At a town hall event in Caro, Michigan, over the weekend, a man in the audience asked Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”
It was “a simple question,” the man insisted.
El-Sayed immediately recognized it as something more. “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” he replied, then turned it back on the man: “Why are you asking the question?”
Why was a Michigan-born Democratic nominee being asked about the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Middle Eastern Islamist organization? Throughout the Senate campaign, Republicans, including President Donald Trump and the GOP candidate, Mike Rogers, have sought to associate El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, with Islamic extremism.
On Saturday, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed responded to an attendee who asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, saying he's "running for Senate and happens to be Muslim."
Most recently, they have pointed to old, resurfaced social media posts from his half-sister, describing how their mother — who left El-Sayed in his early childhood — had been active in the organization in the ’70s.
The implication was familiar, if tired. Muslims in the West, especially after 9/11, have been asked repeatedly to take responsibility for acts of violence carried out by other Muslims around the world.
But the word choice was distinctive. When Muslims are asked about terrorism, they are typically asked to “condemn” it. This presumes a certain collective guilt by association, said Todd Green, a religion scholar and author of “Presumed Guilty: Why We Shouldn’t Ask Muslims to Condemn Terrorism.”
“You just have to make the insinuation, and it puts Muslims on the defensive,” Green said.
The word “disavow” makes a subtle, but important, shift, said Grace Paterson, a philosopher of language. A person may condemn something without necessarily having any specific ties to it. A disavowal suggests something stronger.
“There’s a lot more implicit in the disavowal question,” she said. “You can condemn things you just learned about. Disavowal, I think, brings in this implicit content that there’s a significant connection between the person and the thing.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.
“Disavow” comes from the Old French “désavouer,” a negation or reversal of the word “avouer” meaning “avow.” “Avow,” from the Latin root “advocāre,” means to acknowledge a person as one’s own.
To ask someone to “disavow” something, then, is to ask them to reject a previous affiliation. This affiliation is generally understood to be serious — for instance, it would sound odd for someone to “disavow” their fandom for a book series they no longer enjoy.
In politics, “condemn” and “disavow” are parts of an almost, but not quite, interchangeable lexicon for discussing something that has been deemed a problem, along with such words as “repudiate,” “denounce” and “disown.”
During the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, his association with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who had made derogatory comments about Jews, became a point of contention. Facing mounting pressure to respond, the Jackson campaign released a statement: “I find such statements or comments to be reprehensible and morally indefensible,” it read. “I disavow such comments and thoughts.”
The statement was characterized in the press alternately as a denouncement, a repudiation and a disavowal.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama used or was prompted to use a number of those words in response to the outcry over remarks made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies,” he said in an initial statement .
As the news cycle failed to die down, Obama tried to distinguish between the man and his remarks. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community,” he said in a speech . “I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.”
Though Obama left the church a few months later, he rejected calls that he denounce it: “I’m not denouncing the church, and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church,” he said in response to a question from a reporter.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was repeatedly asked during last year’s mayoral race to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” over concerns from some Jewish constituents who considered its use by protesters threatening or offensive. Though he said he did not use the language himself and would discourage the phrase, he repeatedly declined to say he condemned it.
Eventually, journalist Kristen Welker asked, “Why not just condemn it?”
Mamdani replied that he didn’t believe it was a mayor’s role to police speech. “My concern is to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president, who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an op-ed, putting people in jail for protesting,” he said.
Last month, after Hasan Piker suggested that American Jews’ support of Israel would worsen antisemitism, El-Sayed, who spent months campaigning alongside the streamer, was asked in a debate if he would “disavow” Piker’s remarks. “Absolutely,” El-Sayed responded, though he challenged the premise of the question. “I resist the idea that we should play this cancel culture gotcha game that tells us who we can’t talk to, when democracy is about trying to build a coalition because you went out and talked to as many people as possible.”
But that question was premised on the fact that El-Sayed had shared a stage with Piker. A question like “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” is insidious, Paterson said, because it can’t be answered only by a yes or no. For El-Sayed to merely answer in the affirmative would be to accept the implicit charge: that he had, at some point in time, been tied to the Muslim Brotherhood in a way that he must now separate himself from.
During the town hall exchange, when El-Sayed pushed his heckler to state clearly the basis for his question, the questioner merely said that the Muslim Brotherhood was “a terrorist group.” Absent of a clear claim of a link between himself and the topic, El-Sayed connected the dots himself.
“You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties,” he said.
Minorities in the US have long faced questions about whether they could truly place their duty to the country above their supposed ethnic or religious sympathies. As El-Sayed noted over the weekend, John F. Kennedy dealt with similar accusations related to his Catholic faith during his presidential run. Jewish Americans contended with similar charges, as did Japanese Americans during World War II.
Despite the bigotry inherent in the asking, many Muslims over the years have tried to respond in good faith, declaring through op-eds , public statements and “ not in my name ” campaigns that they do not condone the killing of innocents.
There can be clearer grounds for asking a candidate to speak against someone or something, Paterson said. When the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke endorsed Donald Trump during his first presidential campaign, a Bloomberg reporter asked Trump if he would repudiate Duke. “Sure, I would do that, if it made you feel better,” he replied in August 2015.
Asked about Duke’s support again at a news conference in February 2016, Trump said: “I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke endorsed me? Okay, all right. I disavow, okay?”
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, then rival candidates for the Republican nomination, were among those who considered Trump’s disavowal insufficient . “you’re better than this,” Cruz wrote at the time in a tweet directed at Trump. “We should all agree, racism is wrong, KKK is abhorrent.”
Rubio tweeted, “We cannot be a party that nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan.”
As journalists and his rivals continued to press him on the issue, Trump issued a more forceful disavowal.
“David Duke is a bad person, who I disavowed on numerous occasions over the years,” he said on MSNBC in March 2016. He added, “I disavowed him. I disavowed the KKK. Do you want me to do it again for the 12th time? I disavowed him in the past, I disavow him now.”
When El-Sayed is asked to “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood, those asking the question don’t seem particularly interested in his answer. Among them is Cruz, who has kept insisting that El-Sayed is connected to the group.
Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said she saw it as a campaign strategy by Republicans to associate El-Sayed with Islamic extremism in the minds of voters.
“The whole purpose of this is to have him associated with groups that are deemed as terrorist organizations in the United States,” she said. “This is the unfortunate part of what it’s like to be Muslim in the United States.”
Journalists and the general public seem to now recognize the purpose of such questions as well, Green added. If asking someone like El-Sayed to “disavow” something carries a stronger charge than asking them to “condemn” it, he said it also makes the implications of the question more clear.
“He very adeptly, quickly turned the question back on the questioner,” Green said. “And all of a sudden, the dialogue and the conversation became about basically prejudice, Islamophobia, and whether the threat to democracy is coming from another source other than Muslims.”
