A columnist for Qatar’s state-owned daily Al-Sharq has argued that the United States is on a trajectory toward electing its first Muslim president, pointing to the Democratic Senate nomination of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan as the latest marker on a path he traces back through Barack Obama’s 2008 election and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City.
The column was written by Abd Al-Rahman Al-Shammari, who writes for Al-Sharq and also hosts and anchors news on Qatar’s state television, according to a translation published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Al-Shammari opens with an extended comparison to the biblical account of Moses raised inside Pharaoh’s palace, then applies the same image to American politics: groups once excluded from power, he writes, are “growing up inside the palace” of the U.S. political system even as America has spent the past two decades at war across large parts of the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya.
Obama as the “First Fissure”
Al-Shammari treats Obama’s 2008 election as the opening break in what he calls the traditional American understanding of who is permitted to hold power. “True, Obama is Christian, not Muslim,” he writes, “but we must not miss the symbolism: a Black man whose father was from Africa and grew up Muslim, and whose middle name is Hussein. He reached a station which throughout history was exclusively reserved for White men.”
The claim is Al-Shammari’s own, and the documented record complicates it. Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was raised Muslim in Kenya but was described by Obama himself, in a 2006 speech, as having become “an adult atheist.” Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, whom his mother married after the family moved to Jakarta, was Muslim, and Obama attended a local Indonesian public school for several years as a child, where administrative enrollment records listed his religion as Muslim in line with his stepfather’s faith. Obama has said the household itself was not religiously observant during that period and has described his own upbringing as largely secular. He was baptized as an adult and has attended Christian churches for decades, most prominently Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Al-Shammari’s column does not dispute any of this — it argues that the biographical details carry symbolic weight regardless of Obama’s stated and practiced faith, using the same set of facts that fueled years of “birther”-era suspicion in American politics, but inverting their political charge into a celebratory argument rather than an accusatory one.
Mamdani, El-Sayed, and “A Door No One Could Close”
Al-Shammari traces the same logic forward through two more recent figures. Noting that Muslims became linked in American discourse to “terrorism, security, wars, and immigration” after September 11, he argues that Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, 25 years after the September 11 attacks, marks a turn: “A Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, rules New York… Mamdani entered through a door which no one could close before him.”
He then turns to El-Sayed, describing him as “clearly an Arab name, Muslim of Egyptian origin,” newly selected as the Democratic nominee to face Republican Mike Rogers in a Michigan Senate race Al-Shammari calls consequential for control of the chamber. “These three figures, Obama, Mamdani, and El-Sayed, should not be viewed separately,” he writes. “Placing them on a single timeline allows us to see something greater than three separate electoral success stories.”
El-Sayed’s own public statements are relevant here on their own terms, separate from Al-Shammari’s use of them. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, made while buying his first home, El-Sayed described a personal “obligation” to follow Islamic law in his own life, a statement of individual religious observance comparable to what a devout Christian or Orthodox Jewish candidate might say about their own obligations under their faith. He has said he does not seek to impose Islamic law on others or subvert the Constitution. The distinction between personal religious practice and public governance is one Al-Shammari’s column does not draw, folding the quote into a broader narrative about Muslim political ascent rather than examining it as a statement about one candidate’s private observance.
A State Broadcaster’s Argument
Al-Sharq is one of Qatar’s leading Arabic-language dailies and operates within a media environment the Qatari state closely controls. Al-Shammari’s dual role as an Al-Sharq columnist and a Qatar state television host places the column within state-aligned commentary rather than independent journalism. Qatar has spent decades funding and providing safe harbor to Islamist movements abroad, including Hamas’s political leadership, and MEMRI has tracked a broader pattern in Qatari state and state-affiliated media of framing American domestic political change in terms favorable to those same movements. A column predicting the steady rise of Muslim political power in the United States, published by a state broadcaster with that track record, is newsworthy for what it reveals about how Doha wants the story told as much as for its predictions about American politics.
