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By Anna Rahmanan
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For much of modern American popular culture, the Arab arrived as a threat, not a person.
He entered the frame carrying a gun, holding a hostage or plotting the destruction of the country whose theater audience had paid to watch him lose. If Hollywood needed a faceless enemy after the Cold War, it found one somewhere between Baghdad and Beirut.
Politics soon caught up with fiction.
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The first Gulf War turned Saddam Hussein into America's permanent television villain. The attacks of September 11 fused terrorism and Muslim identity in the public imagination with a force that shaped everything from airport security to sitcom punch lines. Professional wrestling, always an exaggerated reflection of American anxieties, made the caricature literal. The Iron Sheik became one of the industry's defining villains, later followed by Muhammad Hassan, whose televised "Arab American" character disappeared after a storyline collided disastrously with real-world terrorism.
Now Michigan voters could elect an Egyptian American Muslim to the United States Senate.
Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary this week and will face Republican former Representative Mike Rogers in November. A victory would make El-Sayed the first Muslim elected to the Senate—and it would be in a state Donald Trump carried in 2016 and 2024.
The distance between the cartoon terrorist and a major-party Senate nominee can look like a sudden national transformation. But it is probably better understood as the political result of something slower: Arab and Muslim Americans became harder to portray as permanent foreigners once they became more visible as neighbors, colleagues, physicians, mayors and lawmakers.
The stereotype did not disappear; it simply lost its monopoly.
When Foreignness Became a Character
Arabs had appeared as exotic or menacing figures to many Americans long before the Gulf War, but the conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s gave the stereotype new political force. Hijackings, hostage crises and Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait offered American fiction writers a recognizable enemy as the Cold War ended.
Movies such as True Lies, Executive Decision and The Siege placed Arab or Muslim terrorism inside familiar American settings. The threat was frightening partly because it appeared to have crossed the border undetected. Wrestling took that same anxiety and made it theatrical.
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WWE describes the Iranian-born Iron Sheik’s partnership with Nikolai Volkoff as an “anti-American pairing,” built to provoke patriotic crowds during the 1980s. Two decades later, WWE introduced Muhammad Hassan, an Arab American character who initially complained of discrimination after September 11 but was soon folded into imagery associated with Islamic militancy. The character disappeared following a terrorism-themed segment broadcast around the time of the July 2005 London bombings.
Such portrayals worked because many viewers had few competing images. For Americans with little personal contact with Arabs or Muslims, foreign news and fictional entertainment could define the entire group.
September 11 hardened that association. Muslims became more visible in American public life, but often through airport searches, surveillance debates, military campaigns and arguments about whether Islam belonged in the country at all.
The Neighbor Replaced the Abstraction
The change that followed was less a sudden surge of immigration than the maturation of communities already putting down roots.
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The children and grandchildren of immigrants entered schools, professions and public institutions. They spoke with American accents, argued about American politics and built careers unrelated to the conflicts through which their parents’ countries were often presented on television. What changed for the Arab was his public visibility as part of ordinary American life.
Michigan offers one of the clearest examples of that change.
Census data released in 2023 found that 54.5 percent of Dearborn residents identified as Middle Eastern or North African. Because the vast majority identified with Arab ancestry, the city has widely been described as America's first Arab-majority city. Dearborn grew from an ethnic enclave into a place that national candidates visited, courted and, occasionally, misunderstood at their peril.
Exposure does not automatically eliminate prejudice, sure, but research on contact between social groups generally finds that sustained interaction can reduce hostility under the right conditions, though political polarization and threatening news events can reverse or limit the effect.
Still, daily experience gave millions of Americans information that Hollywood had not: Muslim Americans became classmates before they were campaign slogans, doctors treating patients, the business owners sponsoring Little League teams and the parents attending school-board meetings.
The children who inherited post-9/11 America therefore encountered a contradiction their parents were less likely to face: Television could present the Muslim as an alien threat while ordinary life presented one as a friend.
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From Representation to Political Power
Political office was the next stage of that integration.
Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006. André Carson followed in 2008. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants from Detroit, entered the House in 2019. Each of them faced attacks tied to religion, ethnicity or views on Israel, but each also helped make Muslim officeholding less exceptional.
Zohran Mamdani has since carried the change further. The Democratic Socialist became New York City’s first Muslim mayor in January, winning the country’s largest municipal office while campaigning primarily on rent, transportation and child care costs.
El-Sayed belongs to the same political generation: His campaign emphasizes Medicare for All, affordability and removing money from politics. His Muslim identity remains consequential, especially amid disputes over Gaza and U.S. support for Israel, but it no longer consumes the entire case for him, though it does often seem to be a topic of conversation when discussing the case against him.
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That is the deeper shift. A Muslim candidate can now be attacked as too progressive, too hostile to Israel, too inexperienced or too far from the median voter—the ordinary language of partisan politics. Religion may intensify those attacks, but it does not prevent the candidate from reaching the contest in the first place.
El-Sayed’s primary victory also complicates the idea that this story is simply about tolerance. He was propelled by progressive organizing, anger over outside spending and Democratic opposition to Israeli policy as much as by changing attitudes toward Muslims. His general-election viability remains untested and Republicans will argue that his ideological positions put him outside Michigan’s mainstream.
It remains important to note the rise of Arab and Muslim candidates closely tied to the growth of the Democratic left. Progressive organizations offer candidates volunteers, small-dollar donors and an electoral language centered on discrimination, economic inequality and Palestinian rights. Muslim politicians and voters, in turn, give the left an organized constituency in cities and swing-state communities where those issues carry unusual force.
The alliance is imperfect since many Muslims hold socially conservative views, and the electorate itself is increasingly divided. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 53 percent of Muslim adults identified with or leaned Democratic, while 42 percent identified with or leaned Republican. And wider representation has not erased suspicion. Public attitudes toward Muslims remain sharply polarized by party, leaving El-Sayed to face voters who may see a progressive health care advocate and others who still filter a Muslim candidate through the memory of September 11 and the politics that followed it.
A loss in November could therefore carry several possible meanings. It could reflect concern about socialism, foreign policy, party control or El-Sayed himself. His candidacy cannot prove that anti-Muslim prejudice has faded, just as Mamdani’s election did not erase the anti-Muslim attacks directed at him.
What is clear by now is that American culture has shifted dramatically in just a few decades, making candidates like El-Sayed and Mamdani not only viable but central figures in the national political conversation. In the early 2000s, an outspoken Arab candidate running on an anti-Israel platform would have been almost unthinkable.
The Arab previously portrayed as a villain became a neighbor, then a voter, then a political constituency capable of building institutions, shaping public opinion and producing viable candidates.
America once imagined the Arab as someone at its gates; the measure of the change is that it can now imagine him speaking from inside the Senate.
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