"I'm for truth no matter who tells it. I'm for Justice, no matter who it's for or against"
--Malcolm X
Zohran Mamdani and How to Be a ‘Good’ Muslim in America
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by Meher Ahmad
[Ms. Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.]
A few days before Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a friend and I were speculating about his chances of winning. We indulged in a moment of giddy optimism at the prospect that a Muslim man might actually become the mayor of the city we live in. With the polling available then, it seemed plausible. “If he does,” my friend, Arman Dzidzovic, said, “it’s about to get so much worse.”
Arman was referring to the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer — or even a terrorist himself. Arman, a Muslim like me, felt that the higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. I didn’t disagree.
Then we both fell silent. The shared understanding of what it means to be Muslim in America hung in the air between us.
It’s a confounding time to be Muslim in this country. A degree of Muslim culture I would have never thought possible when I was a kid is now imbued in the everyday lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked every time I hear non-Muslim teenagers say “inshallah.” My friend and I were having this discussion about Mr. Mamdani while sitting in a trendy Yemeni coffeehouse, one of many proliferating across the country as places where young Muslims and non-Muslims alike hang out after hours instead of at bars.
And yet with every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve learned to anticipate the patterns of anti-Islamic hate — after a terrorist attack, the bombing of another Muslim-majority country or simply when a high-profile Muslim enters the public consciousness. We can count on crude, anti-Muslim prejudice to bleed into our social media feeds, with the dogmatic good-versus-evil narratives peddled by politicians coming quickly in their wake.
So it came as no surprise when, within hours of Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, right-wing politicians and talking heads called him “little Muhammad,” accused him of wanting to enforce Shariah and insinuated that his victory could bring about another Sept. 11.
But perhaps more insidious is the pernicious Islamophobia that has morphed in the years since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kind that has seeped into the liberal institutions that claim to oppose racism and prejudice. Their actions have helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to take anti-Muslim attitudes and codify them in policies and law, with far-reaching consequences for Muslims in America. In these spaces, Mr. Mamdani is not “little Muhammad” but instead a virulent antisemite who portends violence for Jewish New Yorkers on account of his criticism of Israel and his faith in Islam.
After two years of war in Gaza and nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, the treatment of Mr. Mamdani, 33, has served as a black light, revealing the flecks of anti-Muslim bigotry that still dapple American institutions. The candidate has become an avatar for many things, but when it comes to Islamophobia after Oct. 7, Mr. Mamdani is the poster child for the double standards that Muslims in America are held to today.
The term “Islamophobia” can seem like a misnomer. Is it really a phobia, the way one can be afraid of spiders or heights, or is it simply a form of prejudice? However you put it, much of the experience of being a Muslim in America amounts to assuaging the fears of others, even if those fears are rooted in bigotry.
Many of us learned how to react to that fear early. After the attacks on Sept. 11, my family, like so many others, put American flags outside our house and on our car. Once I started getting stopped by airport security, at age 11, my parents instructed me to always make eye contact with agents, to speak to them confidently and with a smile. These are the social equivalents of putting your hands in the air, of making it clear you’re one of the “good” Muslims, lest someone with the ability to make your life worse think you’re one of the “bad” ones.
I met with Mr. Mamdani one afternoon last month at his campaign offices, where he recounted similar experiences. “Growing up Muslim in New York City after 9/11 was, to some extent, growing up having been marked as an other,” he told me. “I faced what I think many Muslim kids faced,” he said. “Whether it’s the names, the characterizations, the motivations.”
If his experience coming of age after Sept. 11 was anything like mine — Mr. Mamdani and I are almost the same age — there was a shock to being singled out for our faith after the attacks. A degree of Islamophobia existed in America before that day, of course, but after it a pall of suspicion fell over us all, one that has never fully lifted. As a child, I found it confusing: Why was I, a fifth grader, getting stopped at the airport because I could be a terrorist? The logic didn’t track. But then you live with it, and living in that reality informs how you see the rest of the world. That’s true for Mr. Mamdani, too: “In some ways,” he said, “it was also a preparation for being in politics.”
That preparation is evident on the campaign trail. Mr. Mamdani answers the relentless questioning of his beliefs about Jews, antisemitism, Hamas, Oct. 7, Israel’s right to exist — on and on — with an unwaveringly chipper attitude. Regardless of how he answers them, these “Do you condemn” questions deftly associate him with the actions and phrases that don’t always come directly from him, testing, probing, goading him to misstep. It’s maddening to watch, yet he answers them all, sometimes with a winking sense of humor.
At a town-hall meeting of mayoral candidates hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York in May, he paused in the midst of a similar line of questioning on Jews and Israel, smiled and said: “These are all softballs! Come on!” The crowd tittered.
I asked Mr. Mamdani whether he sees his Muslim identity as part of the reason he’s repeatedly questioned about his views on Israel. “I think it’s part of it,” he said. “I also think my having stood up for Palestinian rights throughout my political career is another part of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine how the consciousness of Palestinian suffering was woven into Mr. Mamdani’s political identity. Raised by his mother, Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian filmmaker, and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Columbia University’s more prominent anticolonial professors, Zohran Mamdani grew up with intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi over for dinner. He was a founding member of Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a regular fixture at protests against Israeli incursions into Gaza well before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since the war in Gaza began, he’s made speaking up for Palestinians a part of his political agenda: As a state assemblyman, he sponsored a bill to prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli settlements, led a five-day hunger strike in front of the White House and was arrested as part of a sit-in organized by Jewish Voice for Peace in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house.
But he is also Muslim, and to be a Muslim now is to grow up with an understanding of the injustices facing Palestinians that is deeper than most people’s. For much of the past two decades, the American Muslim understanding of the Palestinian struggle was part and parcel of the knowledge that our lived reality cleaved away from the mainstream narrative of the war on terror. As our communities were surveilled and our home countries bombed and invaded, what many Muslims knew to be true — that the war on terror wrought chaos and death on hundreds of thousands of Muslims that had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11 — remained a belief we could speak only in hushed tones to one another.
