Guest post by Banafsheh Zand at Iran So Far AwayScreencap of Twitter/X video.The growing influence of Islamists linked to the Khomeinist Regime in the United States was shown on September 23, 2026, when a University of Michigan student of Iranian heritage named Iman Dashti asked Michigan’s Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed if he opposed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).Confronting El-Sayed with his words from earlier this year that he would not comment on the death of Regime leader Ali Khamenei because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” Dashti asked him “if you renounce the people who held vigils that supported this terrorist for all the stuff that he’s done.”El-Sayed meandered and didn’t give a direct answer, instead criticizing US foreign policy and stating he didn’t believe the US government should engage in regime change.He didn’t address the suffering faced by Dashti’s family, who had said “my cousin was hunted in the streets of Iran by the IRGC because her hijab wasn’t on right,” (Dashti later added that his cousin’s uncle had been sentenced to death and received 50 lashes.) Instead, Dashti became the victim of an online harassment campaign, which included the publication of his personal information.El-Sayed went on to double-down on his apologia for Tehran during a debate with his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, on October 8. He equated the Islamic Regime to Israel, stating that “both of them have proven dangerous in their own way,” while condemning the US’s ongoing conflict with Tehran as “a war we shouldn’t be fighting, because here we are fighting this stupid war because people like him (Rogers) have been pushing for it for 20 years.”This unwillingness even to appear to be opposed to the Khomeinist regime would have been shocking only a few years ago. The fact that El-Sayed feels he be can so frank about his opinions results from the reality that he has a voting base of Michiganders who share his views.The Khomeinist-Backed CandidateA strong case can be made that the thin margin by which Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Party primary on August 4 came from Muslims voters energized by Tehran-supporting clerics.On July 31, Shi’a cleric Hassan Qazwini, head of the Islamic Institute of America, gave a Friday prayer sermon in Dearborn calling on congregants to vote for El-Sayed; “The way to deal the Zionist a bigger blow is to go and cast your vote on Tuesday, and don’t allow the Zionist candidate to win.”El-Sayed himself had previously spoken at Qazwini’s Institute on June 6. The Qazwini family, several of whom are now serving as clerics in Michigan, are a religious dynasty from Karbala, Iraq, who relocated to Qom, Iran. Hassan Qazwini himself is a graduate of the same Qom hawzeh (seminary) where the regime leadership is educated.Also on July 31, in Canton, Michigan, cleric Mohammad Qazwini, a relative of Hassan, gave a sermon demanding votes for El-Sayed.Mohammad Qazwini’s congregation (named MECCA) was founded by Saleh Qazwini, another Qom seminary graduate who has been recorded uttering statements repeating Khomenist conspiracy theories. Mohammad Qazwini himself has been filmed celebrating the death of Senator Lindsay Graham and asking his congregation to pray that God strikes down President Trump.On August 3, cleric Husham Al-Husayni gave a sermon in Dearborn endorsing El-Sayed and telling congregants to send a message to “Zionist lowlifes.”El-Sayed himself was at the mosque, and claimed there that the reason Michiganders don’t have adequate social services is because the US government spends money fighting Muslims overseas. In 2022, Husham Al-Husayni had said “Thank God we have the Islamic Republic of Iran.”On June 23, Hojatoleslam Mohammad Ali Elahi told his Dearborn congregation that it was a religious obligation to vote for El-Sayed, in order to stop “this war against Iran.”Hojatoleslam Elahi participated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and served as the Director of the Iranian Navy’s Political-Ideological Department beginning in 1982. Elahi afterwards worked as head of research and documentation for the Martyrs Foundation and was on the editorial board of the English-language newspaper Tehran Times.According to a 1993 report from the US Institute for Peace, he came to the US in 1991 in order “to inspect American branches of Hizbullah.” In 2018, he praised the regime’s ideology of Guardianship of the Jurist as being superior to the American presidency.In 2025, Elahi was photographed meeting President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi at the United Nations, while in 2026, he received press coverage for holding a mourning ceremony after Khamenei’s death.Elahi continued to campaign for El-Sayed after the primary victory. On September 4, he gave another sermon in which he appeared to connect El-Sayed’s election to the survival of the Islamic Republic.A Growing CommunityMichigan’s Muslims are heavily clustered in the Metro Detroit area. Their presence is most notable in the cities of Dearborn and