Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once named Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, as an academic inspiration. Ramadan later received an 18 year prison sentence in France for raping three women.

El-Sayed praised Ramadan during a 2011 interview with the SenseSustainability podcast. He recommended Ramadan as one of three authors who inspired him and said that “a lot of his work is excellent.”

Ramadan is the son of Said Ramadan, who married al-Banna’s daughter and became a leading Muslim Brotherhood figure following al-Banna’s death. El-Sayed’s praise now faces renewed scrutiny as questions mount about his knowledge of his own family’s reported connections to the organization.

Ramadan had been scheduled to teach at Notre Dame, but the George W. Bush administration revoked his work visa in 2004. The decision cited donations he made to two Swiss and French-based charities linked to Hamas.

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Those groups were the Committee for Charity and Support for the Palestinians and the Association de Secours Palestinien. The Treasury Department designated them as terror fundraising organizations in 2003.

Oxford University appointed Ramadan chair of Contemporary Islamic Studies in 2009, the same year El-Sayed arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Two years later, El-Sayed publicly identified Ramadan as a source of inspiration.

Ramadan left Oxford in 2017 after allegations of sexual misconduct with minors surfaced. He claimed the accusations were part of a “campaign of slander clearly orchestrated by my longtime adversaries.”

Additional women later accused Ramadan of rape. A Paris criminal court sentenced him in March to 18 years in prison for several counts of rape after he broke a court order, left France for Switzerland, and skipped the trial while citing anxiety and depression.

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El-Sayed recently told NBC News host Kristen Welker that his family had no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. NBC’s Tom Llamas later questioned him about Washington Free Beacon reporting involving 2012 and 2013 posts by his sister, Eman Abdelhadi.

The posts celebrated their mother’s college activism in the organization and said she had relatives who had been “jailed” over ties to the group. El-Sayed responded, “You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?”

When Llamas pressed him, El-Sayed said, “Yeah, I'm telling you, like, we—I have no ties. We have no ties.” Asked whether his mother had ties, he answered, “I have never had these conversations with my mother.”

HOLD THE PRESS: NBC holds Abdul El-Sayed’s feet to the fire on his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

He CLEARLY panicked and lashed out at the reporter. NBC: “When people ask you a question, they do expect the truth.” EL-SAYED (flustered): “Are you insinuating that somehow I was lying?!” This is so good. He’s panicking and his lies are catching up to him. A rare act of journalism from NBC News. — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 14, 2026

Ramadan’s writings had stirred controversy well before El-Sayed praised them. His 1994 University of Geneva predoctoral thesis reportedly praised al-Banna’s “profound spirituality and immense humanity” while ignoring the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent antisemitic campaigns.

In a 2003 article published in France, Ramadan targeted “Jewish intellectuals” and argued that support for Israel prevented them from being considered “universalist thinkers.” The article also blamed Jews for the Iraq war.

French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy described the article as an “anti-Semitic text.” Erasmus University in the Netherlands dropped Ramadan as a visiting professor in 2009 after discovering that he also worked for Iran’s state-controlled PressTV.

Ramadan presented himself to Western audiences as an Islamic “reformist,” but critics called him an “Islamist in sheep's clothing.” During a televised 2003 debate with then French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Ramadan declined to support banning the stoning of women who commit adultery and instead called for a “moratorium.”

El-Sayed has praised other figures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 2020 documentary How to Fix a Primary, cameras captured him showing wedding photographs while sitting in what appeared to be the living room of his father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku.

El-Sayed asked filmmakers not to record a bookshelf because he wanted to “keep the shot secular.” The shelf contained works by an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other figures tied to extremist Islamic movements, according to the Free Beacon.

El-Sayed also called Mohamed Soltan his “friend” in a since-deleted Substack post. Soltan is the son of a senior Muslim Brotherhood official and was jailed in Egypt over his role in 2013 protests seeking to restore Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president Mohamed Morsi.

Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Said Ramadan later established the Geneva Islamic Centre in Switzerland, which George Washington University Program on Extremism director Lorenzo Vidino described as the Brotherhood’s main European headquarters.

Tariq Ramadan’s brother, Hani Ramadan, currently leads the Geneva Islamic Centre. Although Tariq Ramadan denied holding an official role there, public filings obtained by French journalist Caroline Fourest reportedly listed him as an administrator.

His glowing recommendation of Ramadan nevertheless adds another uncomfortable chapter to the record surrounding his academic interests and his claimed ignorance about reported family links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

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