There was “a real sense of contradiction between what was stated and what was actually happening,” Mr. Mamdani told me, when I asked him about his memory of those years. (He was 9 years old on Sept. 11.) “I learned very young, even just in understanding my family’s own history, that no matter if you cared about politics, politics cared about you.”
In New York City, where thousands of Muslims were followed by the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program — later declared unconstitutional — Mr. Mamdani remembers how seemingly basic activities like a visit to a mosque or a soccer field would result in finding yourself watched. “It was the banal. It was the everyday,” he said. “The inversion of innocence and guilt.”
Kashif Shaikh, the head of Pillars Fund, a nonprofit that helps fund Muslim Americans’ cultural and political projects, remembers how hard those years were. “If you were going to speak out against that war,” he said, “they would frame it as ‘You support the terrorists.’”
But as the jingoism that peaked during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began to fade, “We were starting to see a little bit of progress,” Mr. Shaikh said. “There was a lot of building that was happening over the last 20 years.” Muslim political organizations like the Muslim Civic Coalition and the Muslim Public Affairs Council were created or expanded, and as more Muslims rose through the ranks of American society, the veil of fear across the Muslim community in the aftermath of Sept. 11 began to lift.
“Our generation has a confidence in that we have something to offer to the dialogue of New York other than apologizing for what other Muslims did on 9/11,” Ali Najmi, Mr. Mamdani’s election lawyer and a longtime political confidant of his, told me.
At 41, Mr. Najmi is emblematic of the many Muslim Americans who have found their footing in American politics. A child of Pakistani immigrants, he is among dozens of Muslims now helping shape Democratic policy in and out of office, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, André Carson and Lateefah Simon, and Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison.
As mainstream American pop culture embraced more Muslims — Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, Bella Hadid — we’re seen not just as “terrorists,” Mr. Shaikh told me. “We’re seen as full human beings.”
But passing the good/bad litmus test remains a cost of entry for Muslims who aspire to reach the upper echelons of power in American society. Mr. Mamdani is no exception.
Credit: Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
It wasn’t until a week before the Democratic primary that one of the “Do you condemn” questions finally gave those ready, even eager, to find fault with Mr. Mamdani the smoking gun they were looking for. Asked by a podcast host what he made of protest chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” Mr. Mamdani responded by first speaking to the fears and traumas of Jewish New Yorkers after Oct. 7 but didn’t denounce either phrase outright: “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”
The backlash was swift, and its repercussions may well follow him even after this race. His critics pounced on the interaction. Multiple Jewish organizations condemned his lack of condemnation of either phrase, and others took the opportunity to denounce him as a material danger to the Jewish community. One example: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Mr. Mamdani was supporting “an explicit incitement to violence” against Jews.
Mr. Mamdani secured more votes in the primary than any other New York Democrat in more than three decades. His win was hailed as a harbinger of hope in the Democratic Party, proof positive that a multiethnic, multiclass coalition could inject energy into the stagnant politics of a party that has otherwise been floundering in the Trump era.
Within hours of his victory, though, social media posts telling Jewish New Yorkers that they were in danger began to proliferate online. Some even went as far as to say that Jews needed to leave the city for their safety. After the first Muslim candidate ever to win a primary for mayor of New York City took the race, one of the first articles this newspaper published quoted a post by the writer Jill Kargman, who said that the election result was “like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK.”
In the months since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been called an antisemite repeatedly online and in person. People often shout it at him as he walks through the streets of the city campaigning. The label has stuck despite the fact that he campaigned alongside Brad Lander, the comptroller, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City, and despite the fact that polling has shown that a plurality of Jewish New Yorkers planned to vote for him.
“When an accusation is leveled against you again and again, no matter how you respond, it sounds as if you are guilty,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And to someone watching from afar, it’s as if you invited the conversation.”
Two years after Oct. 7, the specific accusation made repeatedly against Mr. Mamdani is a familiar one to many Muslims. Hundreds of us — if not thousands — have been sidelined or silenced since under the banner of antisemitism.
“For the first time last year, we saw employment termination climb to the No. 1 spot of request for assistance,” Afaf Nasher, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, told me. “Overnight, CAIR-New York has had to become experts in free speech.”
Ms. Nasher said that many of the firings or employment disputes that come across her desk recast advocacy for Palestinians, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, as inherently antisemitic. Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse at NYU Langone Health, was fired for describing the bloodshed in Gaza as a genocide in an acceptance speech she gave for an award she got for displaying compassionate care to her patients.
In Maryland an elementary school teacher, Hibah Sayed, was told that a sticker of the Palestinian flag displayed on her classroom door (one among many flags, smaller than an index card) could be seen as antisemitic, as was a kaffiyeh she sometimes wore, not to mention a sweatshirt with the words “Gaza: soul of my soul.” She had a spotless record at her school. She kept her job but was told to sign a document stating that she could be fired if she displayed anything to do with the Middle East on her campus. Like Ms. Jebr, Ms. Sayed had no employment issues before Oct. 7.
Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University, has spent years studying the ways in which civil liberties have been suspended for Muslims in America after Sept. 11. She said the perceptions of Muslims as inherently Jew-hating or violent have paved the way for attacks on pro-Palestinian speech. “I say ‘Muslims’ and ‘Palestinians’ together because you cannot disconnect those two, in terms of people’s perceptions in the United States,” she told me. “The reason anti-Palestinian racism is so salient and so effective and acceptable is because it rides on the back of Islamophobia.”
Not all attacks on pro-Palestinian speech are Islamophobic, Ms. Aziz said, but the two often bleed into each other, As American institutions convulsed with protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, anti-Muslim language and incidents — the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian American named Wadea Al-Fayoume, the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, dozens of incidents of mosques vandalized and threatened — were already on the rise. The attempts at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, using antisemitism as a cudgel, were well underway by the time Mr. Trump was elected for the second time. Palestine Legal, an aid organization that supports pro-Palestinian voices facing legal action in the United States, said it received more than 2,000 requests for legal aid in 2024 alone.
With groups like Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation (the same group that devised Project 2025) whose stated mission is to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, Ms. Aziz suggested, we are seeing something comparable to the era of the Patriot Act in the early 2000s, when the quashing of civil liberties became government policy. “It means the future may be worse,” she said. “The more institutional it becomes, the harder it is to combat.”
