The Questions Adam Hamawy Won’t Answer
· The Atlantic
The photograph, from April 1993, shows a burly sheikh sitting on a couch wearing a gray kaftan, a white-and-crimson turban, and black sunglasses. His beard is thick and white. Reporters crowd into his Jersey City tenement apartment, waiting to hear him speak.
Omar Abdel-Rahman—the man newspapers called the Blind Sheikh—by then had a reputation throughout the Muslim world as the religious leader of Egypt’s largest jihadist group. In 1981, his words inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. His rhetoric could be unremitting, as in a speech in Brooklyn in early 1993: “We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” By spring of that year, law enforcement was investigating Abdel-Rahman’s possible involvement in at least two killings, including that of a prominent extremist rabbi. And that March, the FBI and foreign agencies had arrested several of Abdel-Rahman’s close followers, among them a man reported to be the sheikh’s part-time driver, on charges of helping carry out the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people but had aimed for far more.
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Adam Hamawy, who will almost certainly represent New Jersey’s Twelfth Congressional District come January, was at the press conference in the sheikh’s apartment the day the photograph was taken. He has said that he went there to translate something for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy had met Abdel-Rahman two years earlier and became something of an acolyte, going to mosques across New Jersey to hear him speak, visiting the sheikh at home, and traveling with him to an Islamist conference in Detroit, where Abdel-Rahman and other speakers held forth on the necessity of violent jihad. In that photo, a bearded young man who resembles Hamawy kneels in front of reporters, his eyes trained on Abdel-Rahman. I asked Hamawy’s campaign multiple times whether that man is the candidate; the campaign did not reply.
Najlah Feanny / Corbis / GettySheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman speaks at a press conference in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April 1993.Two months after that press conference, in June 1993, Abdel-Rahman would be arrested for plotting what would have been another catastrophic day of terrorism in New York City; the plan included blowing up two Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations, and assassinating the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Hamawy would testify as a defense witness at Abdel-Rahman’s trial in 1995, and Abdel-Rahman would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Today, Hamawy is a plastic surgeon in Princeton, New Jersey. He won his 12-candidate Democratic primary with 28 percent of the vote. Because his district is deep blue, he is expected to easily win his general election in November. Much about his story surely registers to voters as admirable. He was an infant when his family immigrated from Egypt to Old Bridge, a town of about 50,000 at the time, located 35 miles south of New York City. He worked through college and medical school, went to Ground Zero to care for rescue workers, and served in Iraq as a U.S. Army combat surgeon. He restored bodies broken by war—including that of Tammy Duckworth, now a U.S. senator, who lost her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her helicopter. She has credited Hamawy with saving her life.
Hamawy already has found a place on the Democratic Party’s left wing. Although he is an observant Muslim—on primary night, he led supporters in chants of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is greater)—he is, unlike some fellow believers, pro-choice and an advocate for LGBTQ rights. He is passionate in his support for Medicare for All and in his insistence that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed him. Hamawy himself has endorsed and appeared with the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and campaigned with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that “America deserved 9/11.” Hamawy has also declined to commit to backing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, saying that the Democratic congressional leadership is “failing to meet the moment.”
Throughout his campaign, Hamawy has not fully accounted for why, as a young man, he kept company with Abdel-Rahman and others in his circle. Perhaps Hamawy was merely young, curious, and hapless and did not fully buy into the sheikh’s ideas. Or perhaps he harbored beliefs that he has since renounced. Hamawy himself has provided little explanation. When asked during the primary about Abdel-Rahman, who died in 2017, and his terrorism conspiracy, Hamawy told NBC, “I absolutely regret, and I condemn, what happened.” At the same time, he dismissed reporting about his relationship with the sheikh, attributing it to “right-wing media” and adding, “It’s racist. It’s really anti-Muslim.”
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over Abdel-Rahman’s terror trial as a federal judge, has called the sheikh “one of the world’s leading theologians of terrorism.” And Abdel-Rahman’s influence continued after his conviction: While serving out a life sentence in prison, the sheikh issued the fatwa that Osama bin Laden would use to justify the September 11 attacks.
In August, I spoke with Hamawy by phone for about an hour, and when he talked about health care or being a son of immigrants, he was expansive and friendly. But when I asked about the years when he drew close to Abdel-Rahman, he began to bob and weave—as he had in his testimony during the sheikh’s 1995 trial—and sometimes contradicted himself, even as he said that there was nothing of interest to be discovered.
