed to practice — his “Dr.” comes from the degrees, not a clinic. By his late 20s he was an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia, where he built the school’s first course on systems science in population health.

He ran a big-city health department at 30. In 2015, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed him to lead the city’s health department — making him, at 30, the youngest health official in a major American city. The department had been gutted and privatized after Detroit’s 2012 bankruptcy, and El-Sayed was tasked with rebuilding it from almost nothing. Among the programs he is proudest of: free eyeglasses for Detroit public school children. He also tested schools for lead after the Flint water crisis and pushed back on sulfur dioxide emissions from a Marathon refinery.

He’s a published author and podcast host. El-Sayed co-edited an academic textbook on systems science, wrote the memoir-cum-manifesto “Healing Politics” (2020) and co-authored “Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide” (2021). Since 2019 he has hosted “America Dissected,” a politics-and-public-health podcast produced by Crooked Media.

His faith shows up in unexpected places. A practicing Muslim, El-Sayed wrote in his Rhodes Scholarship application that his religion teaches that to save one life is to save all of humanity — a line, drawn from the Quran, that he has said shaped his path into medicine and public health.

He married at 21 — to someone on a strikingly similar path. El-Sayed met Sarah Jukaku as a fellow University of Michigan student, and the two married in 2006 while he was still an undergraduate. Jukaku went on to earn a master’s at Oxford and an MD at Columbia — mirroring his own route — and is now a psychiatrist in Ann Arbor, where she opened her own practice in 2024. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she has appeared in his campaign videos, once describing how she leaned on her union after medical complications following childbirth. The couple have two daughters, Emmalee and Serene.

He’s a card-carrying union member several times over. El-Sayed has belonged to the SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers and the National Writers Union — a detail that fits a campaign built around labor and health care.

El-Sayed is a genuine progressive who lost his first race — the 2018 Michigan governor’s primary, to Gretchen Whitmer — before returning to public health as Wayne County’s health director. His politics draw fierce opposition from right-wing ecosystem, and this cycle he has been the target of some of the ugliest rhetoric of the Islamophobic campaign. But the fuller picture — the wrestler-turned-epidemiologist, the Oxford blue, the health official who put glasses on schoolkids — is the one that tends to get lost between the headlines.