But the Trump administration has taken the language and institutional policies and codified them. In January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to “combat antisemitism.” The order has given the green light for the Department of Justice to establish a multiagency antisemitism task force, which has, among other things, moved to arrest and deport or, according to the order, “otherwise hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under an vague definition of what antisemitism could entail.
The logical extreme of these policies has already arrived in full force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts, was part of a group that wrote an opinion essay for the campus paper calling for the school to divest from Israel. As a direct result, she was snatched from the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and ferried to a detention facility in an unmarked car. Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal, who both led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, and Ms. Ozturk are among the dozens of Muslims facing the threat of deportation for their protests against Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza.
In all three cases, Trump officials and lawyers have contended that their speech was antisemitic and that their participation in activities protected under the First Amendment amounted to material support of a terrorist group. “We don’t want terrorists in America,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said of Mr. Khalil and others like him.
“The accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer, of being an extremist — these are facts of life for so many Muslims who engage with any part of public life,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And the notion that to stand up for Palestinian rights is to somehow be a bigot is what so many face whenever they express that solidarity.”
Trump administration officials have called Muslims supporting Palestinians antisemitic terrorists, but the trope that Muslims are antisemitic is prevalent in liberal circles as well. “I think liberals have realized it’s racist to assume Muslims are terrorists or terrorist supporters just as a matter of course,” Ms. Aziz said. “But I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to antisemitism.”
Top Democrats have stopped short of calling Mr. Mamdani an antisemite. But when Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York castigated him, they used phrases like “he left open far too much space for extremists” (Governor Shapiro) and said that he had made “references to global jihad” (Senator Gillibrand, for which she later apologized).
With three weeks to go until Election Day, some top Democrats — including the Senate minority leader, Mr. Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who also represent New York — have not endorsed him, despite the fact that he may well become the next Democratic mayor of their city. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would resign before he would back Mr. Mamdani. All cited Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel as a major reason for withholding support.
They continue to hold out despite support for Mr. Mamdani from a number of prominent Democrats, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race last month) and Andrew Cuomo repeatedly suggested Mr. Mamdani is antisemitic.
“One of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” Mr. Adams reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Jewish leaders in March.
“We know all too well that words matter,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Mamdani’s “Globalize the intifada” episode. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”
I asked Mr. Mamdani what he made of accusations of antisemitism when they came from members of his party. “Nothing that has happened in the general election has been as hurtful as what happened in the primary election,” he responded. “It was within a Democratic primary, and so much of our party’s politics is ostensibly in opposition to the Republican Party’s vision of this country. And yet what we saw is that there is quite a bit of room for that Islamophobia within our own party.”
Mr. Mamdani said he’s committed to approaching his detractors from a place of understanding.
“You have to distinguish between that which is said in good faith and that which is said in bad faith,” he said. For those who express their fear in good faith — and he said he extends “good faith to those unless you know otherwise” — he approaches them with the aim of “understanding the basis of the fear.” He added, “Some of that fear is connected to things that I have proposed. Some of it is connected with things that are imagined around what I have said or proposed.”
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who have concerns about me,” Mr. Mamdani said, “because for many of them, they’ve only ever engaged with a caricature of me.”
Correcting that caricature has become one of the key agenda items of the campaign. After his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani had a number of closed-door meetings with members of the Jewish community, particularly groups and congregations that were troubled in particular by his “Globalize the intifada” response.
Among the skeptics is Halie Soifer, the chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a political advocacy nonprofit. She explained to me why the fear of a Mamdani mayoralty should be treated as valid, citing a recent spate of attacks on Jews — the killing of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, the firebombing of a group marching in Colorado in support of Israeli hostages and the arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, which targeted Mr. Shapiro and his family — as a key reason the Jewish community is on high alert.
I asked her what she believes would happen to Jews in New York if Mr. Mamdani took over City Hall. She said Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned that the elected head of the city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is going to potentially give a green light to those who want to inflict harm on Jewish Americans.”
“I don’t think there’s a belief among Jews that he himself would be a perpetrator of violence,” she said, “but there’s a concern that his language is giving a permissive structure to those who may.”
Ms. Soifer listed several issues that she said must be clarified in order to gain the Jewish community’s trust: his past support of an economic boycott of Israel, his refusal to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state rather than as a state with equal rights for all and his definition of what constitutes an antisemitic hate crime.
“We have this rise in anti-Zionist beliefs manifesting themselves in antisemitic violence,” Ms. Soifer said. “People are concerned about their safety,” she went on. “They’re concerned about security, and they want to know that whoever they elect as mayor shares that concern.”
Incidents of antisemitism have undoubtedly increased over the past two years. The F.B.I. recorded more than 4,000 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes since 2023, more than half of them destruction or vandalism of property. This month, an assailant rammed his car into a group of Jewish congregants in front of a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two of the congregants died.
Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told me that many Jewish New Yorkers are navigating their political decisions through this rise in antisemitism. “A lot of liberal Jews are in the middle place, who are afraid of rising antisemitism in the age of Trump but not sure how to feel about a mayoral candidate,” she said. “It surfaces a moment of real reckoning for the Jewish community.”
“There’s a lot of whispering happening,” she said. “Is he antisemitic?” But Ms. Sasson, who has campaigned for Mr. Mamdani, said that once many in the Jewish community get a chance to know Mr. Mamdani, the caricature falls away. “We saw how vulnerably he spoke about the impact of that on him emotionally,” she went on, referring to a moment on the campaign trail in early June when he choked back tears speaking about the accusations of antisemitism he’s been facing. “Cuomo and Adams are here to use Jews as pawns, to use our real Jewish fears,” she said.
There’s a tragic dynamic between antisemitism and Islamophobia in the years since Oct. 7. Jews and Muslims are tiny minorities in this country, both on the receiving end of conspiratorial racism and prejudiced policies now and at various other points in American history. At the extremes of the right and the left, they are often intertwined. The Trump administration’s tactics, which use the accusation of antisemitism as a blunt tool to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, have made the question of whether it is harder to be a Muslim or a Jew in America into a kind of zero sum contest.