“This characterization as a ‘relationship,’ I think, really misrepresents things,” he told me. He has repeatedly referred to the sheikh—who was in his 50s when Hamawy met him—as a “blind old man.” Hamawy noted his U.S. military service and his promotion to lieutenant colonel: “Clearly I was trusted by our government to be able to perform these services.” At one point, when I was pushing for more details, he bristled: “Clearly, clearly you have nothing else to talk about.” His spokesperson eventually ended the interview, and has not responded to multiple emails with additional questions.
Hannah Beier / The New York Times / ReduxAdam Hamawy and Hasan Piker at a campaign event in Trenton, New Jersey, in MayHamawy described Abdel-Rahman in the early 1990s as akin to a religious celebrity. “This was a person who was really everywhere in New York and New Jersey,” he told me, at a time when there were “not many leaders” in the Muslim community. “He was someone who led prayers and was known for his recitation of the Quran.”
Abdel-Rahman was in fact known for far more. The jihadist group in Egypt for which he acted as the religious authority, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, employed deadly violence in an effort to establish extremist Islamic rule in Egypt. Abdel-Rahman had declared in sermons that Sadat, the Egyptian president, was an infidel. He was jailed after Sadat’s death, but judges acquitted him on charges that he had sanctioned it; they ruled that although he had told his followers they had a duty to kill wayward Muslim leaders such as Sadat, there was not enough evidence to prove that Abdel-Rahman had directed the assassination. In 1990, a follower of Abdel-Rahman’s, El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated the radical right-wing rabbi Meir Kahane, who had twice been convicted on terrorism-related charges, in New York City.
Hamawy has said that he first heard the sheikh give a talk in 1991 in Matawan, New Jersey, and in his telling, their meeting afterward was incidental. “I met him,” Hamawy told me, not offering much more detail, “like so many others.”
This understates the nature of their eventual relationship, by Hamawy’s own previous account. In 1995, when the legal team defending Abdel-Rahman in his federal terrorism trial called Hamawy to testify, he made a point of greeting the sheikh, and mentioned phone calls, travel, and visits with Abdel-Rahman. “I have seen him in, you know, speak at different mosques all over New Jersey,” Hamawy said, according to the trial transcript. “I have seen him in his home.” He mentioned seeing the sheikh at a school “several times.”
In November 1991, Abdel-Rahman was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in Detroit, and Hamawy joined him on the 13-hour drive there in a minivan, along with five other men. (Some of the details of Hamawy’s backstory were first reported by The Washington Free Beacon and Jewish Insider.) Hamawy described his decision to travel to Detroit as a sort of lark. “I was a last-minute carpool,” he said in our interview. “I’m a college student.” (He had graduated from Rutgers earlier that year.) “It’s a free ride to go somewhere. It wasn’t like I was following him.”
Yet Hamawy testified during the trial that in Detroit, some of the men from the van shared a hotel suite; Hamawy was in the same room as Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy attended the conference too, and listened to the sheikh’s speech about jihad and the speeches of other hard-line Islamists.
Lorenzo Vidino, who studies Islamic extremism and directs the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me that it is highly unlikely that Abdel-Rahman and members of his inner circle would throw open a door to a random newcomer. “You have in Abdel-Rahman one of the two or three godfathers of radical jihad in the world,” Vidino said. “There’s no chance for an outsider to spend meaningful time in a minivan with the Blind Sheikh.” Earlier this year, Mukasey, the judge in the trial, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Hamawy was more than a casual traveling companion of Abdel Rahman.”
[From the November 2012 issue: My conversion will not be televised]
The conference the men attended was titled “Towards a Global Islamic Economy,” and under questioning by Abdel-Rahman’s lawyer during the trial, Hamawy said that the event was focused on the economy. He told the defense lawyer that he had never heard Abdel-Rahman talk about jihad in America. Nor, Hamawy said in reply to a question from the prosecutor, had he heard Abdel-Rahman talk about robbing banks or attacking military bases.
Then one of the prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald, commenced his cross-examination of Hamawy. Do you recall, he asked, if Abdel-Rahman talked about the Egyptian leader Mubarak in Detroit? “Not really,” Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald handed Hamawy a transcript of the sheikh’s speech from the conference and gave him a moment to read it. Then he rephrased his question more pointedly: Do you recall Abdel-Rahman that weekend talking about Mubarak as “the backstabber who became the loyal dog to America?” Hamawy, his memory apparently refreshed, responded: “Yes.”
