That Zohran Mamdani, an unapologetic Muslim and Democratic Socialist, who ran a campaign centered on joy and inclusion, won the mayorship of New York City sends a message that is radical in the contemporary United States — that Muslims are human beings.
In the final days of the campaign, Mamdani posted a video where he spoke movingly to the hate he endured as a Muslim running a national campaign in the United States where what is anticipated of Muslims is to silently endure a “tolerance of indignity.” How, growing up in the shadow of 9/11, he knows “what it means to live with an undercurrent of suspicion” based on nothing more than his expression of his faith.
The video took me back to Sept. 11, 2001, to the round, tiled table in my parent’s kitchen in Auburn, Ala. I was 14 years old and wore a hijab. I had been checked out of school shortly after watching a plane hit the second tower of the World Trade Center on a television the teacher had rolled into the classroom. When I heard my name on the intercom, I worried that somehow a loved one had been in New York without me knowing.
My father explained, gently, that he’d taken me out for my own safety. When I protested, saying this had nothing to do with me, he told me about the Japanese internment camps during World War II, explaining that fear can be politically harnessed and turned into hate. Racism, he explained, does not see humans.
This wasn’t a new thing for Muslims in the United States – my mother had been spat at in North Carolina during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. State targeting of Black Muslims dates back to the 1930s (not to mention the horrors endured by enslaved Muslims), and the targeting of immigrant Muslims begins in the 1960s.
The Patriot Act, passed forty-five days after 9/11, escalated state targeting of Muslims by consolidating and dramatically widening a regime of surveillance of communities across the country, including in New York. A registry was created of tens of thousands of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men – thousands were deported on little evidence. These domestic violences occurred against the backdrop of U.S. military violence that claimed almost 4 million lives, of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan in the name of “counterterrorism.”
In the coming decades the infrastructure of surveillance and deportation expanded. Domestic spying tools have been used against Black Lives Matter activists. Trump’s Muslim ban, which follows in the path of the Muslim registry, is a now-expanded ban on people from several majority-Black and majority-Muslim countries, categories that often overlap.
It is against this background of a country that has reduced Muslims into a dark, foreign, terrorist “other,” that Mamdani ran a campaign that centers the affordability of the city for all who live within it. That placed videos celebrating trans New Yorkers alongside ones wishing people “Eid Mubarak” in what one instagram commenter, silmyrisman, described as “WhatsApp auntie group chat aesthetics.” That combined the graphics of bollywood with the royal blue and marigold yellow of New York metro cards – a visual embodiment of the diversity that makes this city great.
In a moment of a dramatically emboldened ICE, the campaign celebrated an image of New York City that includes everyone; one that can even have a Muslim for a mayor.
That it is radical to think of Muslims as humans is made obvious by how casually Mamdani’s opponents in this mayoral election engage in anti-Muslim hate. Andrew Cuomo, former Democratic governor of New York, insisted that Mamdani isn’t Muslim enough because he is a progressive, while at the same time nodding along to radio host Sid Rosenberg’s assertion that Mamdani would applaud another 9/11. Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, falsely claimed that Mamdani supported “global jihad.” Pro-Cuomo mailers were circulated with Mamdani’s face darkened, and his beard lengthened. A political comic depicted his name on the side of a plane barreling towards the Twin Towers.
Republican Congressman Randy Fine from Florida publicly demanded the Trump administration “review every naturalization of the past 30 years—starting with Mamdani.”
The hate speech, the death threats, the calls for deportation, all insist that Mamdani’s Muslim identity should disqualify him from participating in public life. How dare this young, brown, Muslim man contest the order of things? How dare he have the audacity to run for – and be in the lead to win – the highest office in the country’s largest, richest, city?
What is troubling to me as we look into the possibilities of the Zohran mayorship, is not just these old white men’s sense of entitlement to power; but that their open racism, like that of the president’s, is not disqualifying.
Instead, the idea that Mamdani should be feared by voters because he is Muslim, and because of his position on Palestine, is not only acceptable in media coverage and political discourse, but pervades it. There is no similar questioning as to whether Cuomo, who is literally providing support for a war criminal as he acts as a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team, should be feared by Muslims and other New Yorkers.
While Mamdani was asked ad nauseum by everyone from The View to the Late Show With Stephen Colbert to condemn Hamas (he did) and recognize Israel as Jewish State (he did not), it would be unfathomable for there to be similar pressure on his opponents to condemn the Israeli forces for committing what is recognized, including by the United Nations, as a genocide, let alone condemn the United States for funding it.
In all this, though nearly one in ten New Yorkers are Muslim, our fears, our lives, are simply not part of the national conversation. Instead, the state apparatus built to target us, one built on an image of us as a dangerous other, is getting more powerful as I write this.
The Trump administration, keen to destroy our democratic institutions, is building on a precedent of the dehumanization of Muslims to do so.
ICE – an entity invented in the name of national security after 9/11— has received an additional $75 billion in federal funds. It has recently signed a contract for Israeli spyware that can hack all phones within its vicinity – a promise to violate our rights to privacy.
Along with other minoritized groups, Muslims continue to be the targets of its kidnapping, detention, and threats of deportation. Activists like Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, Turkish Rumeysa Ozturk, and Indian Badr Khan Suri, have been detained for months, their due process rights violated for nothing more than exercising their constitutional right to free speech. Palestinian Leqaa Kordia is still in ICE detention.
New Yorkers from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Guinea (all majority Muslim countries) were also recently taken from Canal Street during an unprecedented ICE raid in lower Manhattan.
All of these Muslims – whether taken from Ivy League dorms, or from an open air market in Chinatown– were identified as by hate groups emboldened by the pervasive anti-Muslim hate that Zohran describes. The Department of Homeland Security admitted in court to using Canary Mission, a website that doxes people critical of Israel (myself included), to create its list of targets. Savannah Hernandez, a right-wing political commentator with Turning Point USA, who claims that “Muslim culture” is taking over US cities, took credit for the Canal Street sweep.
Mamdani’s victory certainly makes the statement, as he put it, that you cannot win an election by “peddling in islamophobia.”
As that young Muslim girl on her parent’s kitchen table, and as a professor at CUNY today, where my students are immigrants, Black and brown, and queer, and Muslim, I am hopeful and joyous at this result.
However, I also live in an America where hate crimes against Muslims have continued to surge. Where I had a hijabi student walk into class just this semester crying after being swung-at by a man on the subway yelling hate.
While I am proud to see Mamdani ascend to the ranks of the highest political office in New York City, espousing a socialist politics and an inclusivity that insists that Muslims are a part of New York, I am also fearful. I am fearful for his safety in a country that has wielded the force of the state against Black and brown communities, against our leaders, time and time again. I am fearful for those students who are not citizens, and whose future in an academia under attack feels uncertain. I am fearful that no lessons have been learned since 2001, and that the hate this country has allowed to fester for so long destroys the vision of humanity New Yorkers are voting for.