As Mr. Mamdani attempts to make inroads with Jewish voters who have brought their experiences with antisemitism to the fore of his campaign, he’s been on the blunt end of racism and bigotry himself.
The expected outbursts from the right against Mr. Mamdani’s socialist policies are paired with racist accusations. There are the openly Islamophobic statements from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an A.I.-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa after his primary win, and Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, who wrote on social media that Mr. Mamdani is “literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”
But it goes beyond online statements. Mr. Mamdani’s office has received a string of death threats since he began campaigning. I listened to a voice mail message left at his office. A man with a deep voice said, “You should go back to fucking Uganda before I shoot you in the fucking head. Your whole family, too. You pieces of shit Muslims don’t belong here. You’re not compatible with our Western values.”
I’ve read hundreds of Islamophobic slurs written online against Mr. Mamdani for this essay, leaving me pained but somewhat unfazed. You get used to it when you’ve lived here your whole life. Hearing the unbridled hate in someone’s voice felt different. In September a man in Texas was charged with making terroristic threats as a hate crime against Mr. Mamdani.
Many politicians, including many of his Democratic peers, have remained noticeably silent as Mr. Mamdani has faced these threats and racist outbursts.
As a Muslim American, I have found the way his party has failed him particularly wrenching. It echoes what so many of us have experienced from the institutions we are a part of, big and small, and the repercussions we have faced in the wake of Oct. 7, no matter how established (or sometimes because of how established) we are. We may feel as though we belong in the communities and circles we are a part of, but advocacy for Palestinians — and advocacy for ourselves — can cast us out of them overnight, like the nurse at N.Y.U.
This is what has made the psychic toll of this particular moment crushing for so many Muslims in America. There has been progress — we do have Muslim politicians, professors, business leaders, cultural icons — but it is matched with the heartbreak of betrayal from the very communities that we believed had embraced us.
Many of us grew up with the images, the never-ending images, of people who looked just like us covered in ashes and rubble created by American bombs. Then, many Muslims felt they could say nothing. Now, as Israel has extended its bombing campaigns beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and even Qatar, merely registering horror or even righteous anger at the state responsible for leaving tens of thousands of civilians across these countries dead still carries consequences.
The arrests and detentions of people like Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk send a message, just as the firing of a nurse does and just as the treatment of a mayoral candidate does. It tells us that Muslim suffering is acceptable and that there is a cost if we dare say otherwise.
Mr. Mamdani, with his dimpled smile and affable attitude, is in some ways an unlikely face for the paradox of the current moment facing Muslims. But his boy-next-door charm might be the reason he’s among the first Muslim politicians to break into the American mainstream the way he has. My Muslim friends and I often joke that he’s our “gold star boy” because of his goody-two-shoes past. (The most dirt The New York Post has been able to dig up on him is that he once pilfered a table while in college.)
When I was sitting in his campaign office, I asked Mr. Mamdani what it was like to be both the face of progress for one community and a harbinger of Islamist evil to another. “It feels like a contradiction, in both the promise of this moment and the backlash to the very thing,” he replied. Our gold-star boy looked a little weary from his day of campaigning, wearier still when he paused to consider the racist vitriol that comes his way. “To be a Muslim in public life is to know that you will face things of this nature. It doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. It doesn’t mean that they are not disgusting,” he told me. “But it also means that they’re not surprising.”
I felt a sense of weariness, too, hearing Mr. Mamdani resign himself to this reality. There’s a shared grief among Muslims right now, one that feels redundant when we express it to one another. Sitting with Muslim friends or family members over the course of these past two years of war, we often speak of the pain of witnessing the horrors coming out of Gaza, a pain that is deepened by the hypocrisy and hostility of many American institutions. “I know,” I often find myself saying, over and over again. “I know.”
The ravages of this war — whole cities wiped off the map, tens of thousands dead, the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history — have had a lasting effect on the Muslim American psyche. Now, even with a cease-fire in effect, it’s difficult to imagine how an end to the war in Gaza could put the genie back in the bottle.
For many of us, the pain comes, in part, from upholding a stoic facade while those who spew venom face few or no consequences. It’s seeing peers casually dehumanize Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians and knowing that calling it out is largely futile if not dangerous. It’s seeing that kind of language echo through institutions as small as an elementary school all the way up to the White House.
It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half of American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel, and a clear majority say they are concerned with starvation in Gaza and Israeli strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Even as many of our institutions have failed us, the American people seem, finally, to be grasping what we’ve known all along.
But Muslims have been made to grin and bear it in America for more than two decades. Watching Mr. Mamdani stand unwaveringly in the face of a stream of anti-Muslim abuse is to witness the distillation of that dynamic in a single person. I’d be lying if I said I think his fate in this particular matter will improve over time. It is a certainty that Mr. Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, will have to contend with even more Islamophobic slurs, on a national scale.
In the face of this, it’s easy to become cynical, even as his popularity marks a moment of triumph for Muslims. Mr. Mamdani sees it differently.
“I used to be quite consumed by forever being a minority — of being an Indian in Uganda, Muslim in India, all of these things in New York City,” he said to me. It’s a sentiment he’s had to express often over the course of his campaign. It’s at once well rehearsed and heartfelt. “I remember my father telling me that to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place, to see promise and to see the contradictions of it.”
Mr. Mamdani finds hope in that tension.
“I was always left with a cleareyed sense of the world that I was in,” he said, “and how to ensure that the contradiction of that world didn’t leave you with a sense of bitterness.”
More on Mamdani
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Win or Lose, It’s Zohran Mamdani’s Political World Now
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Sept. 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
Illustration by Susana Blasco
Listen to this article · 33:13 minutes
Learn more
by Meher Ahmad
[Ms. Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.]
A few days before Zohran Mamdani’s decisive victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, a friend and I were speculating about his chances of winning. We indulged in a moment of giddy optimism at the prospect that a Muslim man might actually become the mayor of the city we live in. With the polling available then, it seemed plausible. “If he does,” my friend, Arman Dzidzovic, said, “it’s about to get so much worse.”
Arman was referring to the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer — or even a terrorist himself. Arman, a Muslim like me, felt that the higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. I didn’t disagree.
