Abdul el Sayed just won the most expensive Senate primary in American history, beating Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) by a single point, surviving roughly $65 million in outside spending. He is now the first Muslim American to win a major political party’s Senate nomination, and stands a few months away from becoming the first Muslim senator in American history. El Sayed’s race against Mike Rogers will possibly decide control of the Senate. Before the election, voters should know of some of the institutions that helped deliver el Sayed’s primary victory.
Several of these institutions appear in a report our organization published in March documenting the Islamic Republic of Iran’s network of influence and indoctrination in the United States. El Sayed has spent the past year campaigning within this very network.
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On June 6, el Sayed headlined the grand opening of the Islamic Institute of America’s new $20 million mosque in Dearborn Heights, calling it an honor to be there and offering congratulations to its founding imam, Hassan Qazwini. The institute is run by the Qazwini family, an Iraqi Shia clerical family whose highly politicized sermons call homosexuality a disorder “against human nature,” say the mass movement for freedom in Iran is a hoax, claim ISIS was created by Israel, and more. Hassan Qazwini has made so many controversial statements that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign denounced his “dangerous, hateful” rhetoric as “toxic and offensive.” Last month, Qazwini praised Ali Khamenei during a sermon on the occasion of the dead supreme leader’s funeral, while his relative and a fellow imam at the institute, Ahmed Qazwini, glorified Khamenei for “sacrificing” his life “against the Zionists.”
In the final days of the primary, Qazwini used his Friday sermons to instruct congregants that voting for el Sayed was a “religious duty” and an opportunity to “deal the Zionist a blow,” referring to Stevens. He further asserted that her Senate campaign was a “plot being schemed by the pro-Israel lobby.” This came from a sermon at a mosque el Sayed personally helped inaugurate.
Qazwini isn’t the only case. Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi of the Islamic House of Wisdom, an early donor to el Sayed who has appeared alongside him as recently as May, spent the 1980s as an ideological indoctrination officer in the Islamic Republic’s navy and rose to serve as the political-ideological head of the regime’s Bushehr naval base. In September 2025, he met with the Islamic Republic’s president and foreign minister in New York. After U.S. strikes killed Khamenei in February, Elahi held memorial services and described the strike on “our leader” as evil.
El Sayed’s political stances have been noticeably affected by these relationships. On a March strategy call, he told campaign staff he would not comment on Khamenei’s death. Instead, el Sayed said on the call, he would “just go straight to pedophilia, frankly … I’ll just be like, ‘Pedophile president decides that he doesn’t like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.’” A man campaigning to be in the U.S. Senate, which helps oversee American armed services, intelligence, foreign relations, homeland security, and veterans’ affairs, declined to say a single word about the death of a dictator responsible for the murder of hundreds of American servicemembers. That same month, officials in Tehran were deflecting the truth in the same way. Responding to Khamenei’s death, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared that the regime was strong and would not be deterred by “Epstein’s gang.”
Michiganders wondering what this looks like post-election can look to New York. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made repeated visits to the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens, a mosque funded by the Alavi Foundation, now the Amir Kabir Foundation, the New York nonprofit organization that federal prosecutors have identified as a front for the Islamic Republic. Al-Khoei’s imam, Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, has claimed the Holocaust death toll “has been exaggerated” and praised Hamas after Oct. 7, 2023, for making a “big difference.” Al-Sahlani also attended the June 6 inauguration of Qazwini’s new mosque in Dearborn Heights alongside el Sayed. These interconnected networks are gaining political capital and influence throughout the country.
But Muslim Americans are broadly among the most educated and civically integrated communities in the country, and the majority of them want nothing to do with their nation of origin’s ideological exports, especially when escaping these ideologies is often their reason for coming to America. This dynamic is as true in Michigan as it is in any other part of the U.S. Rogers shouldn’t only spend the coming months sounding the alarm about el Sayed’s socialism, because there are even more insightful questions he can ask of his opponent.
WITH ABDUL EL SAYED WIN, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATS FALL TO THE MAMDANI LEFT
Will he condemn the glorification of Khamenei in the mosques that told their congregants it was their religious duty to vote for him? Will he reject the endorsement of an imam who has publicly condemned homosexuality as a mental disorder? Will he repudiate the smearing of a fellow Democrat as a “puppet” by a mosque he helped inaugurate? Will he acknowledge that clerics trained by the Islamic Republic’s seminary system are agents of foreign influence, regardless of their support for him? If el Sayed cannot answer these and other questions plainly, Michiganders should ask themselves why.
In November, a Rogers victory will likely bring overdue investigations of these centers and their documented ties to the Islamic Republic, a regime that just murdered tens of thousands of its own people and is currently at war with the U.S. An el Sayed victory would teach Tehran that its model works, and that its talking points can now flow from its Qom seminary to the ear of a U.S. senator. Expect the regime’s influence to grow accordingly, and for similar candidates to start sprouting up in Texas, Virginia, and other locations, as they have already started to in Michigan and New York.
Tymahz Toumadje is a senior policy analyst at the National Union for Democracy in Iran. Nader Sadeghi is a policy analyst at NUFDI.
