Mohamed Soltan, the son of antisemitic senior Muslim Brotherhood official Salah Soltan, served as a ‘media activist’ for a Brotherhood-affiliated protest movement.
In a 2021 article on a since-deleted Substack account, the left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed defended a man he described as his “friend” after he was jailed for funding the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The man, Mohamed Soltan, is the son of a senior Muslim Brotherhood official who called to kill “those Zionists” and argued for “obliterating America.”
The October 2021 article, headlined “The hypocrisy of police rejecting vaccine requirements,” warned of the “bluntest form of government power” wielded by police in the United States, asking readers to “imagine living long ago under a monarch whose caprice could have you arbitrarily taxed … or jailed or hanged.”
“But you don’t even have to go back in time,” El-Sayed continued. “Go to Egypt, where the personal whims of a dictator may mean you’ll find yourself in the bowels of an Egyptian prison, as happened to my friend Mohamed Soltan, an American citizen.”
Soltan was born in Egypt to Salah Soltan, a former professor of Islamic Law at Cairo University and “senior member” of the Muslim Brotherhood. The elder Soltan was one of 50 Muslim Brotherhood leaders charged with spearheading the 2013 protests aimed at reinstating Egypt’s deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, a longtime Brotherhood leader who chaired the Islamic group’s Freedom and Justice Party. Mohamed Soltan was sentenced to life in prison in Egypt, according to NBC News, which reported that he “faced terrorism-related charges, including belonging to the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood.” ABC News described Soltan as “one of the main liaisons” between the Muslim Brotherhood and the press.
Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, described the elder Soltan as “Brotherhood royalty,” noting his service on the organization’s most important jurisprudential bodies in both North America and Europe, and the younger Soltan as “the polished version of the father.”
El-Sayed made no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood, Soltan’s father, or the circumstances surrounding Soltan’s arrest in his Substack post, instead linking to a Georgetown University School of Foreign Service article saying Soltan “spent nearly two years as a political prisoner in what he describes as ‘an Egyptian dungeon.'” El-Sayed set his Substack publication, The Incision, to private as he faced criticism on the campaign trail for old posts and videos.
The Substack post marks the latest example of El-Sayed’s close personal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s. Though El-Sayed told Meet the Press on Sunday that neither he nor his family have connections to the Brotherhood, his half-sister, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, has said that her “family has long been MB,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. She has also discussed her and El-Sayed’s mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college” in Egypt.
While the precise nature of El-Sayed and Soltan’s personal relationship is unclear, Soltan is just three years younger than El-Sayed and lived in Dearborn, Mich., the heavily Arab city near the Detroit suburb where El-Sayed grew up, as a child. El-Sayed’s parents are also Egyptian, and the Democrat said as recently as 2016 that he has “dual citizenship” in the United States and Egypt, something his campaign now denies. Soltan has contributed the maximum amount allowed to El-Sayed’s campaign, while the nonprofit he leads, the American Committee for Middle East Rights, sent $25,000 to a PAC supporting El-Sayed in June, the Midwesterner reported.
Neither El-Sayed nor Mohamed Soltan immediately responded to requests for comment.
Soltan attempted to distance himself from the Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of his release from Egyptian prison and return to the United States in 2015, writing in a New York Times op-ed—which identified Soltan as a “human-rights advocate”—that he is “not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.” He also downplayed both his father’s affiliation with the Islamist group and his radicalism, writing, “My father, a respected authority on Islamic jurisprudence, lived most of his life outside of Egypt but was affiliated with a progressive, moderate vision of Islamism.”
Salah Soltan, however, has long been known as a “prominent Muslim Brotherhood member.” He “gained notoriety” in 2013 after posting a letter on behalf of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party “apologizing for the mistakes the Muslim Brotherhood has made” as it ruled over Egypt during Morsi’s brief presidency, according to Egyptian media reports. In 2023, the Muslim Brotherhood released a statement thanking a slew of left-wing groups in the United States that called for Salah Soltan’s release from prison and identified him as “the professor of Sharia (Islamic Law) at Cairo University and founder and former president of the Islamic American University (IAU) in Michigan.”
The elder Soltan, meanwhile, has a long history of making extreme antisemitic statements. In 2011, he issued an Islamic religious decree ordering the death of Israel’s ambassador and of “Zionists” traveling to Egypt, saying, “As someone who has studied Islamic law, specializing in Islamic jurisprudence, I am calling to kill the [Israeli] ambassador, not just expel him,” according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Any Zionist—tourist or other—who enters Egypt must be killed. … We stress that this fatwa is directed only toward those Zionists, who destroyed our country, killed our people, and shed our blood on our land.”
One year later, in 2012, Soltan was asked during an Egyptian TV interview if he supported a war with the United States. “Why not? Indeed, we will fight Israel and all those who are behind it,” he responded, according to a MEMRI translation. “Allah is present in this equation, and He is capable of obliterating America and any other oppressor. This is a divine law.”
Mohamed Soltan has nonetheless worked to secure his father’s release from Egyptian prison through a Washington, D.C.-based group he founded, the Freedom Initiative. He received support from congressional Democrats like disgraced former New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and Virginia congressman Don Beyer, both of whom called for Salah Soltan’s release after accepting thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Mohamed Soltan.
The younger Soltan visited the Obama White House in 2017 after it worked to secure his freedom. He maintains a close relationship with his father, who provided an audio recording played at Soltan’s 2017 wedding reception in Virginia. “I am with you,” Salah Soltan said, according to the Times, which profiled the wedding and described the elder Soltan as “a prominent Islamic scholar.” “Look amongst you and you will see me in your faces and eyes. I am with you as you are with me.”
The United States considers the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, one of the largest and most violent branches in the sprawling Islamist network, to be a terrorist organization due to its support for Hamas. El-Sayed has expressed support for that branch: In 2012, he signed an open letter expressing support for Egypt’s then-president Morsi and calling on the Muslim Brotherhood to “purge” media and police in the country.
Collin Anderson, Washington Free Beacon