Then we both fell silent. The shared understanding of what it means to be Muslim in America hung in the air between us.
It’s a confounding time to be Muslim in this country. A degree of Muslim culture I would have never thought possible when I was a kid is now imbued in the everyday lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked every time I hear non-Muslim teenagers say “inshallah.” My friend and I were having this discussion about Mr. Mamdani while sitting in a trendy Yemeni coffeehouse, one of many proliferating across the country as places where young Muslims and non-Muslims alike hang out after hours instead of at bars.
And yet with every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence. More than two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve learned to anticipate the patterns of anti-Islamic hate — after a terrorist attack, the bombing of another Muslim-majority country or simply when a high-profile Muslim enters the public consciousness. We can count on crude, anti-Muslim prejudice to bleed into our social media feeds, with the dogmatic good-versus-evil narratives peddled by politicians coming quickly in their wake.
So it came as no surprise when, within hours of Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, right-wing politicians and talking heads called him “little Muhammad,” accused him of wanting to enforce Shariah and insinuated that his victory could bring about another Sept. 11.
But perhaps more insidious is the pernicious Islamophobia that has morphed in the years since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kind that has seeped into the liberal institutions that claim to oppose racism and prejudice. Their actions have helped lay the groundwork for the Trump administration to take anti-Muslim attitudes and codify them in policies and law, with far-reaching consequences for Muslims in America. In these spaces, Mr. Mamdani is not “little Muhammad” but instead a virulent antisemite who portends violence for Jewish New Yorkers on account of his criticism of Israel and his faith in Islam.
After two years of war in Gaza and nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, the treatment of Mr. Mamdani, 33, has served as a black light, revealing the flecks of anti-Muslim bigotry that still dapple American institutions. The candidate has become an avatar for many things, but when it comes to Islamophobia after Oct. 7, Mr. Mamdani is the poster child for the double standards that Muslims in America are held to today.
The term “Islamophobia” can seem like a misnomer. Is it really a phobia, the way one can be afraid of spiders or heights, or is it simply a form of prejudice? However you put it, much of the experience of being a Muslim in America amounts to assuaging the fears of others, even if those fears are rooted in bigotry.
Many of us learned how to react to that fear early. After the attacks on Sept. 11, my family, like so many others, put American flags outside our house and on our car. Once I started getting stopped by airport security, at age 11, my parents instructed me to always make eye contact with agents, to speak to them confidently and with a smile. These are the social equivalents of putting your hands in the air, of making it clear you’re one of the “good” Muslims, lest someone with the ability to make your life worse think you’re one of the “bad” ones.
I met with Mr. Mamdani one afternoon last month at his campaign offices, where he recounted similar experiences. “Growing up Muslim in New York City after 9/11 was, to some extent, growing up having been marked as an other,” he told me. “I faced what I think many Muslim kids faced,” he said. “Whether it’s the names, the characterizations, the motivations.”
If his experience coming of age after Sept. 11 was anything like mine — Mr. Mamdani and I are almost the same age — there was a shock to being singled out for our faith after the attacks. A degree of Islamophobia existed in America before that day, of course, but after it a pall of suspicion fell over us all, one that has never fully lifted. As a child, I found it confusing: Why was I, a fifth grader, getting stopped at the airport because I could be a terrorist? The logic didn’t track. But then you live with it, and living in that reality informs how you see the rest of the world. That’s true for Mr. Mamdani, too: “In some ways,” he said, “it was also a preparation for being in politics.”
That preparation is evident on the campaign trail. Mr. Mamdani answers the relentless questioning of his beliefs about Jews, antisemitism, Hamas, Oct. 7, Israel’s right to exist — on and on — with an unwaveringly chipper attitude. Regardless of how he answers them, these “Do you condemn” questions deftly associate him with the actions and phrases that don’t always come directly from him, testing, probing, goading him to misstep. It’s maddening to watch, yet he answers them all, sometimes with a winking sense of humor.
At a town-hall meeting of mayoral candidates hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York in May, he paused in the midst of a similar line of questioning on Jews and Israel, smiled and said: “These are all softballs! Come on!” The crowd tittered.
I asked Mr. Mamdani whether he sees his Muslim identity as part of the reason he’s repeatedly questioned about his views on Israel. “I think it’s part of it,” he said. “I also think my having stood up for Palestinian rights throughout my political career is another part of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine how the consciousness of Palestinian suffering was woven into Mr. Mamdani’s political identity. Raised by his mother, Mira Nair, an acclaimed Indian filmmaker, and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, one of Columbia University’s more prominent anticolonial professors, Zohran Mamdani grew up with intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi over for dinner. He was a founding member of Bowdoin College’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and a regular fixture at protests against Israeli incursions into Gaza well before Oct. 7, 2023.
Since the war in Gaza began, he’s made speaking up for Palestinians a part of his political agenda: As a state assemblyman, he sponsored a bill to prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli settlements, led a five-day hunger strike in front of the White House and was arrested as part of a sit-in organized by Jewish Voice for Peace in front of Senator Chuck Schumer’s house.
But he is also Muslim, and to be a Muslim now is to grow up with an understanding of the injustices facing Palestinians that is deeper than most people’s. For much of the past two decades, the American Muslim understanding of the Palestinian struggle was part and parcel of the knowledge that our lived reality cleaved away from the mainstream narrative of the war on terror. As our communities were surveilled and our home countries bombed and invaded, what many Muslims knew to be true — that the war on terror wrought chaos and death on hundreds of thousands of Muslims that had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11 — remained a belief we could speak only in hushed tones to one another.
There was “a real sense of contradiction between what was stated and what was actually happening,” Mr. Mamdani told me, when I asked him about his memory of those years. (He was 9 years old on Sept. 11.) “I learned very young, even just in understanding my family’s own history, that no matter if you cared about politics, politics cared about you.”
In New York City, where thousands of Muslims were followed by the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program — later declared unconstitutional — Mr. Mamdani remembers how seemingly basic activities like a visit to a mosque or a soccer field would result in finding yourself watched. “It was the banal. It was the everyday,” he said. “The inversion of innocence and guilt.”
