Michigan’s Muslims Take Matters Into Their Own Hands
Disgusted by Democrats’ ongoing support for the genocide in Gaza, some Muslim and Arab American voters are embracing third-party candidates and community-based forms of political engagement.
This article is a part of Left Out: The Missing Election narratives, a collection of unreported histories by publications inside of the Movement Media Alliance.
WEST BLOOMFIELD, MICH. — More than 100 of Nour Abubars’ relatives in Gaza have been killed by Israel over the past year, according to the grim tallies she receives from family members. Her cousin Asma and Asma’s teenaged sons were killed in the August 2024 Fajr Massacre, a bombing during prayer at a school where they sheltered in Gaza City.Two days before Election Day, Abubars, 30, sat in her home outside Detroit contemplating whether to vote, considering that America sent the bombs that killed her family.
“I’m one of those people that believe that it’s very selfish not to vote, but this time around, I cannot make a decision,” she says. “I cannot even go to the ballots and do anything, because both [candidates] are absolutely horrific.”
Her relatives still in Gaza told her not to waste her time — “they absolutely have no faith or hope in humanity,” she says.
Abubars did vote — for Jill Stein.
“I don’t see a lot of empathy toward us [from Washington],” Abubars says. “And it’s really, really sad. I just don’t feel like anything I do, protesting or whatever — even though I still see the importance of it, and I still will do it — they don’t want to hear it at all.”
In These Times spoke with 10 Muslim voters from Metro Detroit. Some chose to skip the top of the ticket; others voted for Stein or Donald Trump; others did not vote at all. Outside of groups affiliated with the Democratic Party, it was difficult to locate any Arabs or Muslims who voted for Harris.
For more than a year, hundreds of thousands of Americans strained their voices in chants and on calls to their representatives to demand a stop to this country’s support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Community organizers, activists and students in Michigan tried to leverage their votes in a swing state in return for any commitment by the Democratic Party around a ceasefire or an arms embargo. More than 100,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary. Organizers repeatedly asked to meet with the Biden administration, the party or the Harris campaign, to no avail— the United States stood by Israel. Feelings of betrayal and helplessness cast a shadow, and many who had voted for Barack Obama or Joe Biden could not see themselves voting blue again.
Dearborn — a Detroit suburb with one of the largest Arab and Muslim American populations in the country — flipped red for president for the first time in two decades. Forty-two percent voted for Donald Trump, 36% for Kamala Harris and 18% for Stein. By contrast, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American who broke with Biden to decry the genocide, won with 62% of the city’s vote.
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud refused to endorse a presidential candidate or meet with Trump on a visit. The day after the election, Hammoud wrote on X that “votes are never promised to any party or candidate” and that he and his community will continue to hold the White House accountable.
Muslim Americans are not a monolith, but ethnically, racially and politically diverse. Imams across the country chose to endorse Harris, Trump or a third party. Some who backed Trump agree with his economic policies. Others support LGBTQ book bans in schools, even if they hold some progressive views. But many did so in protest of U.S.-backed violence.
Imam Imran Salha of the Islamic Center of Detroit endorsed Trump in late September 2024 but rescinded the decision hours later, after feedback from his community. He said his endorsement was meant as an anti-Harris vote — not support for Trump.
Salha, 34, is Palestinian, with family in the West Bank. He thinks Trump will likely support Israel’s attacks and illegal annexations there. But he believes Democrats are even more dangerous. “Let’s stop with this holier than thou talk,” Salha says. “Donald Trump is a convicted felon — and what about Kamala? And Obama? Obama drone-bombed Pakistan, Somalia and [five other countries].”
During the presidential race, Salha spoke with representatives from both campaigns about legislation affecting mosques, and about Gaza. “Kamala’s team gave us fluff and kept on telling us access, access, we’ll give you access,” he says. He found the Trump campaign more straightforward: “When it was a yes, it was a yes, and when it was a no, they were like, no, we’re not going to do this for you.”
Referencing Malcolm X’s comparison of white conservatives to wolves and white liberals to foxes, he says, “I choose the wolf any day, because the fox acts like he’s your friend and then pounces on you when you least expect it. That’s the Democratic Party. The wolf is Trump.”
The Detroit mosque was one of many local mosques and Islamic organizations that hosted community dialogues on how to approach the election. People found it helped to express their concerns and hear from leaders and scholars. A recurring theme was to vote and make Muslim voices heard.
In the last weeks leading up to Election Day, the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network (AMEEN), a political advocacy organization for practicing Muslims in Michigan, launched a formal campaign, the “Drive for 75%,” to encourage Muslim turnout— for anyone other than Harris.
The executive director of AMEEN, Rexhinaldo Nazarko, 27, is Albanian and keenly aware of the erasure of the 1912-1913 genocide of Albanians in the Balkan Wars. He is blunt about the campaign’s mission: “We wanted 75% turnout to guarantee her loss. One, as a statement of political power and moral power, and two, as a way to record the genocide in history books, so that in the future, when these elections are analyzed, the genocide vote is [seen as] a very powerful factor.” He’s working with CAIR Action, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ political arm, to analyze exit polls and determine how close the campaign came to the 75% goal.
