Watch my report from Dearborn above
“That’s f***ing trash. That’s trash. We don’t want that. That’s nasty.”
That was a Muslim voter in Dearborn, Michigan, when I asked whether he supported gay and lesbian people. He is voting tomorrow for Abdul El Sayed, a Democrat who has promised to be “a lion” for gay and transgender rights.
So is the man who told me: “As a Muslim, we disagree with that. We think people should live normally. I don’t understand how any country would normalise that. They need some help from their family, from a doctor.” And the one who, asked if he backed LGBT rights, simply said: “No. No.”
British readers will recognise the shape of this. In 2019, Muslim parents picketed the gates of Parkfield and Anderton Park primary schools in Birmingham for months over lessons telling children it was fine to have two mums. Five years later, those same communities elected four pro-Gaza independents to Parliament and slashed the majorities of Jess Phillips, Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood. In the end Labour, the party of the Equality Act that underpinned those lessons and of every Pride-flag-waving council in the land, still got most of their votes.
Tomorrow, the contradiction between conservative Islam and its support for progressive parties will be tested again, when the Democrat Abdul El Sayed fights a crucial battle for a Senate seat in Michigan.
I have spent some time in Dearborn asking Muslim voters how they square voting for a man who campaigns on gay and transgender rights with a faith that forbids both. The so-called Red-Green alliance is a shaky one, but for now one issue trumps all others: Gaza. Many Muslim voters here backed Trump in 2024 to punish Joe Biden for his perceived support for Israel after October 7. I know, because I interviewed them before that election for a GB News documentary. Now that Trump has thrown in his lot with Netanyahu and bombed Iran, they have flocked back to the LGBT Left. This time, though, they have one of their own on the ballot in Abdul El Sayed, and ethnic loyalty is doing the rest of the work.
The capital of Muslim America
Dearborn is the first Arab-majority city in the United States. About 55 per cent of its 110,000 residents told the 2023 census they had Middle Eastern or North African ancestry, mostly Lebanese, Yemeni and Iraqi, and the city has the highest proportion of Muslims anywhere in the country.
Dearborn is the home of Henry Ford, and for most of the last century it was a city of Italian and Polish immigrants who came to work on his assembly lines. Today, its streets are lined with hookah lounges, halal butchers and hijab shops. There is even a street sign honouring Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, who at a Dearborn rally in October 2024 called Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief Israel had killed a week earlier, a “great leader”.
Much like in Bradford or Leicester, locals have seen their areas demographically transform in just a few years. One woman who has lived in Dearborn for more than 40 years told me that the mosque near her house started to play the call to prayer on loudspeakers three years ago, and it now comes through her closed windows twice a day. In typical American fashion, she is suing to stop the excessive noise. When she moved in, her part of the city was perhaps 15 per cent Muslim. She puts it at 85 to 90 per cent now.
Ted Barham, a Christian minister, became briefly famous last year when he objected to the Siblani sign at a council meeting and the city’s Muslim mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, told him he was not welcome in Dearborn.
“It’s not just Dearborn that’s changing,” Barham told me. “Dearborn is changing the country.”
A lion for gay rights
Abdul El Sayed, 42, is a Detroit-born doctor of Egyptian parents, a Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate, and the most Left-wing candidate the Democrats have put up for a Senate seat in a swing state. He wants Medicare for All and an end to American military support for Israel. Trump called him a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”. Such is his toxicity that his Democratic primary opponent Haley Stevens has since endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers.
