Abdul El-Sayed Says South Indian Wife Made Him More Desi Than Arab
The clips, from the podcast Meet The Real Abdul El-Sayed, show him sharing a funny anecdote about how an uncle in Egypt reacted when he married Dr Sarah Jukaku, whose family traces its roots to Bhatkal in Karnataka
Clips from an earlier podcast appearance by Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat who won the Michigan Senate race, are circulating again on social media. They are drawing attention to his Indian connection and to remarks that he may be more "Desi than Arab."
The clips, from the podcast Meet The Real Abdul El-Sayed, show him sharing a funny anecdote about how an uncle in Egypt reacted when he married Dr Sarah Jukaku, whose family traces its roots to Bhatkal in Karnataka. When the uncle asked why he had chosen an Indian woman with 80 million Egyptians to pick from, El-Sayed jokingly says he had a ready reply: there are a billion Indians, so by the numbers it was a pretty likely outcome.
Dr Jukaku is a psychiatrist who was born and raised in Michigan to Indian immigrant parents. Her family traces its roots to Bhatkal, a coastal town in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district. The couple married in May 2006 and have two daughters, Emmalee and Serene.
In the same podcast, El-Sayed jokes that being married into a South Indian family for two decades may have made him "more Indian than Arab".
"I've been married to a South Indian family for 20 years. I might be more Indian than Arab. Everybody likes desis more than Arabs," he says, while in another clip he jokes that “too far in,” with a Desi wife, two Desi daughters and Desi women all around him.
El-Sayed defeated Republican Mike Rogers, who was backed by US President Donald Trump, in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed will be the first Muslim to enter the US Senate.
