Why America’s first Muslim senator is a watershed moment - The Independent

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Every Muslim who grew up in the West in the wake of September 11 knows a version of the question: “Are you one of us, or one of them?” On Tuesday, it was put to the voters of Michigan by the President of the United States, no less, about a 42-year-old doctor named Abdul El-Sayed, born and bred in the state – and they answered by making him the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate.

Consider how the question was asked. Nine days before polling, Donald Trump stood in Port Huron, Michigan, and called El-Sayed a “jihadist” who would need “a metal detector” before entering the Senate. He brought the father of a man killed on Flight 93 on stage to compare the election to 9/11. “Michigan needs to stand up and fight, just like Todd did, to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said. In the final candidate debate, Michigan’s Republican candidate Mike Rogers asked El-Sayed whether he was “for America” or “for terrorist groups overseas”. There is no evidence that El-Sayed has any link to the Muslim Brotherhood, but the accusation was never meant to be proved. It was meant to make voters wonder whether a Muslim could be trusted.

As a British Muslim, I have felt it myself. I was born in Baku, raised in Ukraine and Britain, with a family from Afghanistan, and I worked in Whitehall as a special adviser on Afghan resettlement. I was trusted with sensitive work, and still had to prove, more often than my colleagues, that my background was useful rather than suspect.

That is why El-Sayed’s victory is a watershed. For twenty-five years, calling a Muslim a security risk has cost American politicians nothing. A president said it as loudly as it can be said, and this time the voters made him pay for it.

Campaigning in Detroit the day before Trump arrived, Barack Obama said of the attacks on El-Sayed: “We have seen this movie before. I starred in it.” He meant the birther lie, the years of Republicans insisting that a man with a foreign name and a Kenyan father was not really American.

That lie launched Trump’s political career, and the rage behind it carried him through Joe Biden’s presidency and back to the White House. It was never a disagreement about policy but about who gets to belong. Michigan, where Trump won Dearborn and its Arab-American voters in 2024 over Gaza, has now answered.

Michigan was not alone. Texas elected its first Democratic senator since 1988, Kansas its first since 1932, and South Carolina flipped, too. New Hampshire sent the first openly gay man to the Senate, Minnesota the first Native woman, and Georgia and New Mexico chose the first Black woman and the first Native woman ever to govern a state. Republicans lost the Senate.

As a woman from an ethnic minority in Britain, what matters to me about El-Sayed is not his background, but the fact that he was judged for what he stood for. He ran on healthcare and prices, and he will now be judged on whether he delivers them. The Israel question will follow him into every room, including the Foreign Relations Committee he wants to join, and if he gets it wrong, I think he will simply be blamed as a senator rather than as a Muslim. That is the real success. The first of any background to hold an office carries the hopes and fears of everyone who shares it. The moment that burden lifts, and the job becomes simply a job, is the moment a country has changed.

Midterms punish the party in power, and Tuesday settles nothing for good. But this election was a repudiation of the othering that has spread through the Trump years, and even from Britain it is possible, just for today, to enjoy the feeling. A president told Americans to fear a man because of his name – and they elected him anyway.

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