Nazarko helped launch AMEEN in early 2024 after working for more than four years at Emgage, a Muslim voter advocacy organization, where he mobilized voters for Biden and local candidates. He left over ideological and strategic disagreements. “Emgage is less of an organization that works for the community with the Democratic Party; they are an organization that works for the Democratic Party with the community,” he says.
Emgage endorsed Harris, asking Muslim voters “to consider the human impact of a second Trump presidency.” Emgage spokesperson Nada Alhanooti defends the endorsement as a “principled decision” and told In These Times the group is deeply committed to serving Michigan’s Muslim communities.
Pharmacist Mona Mawari, 39, who served as a Michigan volunteer coordinator for the Uncommitted National Movement last winter, helped with messaging and get-out-the-vote for the Drive for 75%. When she read Uncommitted’s pre-election statement—that it “cannot” endorse Harris but “opposes” a Trump vote and “is not recommending” a third-party candidate — she saw it as a soft Harris endorsement that misrepresented the base.
“We’re at a point right now where the community has a ton of distrust in politics and some organizations, [which] they believe are more loyal to parties than their own base, and our people are being slaughtered overseas in Gaza and Lebanon,” Mawari says.
Asked to comment for this article, Uncommitted co-chair Layla Elabed said that she understood the feelings from the Arab and Muslim American base and that the statement “had very little to do with supporting or uplifting Harris. We made a very, very difficult political risk assessment that it would be harder to do this work under Trump.”
Former Uncommitted volunteers and phone-bankers Julia Koumbassa, 46, and Arika Lycan, 39, found the statement “confusing” and say they would have preferred personal statements from the co-chairs, although Lycan empathizes with “the tough place” of the co-chairs in answering to both a Michigan base and a nationwide movement. Koumbassa, who is Muslim and white, voted for a third-party candidate; Lycan, who is non-Muslim and queer and nonbinary, voted for Harris, fearing what another Trump administration would do.
But Koumbassa and Lycan were more focused on downballot races. In June 2024 they launched the Voter Collective for Co-Liberation, which put out voter guides of local pro-Palestine and anti-genocide candidates in the Democratic primary and the general election.
Attorney Narissa Chahrour, 27, has worked for multiple local Democratic campaigns, including Hammoud’s, but this cycle caused her to lose faith in the two-party system. She is one of many Dearborn residents with family in Lebanon who were displaced by Israel’s September and October 2024 attacks. Chahrour cast her ballot for Stein.
Chahrour remembers the lingering harms of the first Trump presidency: “Don’t come at me and talk to me about the Supreme Court. Trust me, I know, I know. But I can’t care about anything more than I care about genocide.” She adds that, “Something I think about all the time is, how funny is it that America, the country that’s perpetuating the violence and the destruction and the hurt, is the place where we’re seeking refuge? It’s like … running back to your abuser, and it just feels so wrong.”
The thought of running away to another country occurred to Imam Salha while on vacation with family in Qatar. But, he says, “Allah placed [me] in America for a reason. In these times where we feel like we don’t belong, we have to plant our feet even deeper God-willing, and that means, yes, engaging with political parties that hate us. We don’t know where khayr [good] will come from.”
Salha hopes to engage with the Trump administration. If all else fails, he believes Trump’s presidency may reveal the “true, ugly face” of the U.S. empire and prompt Americans to demand better.
Nazarko says AMEEN is in contact with the Trump transition team and has been relaying community concerns. He expressed public disappointment with Trump’s early appointments, which include Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel and Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the United Nations. “It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people,” he told Reuters.
“We’re [still] trying to put Muslims into appointed positions, and we’re trying to kind of create an antiwar coalition to promote the message that Trump actually campaigned on — which was antiwar,” he says.
Sahar Faraj, 31, is an organizer with the Raj’een Collective, a Metro Detroit-based group fighting for the right of return for Palestinians. She says she is done with making calls to Congress: “Why would I waste my time?” Instead, Raj’een is focused on working with local businesses to swap out products from companies like Nestlé and Coca-Cola that support Israel.
Koumbassa and Lycan, the Uncommitted volunteers, aim to continue the momentum of the anti-genocide movement locally. In advance of the 2026 midterms they are organizing to build power in the Democratic Party in Washtenaw County, where they live. They were part of a pro-Palestinian-liberation group, including three Palestinian women, elected to the Washtenaw Democratic County Committee in late November.
Mona Mawari hasn’t given up on political organizing. She echoes Nazarko’s disillusionment with organizations that she feels only mobilize Muslims around elections and neglect them otherwise. Instead, she believes Muslims need an independent, Muslim-led coalition to strengthen their political power without compromising their values. She hosted a community summit in South Dearborn in December to get the 2025 conversation started.
“I see our masajid [mosques] as a huge pool of untapped potential,” Mawari says. “I think that it’s so crucial that we start doing things differently. I want our people, as Muslims, to claim our voices.”
Malak Silmi is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist from Michigan who has reported on Metro Detroit’s city governments and elections for Outlier Media, Al Jazeera English, Michigan Radio and others.
