The University of Michigan MSA's own newsletters and board minutes show El-Sayed running recruitment and da'wah as outreach chair, then serving as staff writer and vice president of a chapter that planned a campaign for Tariq Ramadan and weighed a fundraiser for a Hamas-linked charity.
The only episode from his college years to make news this campaign is a single protest. In January 2007, the story goes, he was vice president of the University of Michigan's Muslim Students' Association when members walked out of a campus talk by three self-described former Islamic terrorists, and El-Sayed spoke at their counter-event. "We've done something good today," he said, "and we need to keep that going in the future." Why he felt compelled to organize against an event of former Islamic terrorists reveals more than El-Sayed intended. Like other Islamist propagandists for the Brotherhood, they refuse to even acknowledge the term "Islamic terrorists" because they claim it's a racist conception.
His years at MSA Michigan is a roadmap to his close ties and collaboration with the Brotherhood. The chapter's newsletter, Al-Risalah ("The Message"), and its board minutes, recovered by the IPT, show far more. He sat on the board for at least two of his four years, as outreach chair and then vice president, and in between wrote for the newsletter.
The Brotherhood's 1991 strategy memorandum lists the national MSA second among "our organizations and the organizations of our friends," and a 2007 FBI intelligence assessment calls it "the first formal U.S. MB organization."
Bound to the national MSA
The Michigan chapter was formally subordinate to that national body. Its charter, still posted as its constitution in 2006, provided that "The MSA shall serve as a chapter of the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada ... and the Great Lakes MSA Council" and "shall adhere to the by-laws and constitutions of both of these supervisory entities." If the chapter violated "any Islamic Principles, as interpreted by the National MSA and the MSA Council," and mediation failed, the two bodies had "the right to dissolve the Executive Committee of the local MSA and supervise new elections." The charter called the president the "Emir(a)" and the board a "Council of Consultation," limited membership to those who "[m]ust have attested to the Shahada," and required that candidates be reminded of a hadith on the oath of allegiance: "the oath to obey him in willingness as well as in unwillingness... and that we would not challenge the authority of its rightful holders unless we saw clear kufr."
"In 1983, MSA National gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)," the national body's 2006 website said. Its constitution provided that, if it dissolved, its U.S. assets would go "exclusively to the North America Islamic Trust." Federal prosecutors told a court in 2008 that trial evidence "established that ISNA and NAIT were among those organizations created by the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood."
"Responsible for bringing students into the MSA"
In fall 2004, Al-Risalah listed "Abdulrahman el Sayed" as outreach chair, sharing the post with Nura Sediqe, a role "[r]esponsible for bringing students into the MSA." Minutes list him at no fewer than eight 2004–05 meetings.
The outreach chair and the da'wah
MSA National's own history gave its founding goal as "spreading Islam as students in North America." The Brotherhood's leaders described the MSA as the first of the public organizations through which they meant to carry out their da'wah, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi told an American audience in 1995 that Islam would "conquer America... not through sword but through Da'awa."
At Michigan, outreach was El-Sayed's job. He was the listed contact for the chapter's Annual High School Recruitment in February 2005. On February 1, 2005, he and Sediqe presented the committee's plans: a speaker for the high school day; a study circle on "How to do effective da'wah," the Islamic call to the faith, to "train/change yourself to be better with da'wah and internal da'wah," the latter meaning outreach to less observant Muslims; and "something that changes msa internally. Bring in muslims/non-muslims from the fringe."
"Bring in muslims/non-muslims from the fringe."
- U-M MSA outreach committee plan presented by El-Sayed and Nura Sediqe, board minutes, Feb. 1, 2005
At a November 16, 2004 meeting El-Sayed attended, members discussed a study circle with Yusuf Estes, an American convert and preacher known for his missionary work, which "was supposed to be for non-muslims" and whose "subject was supposed to be a dawah halaqa." The board listed the "IAW Dawah table," staffed during Islam Awareness Week, among its achievements. By spring, the incoming board complained that "[n]obody signs up" for the table and proposed: "Next time have a sign that says ISLAM AWARENESS TABLE out on the diag! People won't simply come up to the table unless they are already Muslim or they know you."