Kashif Shaikh, the head of Pillars Fund, a nonprofit that helps fund Muslim Americans’ cultural and political projects, remembers how hard those years were. “If you were going to speak out against that war,” he said, “they would frame it as ‘You support the terrorists.’”
But as the jingoism that peaked during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq began to fade, “We were starting to see a little bit of progress,” Mr. Shaikh said. “There was a lot of building that was happening over the last 20 years.” Muslim political organizations like the Muslim Civic Coalition and the Muslim Public Affairs Council were created or expanded, and as more Muslims rose through the ranks of American society, the veil of fear across the Muslim community in the aftermath of Sept. 11 began to lift.
“Our generation has a confidence in that we have something to offer to the dialogue of New York other than apologizing for what other Muslims did on 9/11,” Ali Najmi, Mr. Mamdani’s election lawyer and a longtime political confidant of his, told me.
At 41, Mr. Najmi is emblematic of the many Muslim Americans who have found their footing in American politics. A child of Pakistani immigrants, he is among dozens of Muslims now helping shape Democratic policy in and out of office, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, André Carson and Lateefah Simon, and Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison.
As mainstream American pop culture embraced more Muslims — Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, Bella Hadid — we’re seen not just as “terrorists,” Mr. Shaikh told me. “We’re seen as full human beings.”
But passing the good/bad litmus test remains a cost of entry for Muslims who aspire to reach the upper echelons of power in American society. Mr. Mamdani is no exception.
Credit: Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
It wasn’t until a week before the Democratic primary that one of the “Do you condemn” questions finally gave those ready, even eager, to find fault with Mr. Mamdani the smoking gun they were looking for. Asked by a podcast host what he made of protest chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” Mr. Mamdani responded by first speaking to the fears and traumas of Jewish New Yorkers after Oct. 7 but didn’t denounce either phrase outright: “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”
The backlash was swift, and its repercussions may well follow him even after this race. His critics pounced on the interaction. Multiple Jewish organizations condemned his lack of condemnation of either phrase, and others took the opportunity to denounce him as a material danger to the Jewish community. One example: Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League suggested that Mr. Mamdani was supporting “an explicit incitement to violence” against Jews.
Mr. Mamdani secured more votes in the primary than any other New York Democrat in more than three decades. His win was hailed as a harbinger of hope in the Democratic Party, proof positive that a multiethnic, multiclass coalition could inject energy into the stagnant politics of a party that has otherwise been floundering in the Trump era.
Within hours of his victory, though, social media posts telling Jewish New Yorkers that they were in danger began to proliferate online. Some even went as far as to say that Jews needed to leave the city for their safety. After the first Muslim candidate ever to win a primary for mayor of New York City took the race, one of the first articles this newspaper published quoted a post by the writer Jill Kargman, who said that the election result was “like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK.”
In the months since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been called an antisemite repeatedly online and in person. People often shout it at him as he walks through the streets of the city campaigning. The label has stuck despite the fact that he campaigned alongside Brad Lander, the comptroller, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City, and despite the fact that polling has shown that a plurality of Jewish New Yorkers planned to vote for him.
“When an accusation is leveled against you again and again, no matter how you respond, it sounds as if you are guilty,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And to someone watching from afar, it’s as if you invited the conversation.”
Two years after Oct. 7, the specific accusation made repeatedly against Mr. Mamdani is a familiar one to many Muslims. Hundreds of us — if not thousands — have been sidelined or silenced since under the banner of antisemitism.
“For the first time last year, we saw employment termination climb to the No. 1 spot of request for assistance,” Afaf Nasher, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, told me. “Overnight, CAIR-New York has had to become experts in free speech.”
Ms. Nasher said that many of the firings or employment disputes that come across her desk recast advocacy for Palestinians, specifically pro-Palestinian speech, as inherently antisemitic. Hesen Jabr, a labor and delivery nurse at NYU Langone Health, was fired for describing the bloodshed in Gaza as a genocide in an acceptance speech she gave for an award she got for displaying compassionate care to her patients.
In Maryland an elementary school teacher, Hibah Sayed, was told that a sticker of the Palestinian flag displayed on her classroom door (one among many flags, smaller than an index card) could be seen as antisemitic, as was a kaffiyeh she sometimes wore, not to mention a sweatshirt with the words “Gaza: soul of my soul.” She had a spotless record at her school. She kept her job but was told to sign a document stating that she could be fired if she displayed anything to do with the Middle East on her campus. Like Ms. Jebr, Ms. Sayed had no employment issues before Oct. 7.
Sahar Aziz, a law professor at Rutgers University, has spent years studying the ways in which civil liberties have been suspended for Muslims in America after Sept. 11. She said the perceptions of Muslims as inherently Jew-hating or violent have paved the way for attacks on pro-Palestinian speech. “I say ‘Muslims’ and ‘Palestinians’ together because you cannot disconnect those two, in terms of people’s perceptions in the United States,” she told me. “The reason anti-Palestinian racism is so salient and so effective and acceptable is because it rides on the back of Islamophobia.”
Not all attacks on pro-Palestinian speech are Islamophobic, Ms. Aziz said, but the two often bleed into each other, As American institutions convulsed with protests against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, anti-Muslim language and incidents — the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian American named Wadea Al-Fayoume, the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, dozens of incidents of mosques vandalized and threatened — were already on the rise. The attempts at suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, using antisemitism as a cudgel, were well underway by the time Mr. Trump was elected for the second time. Palestine Legal, an aid organization that supports pro-Palestinian voices facing legal action in the United States, said it received more than 2,000 requests for legal aid in 2024 alone.
With groups like Project Esther, an initiative of the Heritage Foundation (the same group that devised Project 2025) whose stated mission is to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, Ms. Aziz suggested, we are seeing something comparable to the era of the Patriot Act in the early 2000s, when the quashing of civil liberties became government policy. “It means the future may be worse,” she said. “The more institutional it becomes, the harder it is to combat.”
But the Trump administration has taken the language and institutional policies and codified them. In January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to “combat antisemitism.” The order has given the green light for the Department of Justice to establish a multiagency antisemitism task force, which has, among other things, moved to arrest and deport or, according to the order, “otherwise hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under an vague definition of what antisemitism could entail.