Fitzgerald asked Hamawy if Abdel-Rahman had talked in his speech about jihad and the importance of conquering the land of the infidels. Hamawy quibbled about wording and definitions but conceded that Abdel-Rahman’s speech centered on “a struggle in the sake of God, yes. It was a jihad.” (Fitzgerald quoted from speeches of Abdel-Rahman’s several times in the trial, making clear what the sheikh meant by that word, jihad. For example: “If God, glory be to him, says do jihad, it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with a missile.”) Among the other speakers at the Detroit conference was Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of a repressive, violent Islamist movement in Sudan and a friend of Abdel-Rahman’s.
As the trial went on, the prosecutor burrowed in, asking if the sheikh had ever described America and Israel as enemies of Islam. Yes, Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald then asked if Hamawy had ever heard Abdel-Rahman say that Muslims have an obligation to carry out jihad against enemies of Islam. “Of course,” Hamawy replied. “That’s what he always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know.”
The successful prosecution of Abdel-Rahman and nine others hinged largely on the testimony of Emad Salem, an undercover informant for the U.S. government. Salem had infiltrated Abdel-Rahman’s circle, pretending to be a disaffected Egyptian special-forces soldier turned jihadist, and was one of the band who traveled in the van to Detroit. One day during that trip, Salem testified, Abdel-Rahman took the group, Hamawy included, back to the hotel suite. They sat on the floor, and Abdel-Rahman grilled Salem on his military knowledge: Do you know dynamite? Yes, Salem said. Did he know how to blow dynamite up? Again, Salem replied yes. Then Abdel-Rahman inquired about Salem’s skill as a shooter. “He ask [sic] me to turn my rifle to President Mubarak’s chest,” Salem testified.
Hamawy, in his testimony, denied ever witnessing such a conversation, though he noted that Salem frequently talked in front of the sheikh about his abilities with bombs. He said that he and the rest of Abdel-Rahman’s circle suspected that Salem might be working for Egyptian intelligence and trying to entrap the sheikh.
Salem was a complicated figure who had lied under oath in the past. The lead federal prosecutor in the trial, Andrew McCarthy, later referred to him as “the strangest, wiliest, most impossible, most infuriating pain in the ass I ever will know.” But McCarthy also called him “breathtakingly effective.” Salem managed to tape-record countless hours of his conversations with suspects (though he was not able to record the conversation in which he said the sheikh told him to turn his gun on Mubarak). Jurors judged Salem credible enough to convict 10 men on 48 of 50 charges. A federal appeals-court panel unanimously affirmed the verdicts.
There was, according to Salem, more talk of rifle shooting on the drive from Detroit back to New Jersey. One of Abdel-Rahman’s followers asked Salem if he could train him and other followers in rifle target practice. In code, the men called it “deer hunting.” This follower told Salem that he and other followers hadn’t gotten a chance to practice with rifles since Nosair, who had organized past trainings, had been arrested. Can we, the follower asked, go deer hunting with you? Salem agreed: “I said, ‘Sure, why not, we will do that.’”
Hamawy, who was in the van at that time, was not asked during the trial about that conversation, nor did he speak of it on his own.
Hamawy remained on friendly terms with the sheikh after the Detroit conference. In the summer of 1992, before Hamawy entered medical school, he and two friends took a pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Egypt and London; Hamawy also stopped in Jerusalem. When asked during the trial who had recommended his travel agent, Hamawy answered: “Sheikh Omar.” A friend of the sheikh, he said, accompanied the young men on their flight to London. There, Hamawy testified, they relied on yet another friend of the sheikh, a man who worked in an Islamic bookstore, who found them a youth hostel.
At least two of the men Hamawy and his friends met on that trip, including the bookstore worker, were suspected members of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, prosecutors said. When Hamawy and his friends returned to London on their way home, Hamawy testified, he made sure to call the bookstore worker and thank him for his hospitality. Hamawy was asked during the trial if he knew what Gama’a al-Islamiyya was and said that he had heard of it; asked if he knew any members of the organization, he said, “I assume that Sheikh Omar was, yes.”
Once Hamawy entered medical school, he saw less of Abdel-Rahman. The sheikh was very much in the news in 1993 as followers of his were being investigated for their role in the World Trade Center bombing. In April of that year, Hamawy called Abdel-Rahman. “I hadn’t been able to see Sheikh Omar that much,” he testified in the federal trial. “I had called him earlier that week and told him: ‘It is my spring break now. If you need anything, you can just give me a call.’” As it happened, the sheikh called and asked Hamawy to translate a document for him as he was getting ready to hold the press conference in his Jersey City apartment.
