On July 24, at the Muslim Educational Community Center of America in Canton, Michigan, the center's founder and imam, Sayed Saleh Qazwini, stood before his congregation and asked who was behind America's wars.
"Who was it that pushed for the war with Iraq? Who was it that pushed for the war with Libya?" His answer: "AIPAC and the Zionists that are in full control of the government here."
About a week later, days before Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, Qazwini gave his congregation instructions. "It's mandatory to go and to elect brother Abdul El-Sayed," he said, "because at least we know he's a Muslim."
El-Sayed won that primary by fewer than 14,000 votes.
He's now the Democratic nominee in Michigan's toss-up Senate race, and a new investigation shows how much of his campaign ran through mosques and Islamic centers where leaders preached that kind of message.
In March, during Ramadan, El-Sayed spoke at the Islamic Center of Detroit. "I have to get on the ballot to be able to get your vote, inshallah," he told the worshippers. "So my team is here in the back." His campaign was collecting petition signatures to get him on the ballot.
The closing prayer at that event, translated from Arabic, said: "O our Lord, the Zionists have spread corruption in the land... take the worst revenge upon them." It's not clear whether El-Sayed was still in the room when it was recited. He chose to campaign there.
In August, after Qazwini's "Zionists" sermon and his "mandatory" endorsement, El-Sayed appeared with Qazwini again, this time at a campaign-season event at Christ Episcopal Church in Dearborn.
By then, Qazwini's views were no secret. El-Sayed kept appearing with him anyway.
The research behind the reporting comes from the Middle East Forum. Its executive director, Gregg Roman, says his team reviewed recordings from about three dozen Michigan mosques and Islamic centers and cataloged 938 statements it classifies as extremist. Twenty-seven come from MECCA's own videos. Roman says nine of these institutions have received $45 million in taxpayer funding, and that 41 local, state and federal officials have attended events at them.
Those institutions are tax-exempt, and that's where the law comes in. Churches, mosques and other 501(c)(3) nonprofits can't campaign for or against candidates. J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department elections lawyer who now runs the Public Interest Legal Foundation, put it plainly: houses of worship that tell their members to vote for a federal candidate are "jeopardizing" their tax status.
An imam telling his congregation it's "mandatory" to elect a particular Senate candidate is about as clear as campaign activity gets.
Rep. Keith Self of Texas has asked the IRS to investigate the tax-exempt status of the Islamic Society of North America, which he says reportedly engaged in prohibited political activity on El-Sayed's behalf.
The El-Sayed campaign didn't respond to requests for comment.
None of this is about the millions of Muslim Americans who pray for their families and their country. It's about the specific clerics El-Sayed chose to stand next to, and what a Senate candidate's choices say about him. A candidate can't pick who preaches at a mosque. He can pick whose endorsements he accepts and whose stages he keeps sharing.
El-Sayed is running statewide as a mainstream candidate for working families in Michigan. In Canton, the message from the pulpit was that "Zionists" control the government and that voting for him was a religious duty because he's Muslim.
Michigan voters can decide which version of his campaign to believe on Tuesday.