Hamtramck. A growing Muslim population has also brought with it a use of the political system to enforce Islamic norms.For example, in 2004, the Hamtramck city council allowed mosques to broadcast the call to prayer from loudspeakers, and in 2023 it allowed halal animal slaughter – a practice some animal rights activities consider cruelty.From Qom to DetroitMany of Michigan’s Muslims are Twelver Shi’as. When discussing Shi’a Islam, it is important to note that the Shi’a clergy are an organized hierarchy, akin to that of the Roman Catholic Church.Thus, it is easy for the Khomeinist elite to introduce clerics into American society simply through the pattern of immigrants building a mosque and asking Shi’a authorities to send them a prayer leader.The largest mosque in the USA, Dearborn’s Islamic Center of America, is Shi’a. Hassan Qazwini was the prayer leader of this mosque until leaving in 2015.The next imam, Ibrahim Kazerooni spent years delivered sermons lauding the Islamic Regime before achieving some notoriety in January 2020 after holding a vigil to mourn Qassem Soleimani. Weeks later, he endorsed revenge operations against American soldiers.Another cleric spouting Khomeinist rhetoric is Haj Hassanain Rajabali. On June 15, 2026, he spoke at Hojetoleslam Elahi’s mosque, and claimed that the (Jewish) Rothschild family has controlled the world since the XVIIIth century. This conspiracy theory was mentioned by Ruhollah Khomeini in the first chapter of his Islamic Government.In 2015, Sheikh Usama Abdulghani – an African-American convert to Islam who spent decades studying in Qom – established the Hadi Institute in Dearborn.This institute contains a school, publishing company, and a service called the Light of Guidance. On Light of Guidance’s YouTube channel, one can watch Sheikh Abdulghani’s Moharram lecture dedicated to Ali Khamenei or his commemoration of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Hadi Publications, meanwhile, has printed a children’s book praising the Palestinian intifada entitled “The Echo of Stones”.When the Twelve-Day War began in June 2025, Abdulghani told his followers to “trust our leadership” while another Hadi Institute representative described Khamenei as the “leader of the resistance” and going to on explain “they are speaking about attempting to kill our beloved (Khamenei), are we just going to sit back idly…we have a role to play.”Tarek Bazzi, another of Abdulghani’s deputies, led a public demonstration in 2024 praising “Imam” Khomeini, shouting “Death to America” and calling for the annihilation of Israel.Political ImplicationsWith a polarized electorate in a ‘swing state,” the Muslim vote is of extreme importance. Thus, instead of investigating these clerics, local politicians have embraced them.Hojatoleslam Elahi gave an invocation at the second-term inauguration of Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2023, and his mosque was visited by then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2021.Michigan Muslims gravitated toward voting for Democrats, and formed an alignment with the “anti-imperialist” left. Thus, in 2018, Rashida Tlaib was elected to Congress representing Dearborn. Abdul El-Sayed is following her path.As they’ve gained in power, however, Michigan Muslims’ views have begun to differ from those of most Democrats. In 2022, Muslim groups advocated for banning teaching LGBT in public schools. In 2023, the now all-Muslim Hamtramck city council banned public display of gay pride flags. Liberal LGBT groups who had helped Muslim politicians later stated they felt betrayed.After the Gaza conflict began, due to their anger over what they perceived as former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel, many Michigan Muslims refused to vote for Kamala Harris, thus helping Donald Trump return to the White House. This sent a message to Party leaders: you can’t win without us.For Iranians, these developments bring back painful memories.The Alliance of the Red and the Black – and the Fate of the LeftThe Islamic Revolution in Iran was won by a coalition of Islamists and Leftists. This coalition did not emerge by accident. While clerics could bring crowds from the mosques into the streets, they did not have the skills of modern political organizing.Likewise, the left had the skills to launch a successful international propaganda campaign, and build guerilla warfare units in Iranian cities, but their intellectual base was too small to form a mass movement. Only by working together could the clerics and the left achieve their shared goal of overthrowing the Shah.The intellectual left had assumed that clerics, unable to manage a modern state, would defer to their abilities, but instead Khomeini quickly inaugurated his vision of Islamic law and leftists were either executed, imprisoned, or exiled.For decades, the Iranian Diaspora has been telling the West that what happened in Iran could occur to them too. Today’s Michigan is a vivid example of what can happen when warnings are ignored.The post The Islamic Republic of Michigan appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.