The generous explanation for Hamawy’s affiliation with Abdel-Rahman is youthful fascination. It’s not unusual for young people to be captivated by radical leaders, only to wise up and turn away as the years pass. The American left offers many such examples of this, from those attracted by Soviet Communism in the 1930s to those who embraced the violence of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Young socialist Iranians embraced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, only for many thousands to end up before his firing squads in years to come. In our interview, I asked Hamawy if there was something about Abdel-Rahman that spoke to him as a young man. Was he merely intrigued, or something like a true believer? He pushed back on my question.
“It wasn’t a personal relationship,” he said. “This is where reality and fiction is beginning to kind of diverge.”
In the course of his medical career, Hamawy has worked on missions of mercy in countries including Haiti, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria; in 2024 and 2025, he spent several weeks at hospitals in Gaza. The details of two such missions raise additional questions.
By 1994, Yugoslavia had dissolved, and three of its republics—Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia—had descended into brutal ethnic and religious wars. About half of Bosnia’s roughly 4 million citizens were Muslim, and Bosnian Serb and Serbian military units carried out massacres and mass rapes against them. The suffering of Bosnia’s Muslims was a subject that consumed many millions of Muslims, and others, around the globe. Several witnesses in Abdel-Rahman’s federal trial testified that the sheikh and his followers spoke often of Bosnia and the duty of Muslims to fight jihad there.
No evidence suggests that Abdel-Rahman encouraged Hamawy to go to Bosnia. But as a medical student, he was among those who wanted to help. In the summer of 1994, Hamawy told me, he reached out to the Bosnian Mission to the United Nations, and asked about volunteering. In a 1996 interview with The New Jersey Star-Ledger, he said that the mission had recommended that he reach out to Benevolence International, a charity with offices in several countries, including the United States and Bosnia. Hamawy spent his first week in Sarajevo and the next four in Zenica, a hill city about an hour away. As he described it to me, he stayed with two local doctors and spent his days going to the charity’s warehouse and delivering medical supplies to local clinics.
Zenica was a contested and violent place at that time. Jihadists who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya were pouring into Bosnia. Zenica became the headquarters of the notorious brigade known as Odred El Mudžahid, or “The Jihadist Unit,” composed of foreign fighters from across the Middle East and Chechnya. A human-rights criminal tribunal later found that from 1993 to March 1994, the brigade had engaged in torture, looting, and massacres of Christian Croats and Serbs, soldiers and civilians alike, some of whom were beheaded; in January 1994, gunmen from the brigade had executed a British aid worker outside of Zenica. Much later, some commanders affiliated with the brigade were convicted of war crimes.
Benevolence International was an important player in that jihadist ecosystem. In the years after its incorporation in 1992, the charity provided medical assistance to impoverished Bosnian refugees. But during those same years, its guiding force was Osama bin Laden: According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Benevolence International’s office in Sarajevo was one of bin Laden’s “impressive array” of offices providing financial and technical support for terrorism.
After 9/11, the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina investigated the group and raided several of its offices. They found many compelling links to al-Qaeda, including a photograph taken in Afghanistan in the late 1980s showing the Benevolence International director Enaam Arnaout and bin Laden holding rifles and a shoulder-fired rocket. They also discovered a handwritten letter in which bin Laden authorized Arnaout to sign on his behalf, and documents establishing that Arnaout had worked with members of al-Qaeda to purchase rockets, mortars, rifles, and bombs to distribute to fighter camps, including those of al-Qaeda. In 2002, Arnaout was indicted on charges of racketeering, money laundering, and concealing his terrorism ties, and the Treasury Department designated Benevolence a “financier of terror.” Arnaout pleaded guilty to illegally siphoning off charitable contributions to buy uniforms and other supplies for fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya, though as part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped the terrorism-related charges against him. (In 2005, a lawyer who had represented Benevolence International, Matthew J. Piers, wrote a defense of the organization in which he argued that the U.S. government’s investigation had caused its “malevolent destruction.”)
Hamawy told me that he knew nothing at the time about the group’s ties to al-Qaeda or its support for jihadist fighters. He simply believed that he was working with staff at what he told me was a UN-endorsed charity to deliver supplies to clinics overwhelmed with the sick and dying. (The UN did not keep a list of certified charities in Bosnia.) “I had no sense or even suspicion anything like that was happening,” he said. “To kind of imply that between my microbiology rotation and my psychiatry rotation, I was in the mountains acting as, like, you know, some nefarious player is, again, kind of ludicrous.”