None of this, in itself, is sinister. Da'wah is a religious duty for Muslims, as evangelism is for many Christians, and student religious groups of every faith invite outsiders to learn about them. One Al-Risalah columnist wrote that Muslims are obligated "to tell others about Islam, not convert them." The chapter's records do not show what El-Sayed said at its da'wah sessions, and they do not show that anyone converted.
The significance lies in whose da'wah it was. "By 'settlement of the Dawa'a,'" Brotherhood official Zeid al-Noman said, "the Muslim Brotherhood Dawa'a is meant. It is not meant to spread Islam as spread of Islam is a general thing." The organization the Brotherhood created to carry its da'wah onto American campuses put El-Sayed in charge of bringing new people in.
A campaign for Tariq Ramadan
The first board meeting of El-Sayed's outreach year, on September 21, 2004, which he attended, took up a cause from the national organization. "MSA Natl wants to have a call to action week, Sept 24 to Oct 1 to speak out against the revocation of Tariq Ramadan's Visa in the US," the minutes record. "We need to get UM administration and Student Government to support this."
Ramadan, grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, had been offered a Notre Dame professorship. In July 2004 the State Department revoked his visa, a decision opposed on academic-freedom grounds by scholarly groups as well as Muslim organizations (the minutes titled the item "In Defense of Academic Freedom"); in 2006 it barred him over donations to a Swiss charity the Treasury Department had designated in 2003 for funding Hamas. The exclusion was lifted in 2010.
The same minutes record: "MSA should take a stance openly and fearlessly, and we should take a stance against the injustice in Palestine," adding that "[t]hese are just suggestions in general." In December, the chapter endorsed an Ann Arbor picket of banks identified "as supporters of the IDF."
In March 2005, the chapter sent members, under the heading "Support Divestment!", to a student government vote on investigating university investments in companies doing business with Israel. The resolution failed, 25 to 11. At the March 22 board meeting, which El-Sayed attended, the minutes celebrated: "We created the biggest MSA meeting in the history of MSA meetings."
A dinner for a Hamas-linked charity
The board also weighed a fundraising dinner for KindHearts, a charity in Toledo, Ohio. On December 7, 2004, at a meeting El-Sayed appears to have attended (the attendance list records an "Abdulrahman," and he co-presented another item that day), the political committee proposed it. The minutes describe KindHearts as a "non-profit relief organization helping Palestine and other Muslim countries" and record that the "[o]rganization has no legal problems" and that the "MSA is no jeapordy [sic] by being affiliated with this organization." Members called the dinner "worthwhile and a means of taking direct action in helping Islamic political causes."
On January 18, 2005, with El-Sayed present, members noted that KindHearts "give[s] money to places all over the middle east," asked whether the MSA should "focus [its] resources on a foreign affair," and suggested holding the dinner "through IES as opposed to MSA." The minutes conclude: "We will do this event with having IES sponsor it." The minutes do not identify IES, and no record found by the IPT shows whether the dinner took place.
"Organization has no legal problems... MSA is no jeopardy by being affiliated with this organization."
- U-M MSA board minutes, Dec. 7, 2004, on the proposed KindHearts dinner
Well before the MSA board discussed a KindHearts fundraiser, the charity had been named in a U.S. Senate Finance Committee inquiry into terror financing. On December 22, 2003, Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Max Baucus (D-Mont.) wrote to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson requesting tax filings, donor lists, and audit and criminal investigation records for a list of tax-exempt groups. The letter was made public on January 14, 2004. It said the inquiry was aimed at organizations, "particularly tax-exempt organizations such as charities and foundations, which finance terrorism and perpetuate violence." "Kind Hearts" appeared on the attached list alongside the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, both already shut down by the government, and the Muslim Student Association itself was on the list too. The request made the front page of the Washington Post.
On July 26, 2004, federal prosecutors indicted KindHearts' sole registered professional fundraiser, Mohammad El-Mezain, the former chairman of the Holy Land Foundation. The indictment described him as "a cousin of HAMAS Deputy Political Chief and Specially Designated Terrorist Mousa Abu Marzook" and "an organizer and leader of the criminal activity." He was later convicted.
