In a 2009 New York Times interview about his Sharia-compliant mortgage, El-Sayed, then a 24-year-old medical student, said, “Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation.” In August 2026, his campaign confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that he still follows Sharia in his personal life.
Speaking to CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter in October 2022, El-Sayed linked the forces behind the state’s ballot measure banning Sharia to those behind the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa race massacre and the Oklahoma City bombing. “I don’t have to tell you that the same exact forces that drove native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago, and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, that those forces are alive and well today,” he said.