When I spoke with Jeffrey Parsons, who led FBI anti-terror investigations for two decades and now works for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, he was inclined to believe Hamawy’s claim to ignorance about the specifics of the charity’s subterfuge. Al-Qaeda-linked charities often played a double game, and those on the medical side might have known little about the money and aid sluiced off for jihadists. Still, as with his ties to Abdel-Rahman, Hamawy’s apparent lack of curiosity is itself curious. “It is an interesting life choice,” Parsons told me. “He definitely went there willingly, and he was in a city and a charity that would become a core for big shots in al-Qaeda.”
[From the September 2026 issue: What happened to al-Qaeda?]
Decades later, in 2024 and 2025, Hamawy journeyed to Gaza for another medical mission as Israeli bombs fell around him. He worked at the European Hospital in 2024 and Nasser Hospital in 2025, and said that he was seared by the experience. The war there was more horrifying than any he had seen before, particularly for children, he told me.
He has been adamant in interviews that Hamas had no presence in or underneath these hospitals. He told me that as a surgeon he could walk anywhere, that he had a trained eye, and that he saw no signs of militants or weapons. In 2024, he told Jacobin magazine that he had not seen a single weapon at the European Hospital: “Not one rifle. Not one pistol. Not one grenade launcher. This was a completely benign civilian hospital with no tunnels underneath it.” ABC News asked him about Israeli and U.S. intelligence that Hamas gunmen had access to Nasser Hospital. “Their intelligence is just wrong,” Hamawy said. “In terms of operations and people, actually fighters that are actively in, that has not been observed by anyone that’s been in these hospitals over the last two years.”
Yet in the spring of 2025, the Israelis ordered staff and patients at the European Hospital to leave and bombed directly outside. Afterward, Israel said that its forces had found the body of Mohammed Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas, in a tunnel that ran beneath the hospital emergency room. (His brother, Yahya Sinwar, had directed the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.) In January 2026, Doctors Without Borders suspended “non-critical” medical operations at Nasser Hospital, stating: “Our teams have reported the presence of armed men, some of them masked; intimidation; arbitrary arrests of patients; and a recent situation involving the suspected movement of weapons.” Israel and the U.S., as well as The New York Times, have found evidence of Hamas’s presence at another hospital in Gaza, al-Shifa. Last year, I spoke with medical personnel who had worked there and at other Gaza hospitals. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” one Doctors Without Borders staffer told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”
I asked Hamawy about Sinwar’s death underneath the European Hospital. Hamas confirmed more than a year ago that the Israelis had killed Sinwar, and has not disputed that he died in that tunnel. The Israeli military also took a group of foreign reporters, including from The New York Times and NBC News, through the tunnel under the hospital to the bloodstained room where Israeli forces said Sinwar had died.
“I don’t believe anything until we have third-party observers on the ground,” Hamawy told me. “To take the word of the Israelis and not take the word of the Palestinians seems kind of, like, illogical.” The Israelis, he said, “show you pictures that, to my experienced eye, look at it and say, ‘Hey, something doesn’t look right about this picture.’”
The problem for Hamawy is that, in the past, his intuitions have proven quite fallible.
At one point in our interview, Hamawy said that my line of questioning about the sheikh was “trying to characterize me, like everyone else is characterizing me, as: ‘Oh my God, this man is a Muslim man who came in contact with someone who, again, you know, ended up, like, serving for crimes, for years that I have condemned.’”
I could find no public evidence that Hamawy had denounced Abdel-Rahman prior to his candidacy and the media’s unearthing of that history. More to the point, asking about that history is fair game. He owes a fuller explanation to his would-be constituents.
Perhaps voters simply are no longer paying attention to his campaign. Hamawy’s Republican opponent, Gregg Mele, has no money and even less mojo; he is a near-perpetual candidate in New Jersey who has yet to come close to winning a seat. Most reporters have stopped covering the race, other than to track Hamawy’s encounters with other Democratic politicians on the left. In August, he attended the annual Panamerican Congress, a meeting of left-wing leaders in the Americas, held this year in Uruguay. And he and another likely U.S. representative, Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, served as keynote speakers at the annual gala of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C.
Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, points out that New Jersey sits between two big media markets, New York City and Philadelphia, and remains an afterthought in both. “Political junkies to the side, a lot of people don’t know what’s going on,” Rasmussen told me about Hamawy’s race. “But you can count me as a person who thinks that there are really important questions left about his background.”
If we are to assume that Hamawy’s political coming of age included a turn away from men such as Abdel-Rahman, the puzzle is why he does not talk candidly about that change of heart, rather than continuing to insist that to ask such questions is hateful.