The logical extreme of these policies has already arrived in full force. Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts, was part of a group that wrote an opinion essay for the campus paper calling for the school to divest from Israel. As a direct result, she was snatched from the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and ferried to a detention facility in an unmarked car. Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal, who both led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, and Ms. Ozturk are among the dozens of Muslims facing the threat of deportation for their protests against Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate violence in Gaza.
In all three cases, Trump officials and lawyers have contended that their speech was antisemitic and that their participation in activities protected under the First Amendment amounted to material support of a terrorist group. “We don’t want terrorists in America,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said of Mr. Khalil and others like him.
“The accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer, of being an extremist — these are facts of life for so many Muslims who engage with any part of public life,” Mr. Mamdani told me. “And the notion that to stand up for Palestinian rights is to somehow be a bigot is what so many face whenever they express that solidarity.”
Trump administration officials have called Muslims supporting Palestinians antisemitic terrorists, but the trope that Muslims are antisemitic is prevalent in liberal circles as well. “I think liberals have realized it’s racist to assume Muslims are terrorists or terrorist supporters just as a matter of course,” Ms. Aziz said. “But I don’t think that’s the case when it comes to antisemitism.”
Top Democrats have stopped short of calling Mr. Mamdani an antisemite. But when Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York castigated him, they used phrases like “he left open far too much space for extremists” (Governor Shapiro) and said that he had made “references to global jihad” (Senator Gillibrand, for which she later apologized).
With three weeks to go until Election Day, some top Democrats — including the Senate minority leader, Mr. Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who also represent New York — have not endorsed him, despite the fact that he may well become the next Democratic mayor of their city. Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would resign before he would back Mr. Mamdani. All cited Mr. Mamdani’s criticism of Israel as a major reason for withholding support.
They continue to hold out despite support for Mr. Mamdani from a number of prominent Democrats, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representatives Pramila Jayapal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Mamdani’s opponents Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race last month) and Andrew Cuomo repeatedly suggested Mr. Mamdani is antisemitic.
“One of the candidates running for mayor is spewing antisemitism,” Mr. Adams reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Jewish leaders in March.
“We know all too well that words matter,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Mamdani’s “Globalize the intifada” episode. “They fuel hate. They fuel murder.”
I asked Mr. Mamdani what he made of accusations of antisemitism when they came from members of his party. “Nothing that has happened in the general election has been as hurtful as what happened in the primary election,” he responded. “It was within a Democratic primary, and so much of our party’s politics is ostensibly in opposition to the Republican Party’s vision of this country. And yet what we saw is that there is quite a bit of room for that Islamophobia within our own party.”
Mr. Mamdani said he’s committed to approaching his detractors from a place of understanding.
“You have to distinguish between that which is said in good faith and that which is said in bad faith,” he said. For those who express their fear in good faith — and he said he extends “good faith to those unless you know otherwise” — he approaches them with the aim of “understanding the basis of the fear.” He added, “Some of that fear is connected to things that I have proposed. Some of it is connected with things that are imagined around what I have said or proposed.”
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who have concerns about me,” Mr. Mamdani said, “because for many of them, they’ve only ever engaged with a caricature of me.”
Correcting that caricature has become one of the key agenda items of the campaign. After his primary victory, Mr. Mamdani had a number of closed-door meetings with members of the Jewish community, particularly groups and congregations that were troubled in particular by his “Globalize the intifada” response.
Among the skeptics is Halie Soifer, the chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a political advocacy nonprofit. She explained to me why the fear of a Mamdani mayoralty should be treated as valid, citing a recent spate of attacks on Jews — the killing of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, the firebombing of a group marching in Colorado in support of Israeli hostages and the arson attack at the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, which targeted Mr. Shapiro and his family — as a key reason the Jewish community is on high alert.
I asked her what she believes would happen to Jews in New York if Mr. Mamdani took over City Hall. She said Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned that the elected head of the city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel is going to potentially give a green light to those who want to inflict harm on Jewish Americans.”
“I don’t think there’s a belief among Jews that he himself would be a perpetrator of violence,” she said, “but there’s a concern that his language is giving a permissive structure to those who may.”
Ms. Soifer listed several issues that she said must be clarified in order to gain the Jewish community’s trust: his past support of an economic boycott of Israel, his refusal to say Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state rather than as a state with equal rights for all and his definition of what constitutes an antisemitic hate crime.
“We have this rise in anti-Zionist beliefs manifesting themselves in antisemitic violence,” Ms. Soifer said. “People are concerned about their safety,” she went on. “They’re concerned about security, and they want to know that whoever they elect as mayor shares that concern.”
Incidents of antisemitism have undoubtedly increased over the past two years. The F.B.I. recorded more than 4,000 incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes since 2023, more than half of them destruction or vandalism of property. This month, an assailant rammed his car into a group of Jewish congregants in front of a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Two of the congregants died.
Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told me that many Jewish New Yorkers are navigating their political decisions through this rise in antisemitism. “A lot of liberal Jews are in the middle place, who are afraid of rising antisemitism in the age of Trump but not sure how to feel about a mayoral candidate,” she said. “It surfaces a moment of real reckoning for the Jewish community.”
“There’s a lot of whispering happening,” she said. “Is he antisemitic?” But Ms. Sasson, who has campaigned for Mr. Mamdani, said that once many in the Jewish community get a chance to know Mr. Mamdani, the caricature falls away. “We saw how vulnerably he spoke about the impact of that on him emotionally,” she went on, referring to a moment on the campaign trail in early June when he choked back tears speaking about the accusations of antisemitism he’s been facing. “Cuomo and Adams are here to use Jews as pawns, to use our real Jewish fears,” she said.
There’s a tragic dynamic between antisemitism and Islamophobia in the years since Oct. 7. Jews and Muslims are tiny minorities in this country, both on the receiving end of conspiratorial racism and prejudiced policies now and at various other points in American history. At the extremes of the right and the left, they are often intertwined. The Trump administration’s tactics, which use the accusation of antisemitism as a blunt tool to suppress pro-Palestinian speech, have made the question of whether it is harder to be a Muslim or a Jew in America into a kind of zero sum contest.