In February 2006, Treasury froze KindHearts' assets, calling it "the progeny of Holy Land Foundation" and stating that its "officials and fundraisers have coordinated with Hamas leaders." Treasury said Hamas leader Khalid Mishaal had "identified El-Mezain as the Hamas leader for the U.S." and that "[f]ollowing the closure of HLF, U.S.-based Hamas leader El-Mezain transferred his fundraising skills to Kindhearts." Treasury never finalized a designation; in 2009 a federal judge ruled the warrantless freeze unconstitutional, and in a 2012 settlement in which neither side admitted wrongdoing, the government removed KindHearts from its list and the charity, which had already dissolved, agreed to remain closed.
"Regional Unity"
El-Sayed left the board for the 2005–06 school year; the minutes of October 25, 2005, list him among the "Non-Eboarders." By March 2006 he was on the newsletter's masthead as a staff writer.
That month's issue carries his signed op-ed, "Regional Unity." It argues that metro Detroit's Muslim community is crippled by divisions of race, sect and ethnicity. "Further cooperation would lead to harder-impact Da'wa, stronger political voices, more weight with the Muslim community at large," he wrote. He closed: "it remains our responsibility in the Eyes of Allah, given the work of our parents, and the plight of the global Muslim Ummah that we make the Muslim community in metro Detroit the point of nucleation for global unification... unification is a crucial step in healing our ailing Ummah. And Allah knows best."
"We make the Muslim community in metro Detroit the point of nucleation for global unification."
- Abdulrahman El-Sayed, "Regional Unity," Al-Risalah, March 2006
The essay is chiefly about divisions among Detroit's Muslims, and it does not call for an Islamic state. But read beside the Brotherhood's own documents, its program is familiar. Akram's 1991 memorandum spoke of "unifying and directing Muslims' efforts" and "settling our Dawa'" in America; Qaradawi spoke of conquest "through Da'awa." El-Sayed's words are milder, and nothing in the essay endorses the Brotherhood. But they were written by a student who had spent the previous year running his chapter's da'wah and recruitment, in an organization the Brotherhood built for exactly that purpose, and they describe the Brotherhood's method: da'wah and political organizing, built from the campus up, in the service of the worldwide ummah.
"Further cooperation would lead to harder-impact Da'wa, stronger political voices, more weight with the Muslim community at large."
- El-Sayed, "Regional Unity," Al-Risalah, March 2006
"Their ends I do not question"
El-Sayed published his first signed commentary on terrorism, in the Michigan Daily on February 22, 2006. At a February 14 meeting he attended, the board had planned a campus vigil for Jill Carroll, an Ann Arbor native and journalist kidnapped in Baghdad by a group that threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women in U.S. custody were freed.
He called the kidnapping "an utter abomination" and "a heartless and inhumane act," and the kidnappers "twisters of an elegant faith and criminals against humanity." The kidnappers, he wrote, "are undoubtedly enraged to the point of false judgment and unjust action by some factor. To identify this factor, we must consider their own demands: the release of all Iraqi women held in military penitentiaries. While their means remain unjustified, their ends I do not question. Do not these innocent women, like Carroll, deserve release?" "The war in Iraq — an implicit enabler to the capture of Carroll — is also an abomination," he wrote.
"While their means remain unjustified, their ends I do not question."
- El-Sayed on Jill Carroll's kidnappers, Michigan Daily, Feb. 22, 2006
It was an early statement of a pattern: condemnation, followed at once by an explanation locating the cause in American or Western policy. After a man attacked Temple Israel in suburban Detroit in March 2026, El-Sayed condemned the attack and then explained that the attacker had lost relatives in an airstrike in Lebanon: "Hurt people hurt people." In fact, the perpetrator was a relative of Hezbollah terrorists who was been killed by the IDF while on a mission to attack Israel. He later apologized for parts of that response. He never said which parts.
Bin Laden's host, and lawyers for Al-Arian
In September 2005, during El-Sayed's year off the board and before he joined the staff, Al-Risalah published political chair Shimaa Abdel-Fadeel's travel diary of a summer visit to Sudan, during which she "had dinner with the former presidential advisor, Dr. Hassan Al Turabi." Turabi had been secretary general of Sudan's Muslim Brotherhood and leader of the National Islamic Front that grew out of it. "Bin Ladin relocated to Sudan in 1991, where he was welcomed by National Islamic Front (NIF) leader Hassan al-Turabi," a 1996 State Department fact sheet said.
