Growing up in Portage, Mich., Aisha Siddiqui said she was frequently in spaces where she couldn’t help but notice how different she was from others.
“I was a very shy and nervous kid and already very insecure and just being the only girl of color, sometimes the only girl who had hijab on her head,” made her feel alienated, she said.
That feeling was paired with a sense of being somehow responsible for everyone else who was like her. “As a Muslim,” Siddiqui, who is now a sophomore at the University of Michigan, explained, “You're expected to condemn and be able to carry the burdens of everything that every single Muslim has done at once.”
It’s because of that vexxing double bind that she found Abdul El-Sayed’s historic win in last week’s election to be monumental: “[El-Sayed] brings that American-Muslim identity to the forefront and kind of shows that you can be both at once and you can be enough in both identities.”
For many Muslims, seeing the physician and public health administrator become the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate feels like a moment for collective pride – especially following a campaign riddled with Islamophobic claims and xenophobic tropes.
That sense of pride was visceral following Friday prayer in a side room of the student union at the University of Michigan – and perhaps only more so because El-Sayed served as the vice president of the Muslim Student Association.
“His roots are here,” said Hamza Said, a junior. “He was in the same room praying with us. He was in the same room putting his shoes on and going out and going to classes.”
Said felt especially moved by El-Sayed's visit to Friday prayers last year when he made a short speech and talked with students.
“I've never really had any person in government that I could be like, ‘He's the same as me. He comes from the same place. He has the same values,’” Said said, who noted El-Sayed, like him, is Egyptian-American and studied pre-med. “I think one of the most inspirational people who I've ever met.”
Many could also relate to some of the negative sentiments that trailed El-Sayed throughout his candidacy – including the repeated suggestion that his name somehow undermined his ability to serve in Congress.
“I grew up in a majority white community where people had trouble pronouncing my name,” said Abdullah Ali, a senior studying astronomy. “So my name means a lot to me. It was a core piece in what helped me form my sense of self. And so all of the rhetoric surrounding [El-Sayed’s] name especially was very personal to me.”
Ali added that he found the focus on El-Sayed’s name to be “bizarre,” adding that his opponents seemed keen to suggest his name meant he had some kind of “ulterior motives” to running for office.
But Ali said he didn’t see the same kind of dismissive negativity when he talked to voters. He knocked on doors as a volunteer canvasser and said he had almost no negative interactions with people.
“The few that I did have were almost entirely about his policy and never about his identity. And that was very touching to me – that real people like that don't carry that kind of hate in their hearts,” Ali said.
For many Muslims, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 led to a sort of work hard and keep your head down ethos. But amidst increased surveillance and heightened scrutiny that followed, Muslims began to take a different tact – engaging in civic life and indeed, running for public office.
El-Sayed is one of a growing number of Muslims elected to public office across the country.
When he took the stage in Detroit on election night, El-Sayed began by saying his full name – Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed – and pronounced it as it’s meant to be said instead of the shortened, anglicized way he said it in political ads or campaign stops.
That moment was full of meaning for many, including Aisha Siddiqui.
“It just also goes to show that we don't always have to be digestible to the media and make ourselves smaller and confine ourselves to certain limits in space,” she said. “He can be Abdulrahman and still be our senator and still be an American and still provide for us the things that he promised us.”
Michigan Public’s Rob Hess contributed to this story.