As Mr. Mamdani attempts to make inroads with Jewish voters who have brought their experiences with antisemitism to the fore of his campaign, he’s been on the blunt end of racism and bigotry himself.
The expected outbursts from the right against Mr. Mamdani’s socialist policies are paired with racist accusations. There are the openly Islamophobic statements from MAGA stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an A.I.-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa after his primary win, and Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, who wrote on social media that Mr. Mamdani is “literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”
But it goes beyond online statements. Mr. Mamdani’s office has received a string of death threats since he began campaigning. I listened to a voice mail message left at his office. A man with a deep voice said, “You should go back to fucking Uganda before I shoot you in the fucking head. Your whole family, too. You pieces of shit Muslims don’t belong here. You’re not compatible with our Western values.”
I’ve read hundreds of Islamophobic slurs written online against Mr. Mamdani for this essay, leaving me pained but somewhat unfazed. You get used to it when you’ve lived here your whole life. Hearing the unbridled hate in someone’s voice felt different. In September a man in Texas was charged with making terroristic threats as a hate crime against Mr. Mamdani.
Many politicians, including many of his Democratic peers, have remained noticeably silent as Mr. Mamdani has faced these threats and racist outbursts.
As a Muslim American, I have found the way his party has failed him particularly wrenching. It echoes what so many of us have experienced from the institutions we are a part of, big and small, and the repercussions we have faced in the wake of Oct. 7, no matter how established (or sometimes because of how established) we are. We may feel as though we belong in the communities and circles we are a part of, but advocacy for Palestinians — and advocacy for ourselves — can cast us out of them overnight, like the nurse at N.Y.U.
This is what has made the psychic toll of this particular moment crushing for so many Muslims in America. There has been progress — we do have Muslim politicians, professors, business leaders, cultural icons — but it is matched with the heartbreak of betrayal from the very communities that we believed had embraced us.
Many of us grew up with the images, the never-ending images, of people who looked just like us covered in ashes and rubble created by American bombs. Then, many Muslims felt they could say nothing. Now, as Israel has extended its bombing campaigns beyond Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and even Qatar, merely registering horror or even righteous anger at the state responsible for leaving tens of thousands of civilians across these countries dead still carries consequences.
The arrests and detentions of people like Mr. Khalil and Ms. Ozturk send a message, just as the firing of a nurse does and just as the treatment of a mayoral candidate does. It tells us that Muslim suffering is acceptable and that there is a cost if we dare say otherwise.
Mr. Mamdani, with his dimpled smile and affable attitude, is in some ways an unlikely face for the paradox of the current moment facing Muslims. But his boy-next-door charm might be the reason he’s among the first Muslim politicians to break into the American mainstream the way he has. My Muslim friends and I often joke that he’s our “gold star boy” because of his goody-two-shoes past. (The most dirt The New York Post has been able to dig up on him is that he once pilfered a table while in college.)
When I was sitting in his campaign office, I asked Mr. Mamdani what it was like to be both the face of progress for one community and a harbinger of Islamist evil to another. “It feels like a contradiction, in both the promise of this moment and the backlash to the very thing,” he replied. Our gold-star boy looked a little weary from his day of campaigning, wearier still when he paused to consider the racist vitriol that comes his way. “To be a Muslim in public life is to know that you will face things of this nature. It doesn’t mean that they’re acceptable. It doesn’t mean that they are not disgusting,” he told me. “But it also means that they’re not surprising.”
I felt a sense of weariness, too, hearing Mr. Mamdani resign himself to this reality. There’s a shared grief among Muslims right now, one that feels redundant when we express it to one another. Sitting with Muslim friends or family members over the course of these past two years of war, we often speak of the pain of witnessing the horrors coming out of Gaza, a pain that is deepened by the hypocrisy and hostility of many American institutions. “I know,” I often find myself saying, over and over again. “I know.”
The ravages of this war — whole cities wiped off the map, tens of thousands dead, the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history — have had a lasting effect on the Muslim American psyche. Now, even with a cease-fire in effect, it’s difficult to imagine how an end to the war in Gaza could put the genie back in the bottle.
For many of us, the pain comes, in part, from upholding a stoic facade while those who spew venom face few or no consequences. It’s seeing peers casually dehumanize Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians and knowing that calling it out is largely futile if not dangerous. It’s seeing that kind of language echo through institutions as small as an elementary school all the way up to the White House.
It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half of American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Israel, and a clear majority say they are concerned with starvation in Gaza and Israeli strikes that kill Palestinian civilians. Even as many of our institutions have failed us, the American people seem, finally, to be grasping what we’ve known all along.
But Muslims have been made to grin and bear it in America for more than two decades. Watching Mr. Mamdani stand unwaveringly in the face of a stream of anti-Muslim abuse is to witness the distillation of that dynamic in a single person. I’d be lying if I said I think his fate in this particular matter will improve over time. It is a certainty that Mr. Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, will have to contend with even more Islamophobic slurs, on a national scale.
In the face of this, it’s easy to become cynical, even as his popularity marks a moment of triumph for Muslims. Mr. Mamdani sees it differently.
“I used to be quite consumed by forever being a minority — of being an Indian in Uganda, Muslim in India, all of these things in New York City,” he said to me. It’s a sentiment he’s had to express often over the course of his campaign. It’s at once well rehearsed and heartfelt. “I remember my father telling me that to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place, to see promise and to see the contradictions of it.”
Mr. Mamdani finds hope in that tension.
“I was always left with a cleareyed sense of the world that I was in,” he said, “and how to ensure that the contradiction of that world didn’t leave you with a sense of bitterness.”
More on Mamdani
Opinion | Mara Gay
‘They’re Not Avoiding the Things They Don’t Know’
Oct. 7, 2025
Opinion | Jennifer Steinhauer
Win or Lose, It’s Zohran Mamdani’s Political World Now
Oct. 6, 2025
Opinion | Nicole Gelinas
Democrats Have a Real Problem Facing Charismatic Candidates
Sept. 1, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Meher Ahmad is an editor in the Opinion section.