Qatar’s reach into American institutions extends well beyond its state broadcaster. Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding for U.S. universities, having contributed cumulative gifts and contracts variously reported between $6.6 billion and $8.8 billion since federal tracking began, according to the Department of Education’s Foreign Gift and Contract Transparency Portal. That funding has gone to institutions including Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon, several of which operate branch campuses inside Qatar’s own Education City complex in Doha, built and funded by the Qatar Foundation. Separately, Qatar has spent between $240 million and $260 million since 2016 on Foreign Agents Registration Act-registered lobbying and public relations firms in the United States. Qatar’s media reach into the United States runs directly through its ownership of Al Jazeera, whose English-language service broadcasts domestically and has drawn scrutiny, including from members of Congress, over whether its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reflects editorial independence or the interests of its state owner. Read against that footprint, Al-Shammari’s column is one data point in a far larger pattern of Qatari money and messaging shaping how Americans encounter the region, and how the region is encouraged to see America. Whether or not a Muslim president is on the horizon, Qatar’s spending shows a state actor betting heavily that shaping American opinion now will pay off regardless of who eventually wins.
A Broader Pattern in Local Politics
The number of Muslim Americans holding elected office at the local and state level has grown over the past decade, tracking both broader demographic growth and the increasing organization of Muslim American political engagement since 2016.
That growth has coincided with the emergence of Muslim-centered residential and civic developments in several states. In Texas, developers affiliated with the East Plano Islamic Center have proposed The Meadow, formerly EPIC City, a 402-acre master-planned community near Josephine built around a central mosque. Similar civic recognition of Muslim and Palestinian-American communities has taken shape elsewhere. In Paterson, New Jersey, Mayor Andre Sayegh marked the beginning of Ramadan with a Hilal lighting ceremony on February 28, 2025, declaring Paterson the “capital of Palestine” and “the fourth holiest city in the world,” later adding, “Paterson is the capital of Palestine in the United States of America,” and calling the city “The Mecca of New Jersey.”
Outside Chicago, the Arab-American Business and Professional Association unveiled the first of its “Welcome to Little Palestine” signs in Bridgeview, Illinois, at 83rd Street and Harlem Avenue, marking an area stretching from 79th Street to 113th Street that the association calls one of the largest Palestinian-American communities in the United States. A second sign followed at Westfield Plaza on 87th Street. ABPA president Rush Darwish called the unveiling “more than a sign,” saying, “it is a declaration of who we are.” The designation followed Illinois House Joint Resolution 46, which names Harlem Avenue “Little Palestine Way” through Bridgeview, Burbank, Chicago Ridge, Palos Hills, and Worth; the resolution passed the Illinois House 76 to 33 in November 2025 and remains pending in the state Senate. Cook County officials went further, proclaiming April 7 “Little Palestine Day” in May 2026.
An Unprecedented Commission Bill in Massachusetts
A bill currently before the Massachusetts state legislature, Senate Bill S.2134, would create a permanent eleven-member Commission on the Status of People Who Practice Islam, empowered to study issues affecting Muslims, coordinate with government agencies, recommend legislation and policy, and employ its own executive director and staff. The ACLU of Massachusetts has raised its own objection, questioning whether a permanent state-backed body organized around a single faith is consistent with government religious neutrality and the separation of church and state.
The bill raises a fair comparison question: no other single religious group in Massachusetts, or in most states, has a standing government commission organized around its members’ status as adherents of that faith. Commissions addressing antisemitism, by contrast, typically address discrimination against a group rather than serving the interests of practitioners of a specific religion as such, and often include Muslim representation alongside Jewish representation rather than existing as a faith-exclusive body. Whether S.2134 advances, and how its sponsors answer the neutrality question the ACLU has raised, will determine whether Massachusetts becomes the first state with a commission of this kind.
What the Record Actually Shows
Read individually, the pieces here are disconnected: a columnist in Doha, a mayor in New Jersey, a street sign outside Chicago, a bill in the Massachusetts State House, a Senate candidate’s decade-old remark about his own faith. None of them required the others to happen. Paterson’s mayor did not need Al-Shammari’s column to declare his city the capital of Palestine. Bridgeview’s street signs and Cook County’s proclamation did not require a Qatari columnist’s blessing. Massachusetts lawmakers advanced a commission bill without any prompting from Al-Sharq. Each stands on its own, documented in public records, official statements, and a candidate’s own words.
What Al-Shammari’s column does is something different: it names the pattern out loud, for a state-controlled Arabic audience, and reads it as a single unfolding story rather than a series of unrelated local events. That a Qatari state broadcaster, backed by the same government spending hundreds of millions of dollars on American universities and Washington lobbying, is the one connecting these dots for its own audience is itself the story worth noting. Whether the pattern he describes adds up to what he predicts is a question for American voters to answer, not for a columnist in Doha, and not for Qatari money to decide in advance.