The March 2006 issue that carried "Regional Unity" also carried her column saying Muslims need "more lawyers to defend and stand up for the likes of Sami Al-Arian and Mumia Abu Jamal." The next month Al-Arian, whom a federal judge later called "a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad," pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the group. The Michigan Daily had reported in December 2005 that an MSA member had begun a letter-writing campaign for Al-Arian, who before his arrest "was a frequent visitor to Ann Arbor, often staying at Abdelfadeel's house."
Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, who was shot after pulling over Abu-Jamal's brother during an overnight traffic stop. He is now serving a life sentence.
The Michigan Daily identified Abdel-Fadeel in December 2006 as "political chair of the Muslim Students' Association," which put her on the 2006–07 board on which El-Sayed served as vice president.
Vice president
In his senior year, the chapter's executive committee page listed "President Nura Sediqe" and, directly beneath her, "Vice President - Internal Affairs Abdul Rahman Elsayed."
That year Al-Risalah ran an editorial asserting that Israel's November 2006 operation in Beit Hanoun "was not looking for militants rather it was looking to collectively punish Palestinians." The town, the Israel Defense Forces said, housed numerous launching ramps used to fire Qassam rockets into Israel; during the operation, a woman blew herself up beside Israeli troops in an attack claimed by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.
An Islam Awareness Week recap compared the week to "the Zionist take-over of the Diag." The newsletter promoted the Unity Experiment and printed "an encouragement letter sent to the group by their mentor, Br. Dawud Walid (Executive Director of CAIR-MI)." In a 2012 sermon, Walid would ask, "Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah?" and answer: "They are the Jews, they are the Jews."
In early 2007, Sediqe, then president, praised the Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention in Toronto as "one of the most effective conferences that exist..." She named among its keynote speakers Tariq Ramadan; Siraj Wahhaj, named by prosecutors on a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 1995 "Blind Sheikh" terrorism case (he was never charged, and the lead prosecutor later said he was not a suspect); and Tareq Suwaidan, named on the government's list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case, in its section of "members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood," who, a Saudi prince said in 2013, had described himself as "one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood." At a November 2000 Palestinian convention in Rosemont, Ill., according to a video transcript cited in a 2003 federal court filing, Suwaidan said: "The Jews will meet their end at our hands." Two years before, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had detained and fingerprinted American citizens returning from the same conference, citing intelligence that it "would serve as a possible meeting point for terrorists," an action a federal appeals court upheld in Tabbaa v. Chertoff.
"May Allah extend the baraka"
For at least two years on its board and a third on its newsletter staff, El-Sayed helped lead a chapter of a national organization founded, by the Brotherhood's own account, by its members. He sat at the table as that chapter planned a campaign for the Brotherhood founder's grandson, resolved to take a stance "openly and fearlessly" "against the injustice in Palestine," and heard that a charity whose registered fundraiser was an indicted Hamas financier had "no legal problems."
In March 2018, while running for governor, El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, recorded a video congratulating the chapter on its 50th anniversary. "May Allah extend the [baraka] that you've had for the past fifty years to the next fifty," he said. Baraka is Arabic for "blessing."
Next: Part 4. From 2017 to 2020, El-Sayed spoke at ISNA, CAIR national and chapter banquets and the ICNA-MAS convention, and personally asked audiences to give money to CAIR. He attended a CAIR banquet at which a speaker accused "the Jewish Federation" of funding neo-Nazis, and he told Rep. Ilhan Omar her objection to repeated demands that Muslim officials condemn Hamas was "entirely correct."
Links to all six parts of the series:
Part 1. "Sure. Yeah, Absolutely." The long road to a three-word disavowal
Part 2. "Our Organizations." What the FBI and the Brotherhood's own records say
Part 3. The Ann Arbor Years. Inside the MSA chapter he helped run
Part 4. The Circuit. ISNA, CAIR and ICNA-MAS, 2017–2020
Part 5. The Company He Keeps. A rally, a flotilla organizer, a youth council and Hasan Piker
Part 6. In His Own Words. Israel, Hamas, Iran, the Brotherhood, and ten questions
Steven Emerson is an award-winning investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which maintains one of the world's largest archives on Islamist terrorist networks. He is the author or co-author of eight books on terrorism and national security.
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