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January 15, 2025 | 11:58 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A Muslim imam from the United States (US) is expected to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony, which will take place on January 20, The New Arab reported.
The ceremony will mark the start of Donald Trump’s second term as US president following his victory in the November election, which saw him defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
Husham Al-Husainy, the Iraqi-American director of the Islamic Education Center of Karbala in Dearborn, Michigan, will also speak at the event, The Washington Reporter reported on Monday.
The Shiite Muslim imam will address the audience alongside other religious leaders, including senior pastor Rev. Lorenzo Sewell of Church 180, also in Detroit, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University in New York, and Father Frank Mann, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn.
In October, Al-Husainy had voiced support for Trump during the presidential campaign. Trump held a rally in Michigan, home to a prominent Arab-American and Muslim-American community.
"I'm leaning toward Trump because I feel he's closer to the Bible, the Torah and the Quran. Because I'm for peace, no war," he said, adding that the country "deserves to have a strong leader who can bring peace to this world," he told Fox News in October 2024.
Al-Husainy arrived in the US in the 1970s to study aeronautical engineering and has been an active member of Dearborn's Muslim community for more than two decades.
A prominent member of the Iraqi community in the US, Al-Husainy made headlines in 2007 after he reportedly refused to call Hezbollah a "terrorist organization" in a television interview on Fox News.
"Hezbollah is a Lebanese organization. And I have nothing to do with it," Al-Husainy said during an appearance on Hannity and Colmes.
Frustrated by the Biden administration's failure to achieve a Gaza ceasefire, and its persistent military support for Israel and the subsequent war in Lebanon, the state's Arab-American community has turned away from the Democratic Party and voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
At the time, the Republican promised to bring “peace and prosperity to the Middle East”, and visited many businesses in the area and spoke to local residents.
At a rally in Novi, Michigan, Trump invited a number of Arab and Muslim-American leaders to speak on stage, which was interpreted as a community endorsement of his presidency.
Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit said on stage: “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promised peace. He promised peace, not war… He promised to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.”
Trump, who is strongly pro-Israel, claimed that Hamas’s attacks on Israel, which sparked a deadly military offensive in Gaza, “would never have happened” if he had been president at the time.
Trump has invited a number of world leaders to attend his inauguration in Washington DC. Invitations have been extended to Chinese President Xi Jinping, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Argentinian President Javier Milei and Hungarian leader Viktor Orban – all of whom Trump has likened to him.
Joe Biden, who is days away from taking office as US president, has said he will also attend.
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