New York, the city of 9/11 and the felled Twin Towers, has elected an avowed Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, as its mayor, and Muslims worldwide have exploded into celebration. Their WhatsApp groups are bursting with euphoria, and on social media, they have painted the town red—not the red of socialism, but that of Islamic triumphalism.
The Left and Islamism have been strange bedfellows—an arrangement in which the former romances the latter, and the latter uses it for its legitimation.
Decoding Muslim triumphalism
Why are Muslims ecstatic about Mamdani’s victory? Is it for the reason New Yorkers voted him in: his socialist agenda of affordable housing, free buses, free child care, wage increase, and rent freeze? Or do they see in his rise the advancement of their agenda of Islamising the West? After all, New York and its skyscrapers have the same fascination for present-day Islamists that Constantinople (Istanbul) and the dome of Hagia Sophia once had for early Muslims.
Mamdani is the darling of Muslims because he disparages Narendra Modi in the most slanderous language and vilifies him as a war criminal.
“My critique has been of Mr Modi and the BJP political party for their vision of an India that only has room for certain kinds of Indians, and it’s part of a belief that pluralism is something to be celebrated, something to be strived for,” Mamdani said on 22 October during his visit to a temple in New York on Diwali.
He rails against Israel in a language which is brazenly antisemitic, denying its right to exist as a Jewish state. He has refused to condemn the phrase, “Globalise the Intifada”, and threatens to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York. Meanwhile, he resorts to nuance and ambiguity when it comes to condemning Hamas for the terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. He harps on Islamophobia, but resorts to evasion and sophistry in condemning the wave of Islamic jihadism that is sweeping across the world. He intends to set right all that he thinks has gone wrong with the world—Hindutva, Zionism, Islamophobia.
However, the bigger question is, would Muslims still adore him if Mamdani—who flaunts his Muslimness—questioned them about the ills that ail them? What if he asked them to introspect about their obscurantism, extremism, supremacism, and terrorism?
Mamdani says he is not apologetic about being a Muslim. He shouldn’t be. But should he be assertive about it? The crux of the problem is that the newly elected mayor of New York City is not even apologetic about 9/11. The attack was carried out by Muslims, who did it in the name of Islam, with full support and irrefutable ideological sanction from mainstream Islamic thought. In his understanding, the worst thing about 9/11 has been the hard stares that his hijab–clad aunt received in the public spaces of New York in the immediate aftermath of the attack. If one takes pride in their identity, one must also shoulder the blame for the wrongs done in its name. If Mamdani is not critical of these wrongs, he is escaping responsibility and being too clever by half.
While Mamdani obsesses about Islamophobia, he sees no need to call out the discourse, the ideology, and the global movement of jihadism, which is so blinkered, primitive, and violent that it reduces even the vote for him to Ballot Jihad. Such an ideology may be to his advantage today, but eventually, it will devour him too.
Also read: Moderate Democrat victories signal a bigger shift than Mamdani. The party is bouncing back
The true place of pride
Zohran Mamdani’s victory reflects the glory of modernity, the civilisation of enlightenment, and American culture. If it’s a matter of pride, it belongs to the people of New York, who voted him to power for his welfare agenda, looking beyond his religion or ethnicity, and rising above the tribalism of identity politics. They have embraced and accepted as their leader a member of the community that wishes destruction on Western civilisation. One only needs to browse through YouTube to get an idea of their anti-West sentiment in general and anti-America in particular.
Muslims can be justifiably proud of themselves when they have evolved to the moral height where they accept diversity, pluralism, and non-discrimination in the same way as the US or the UK. They can take pride in the Mamdani moment only after a Muslim-majority city elects a non-Muslim to leadership, like New York elected Mamdani and London elected Sadiq Khan. Until then, instead of pride, they should practice gratitude.
Also read: Will Mumbai start looking for its Mamdani now? The city is as unaffordable as New York
The missing perspective
In his victory speech, Mamdani talked about immigrants in New York.
“New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he said.
Beautiful words. One may wonder, though, about the cities in Muslim countries—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Jeddah, Riyadh, Mecca, Medina, Doha, Kuwait, and Muscat. They’re also built and powered by “immigrants”, a large number of them from the Indian subcontinent, and a majority of them Muslims. But they are not even recognised as immigrants, because they can’t settle there. To imagine that they could be accepted in the position of leadership is simply outlandish. However, what’s interesting is that millions of Indian Muslims working in the Gulf are never seen complaining about their permanently alien and inferior status. They are ideologically conditioned to put up with discrimination, even oppression, as long as it is meted out by Muslim rulers.
America and Europe accept immigrants and refugees, confer citizenship and all other rights on them, embrace them with all their diversities, and let them even ascend to leadership positions. On the other hand, Muslim countries don’t give citizenship to even fellow Muslims. Millions of Indian Muslims working in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE—many of them claiming to be of Arab origin—can never hope for citizenship, despite working there for 50-60 years. Pakistan and Bangladesh deny citizenship to even those who belong there. Lakhs of Biharis—the Urdu–speaking Pakistani citizens in then–East Pakistan—are languishing in statelessness in squalid camps in Dhaka and other places. Neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh wants them. These facts don’t fit into the narrative of Islamophobia, but they are far more outrageous than those that are grist to the narrative mill.
Muslims should rightly be proud on the day they attain the moral evolution of celebrating diversity and pluralism—when Lahore has a Sikh mayor, Karachi a Hindu one, Doha a Jewish leader, and Dubai elects a Christian. Or, for that matter, when Srinagar has a Pandit mayor, and Jammu and Kashmir, a Hindu chief minister. At present, even Mamdani, being a Shia, wouldn’t be able to become the mayor of Sunni–majority Lahore. Actually, he can’t even be the mayor of the Shia city of Tehran since he belongs to the Ismaili sub-sect. It’s one thing to flaunt identity in New York and quite another to come face to face with its reality in Muslim societies.
Mamdani is far too bright not to know that the Muslim identity he flaunts to worldwide cheers has a flipside. While he shames the world for its Islamophobia, is he unaware of all the phobias Muslims nurture—the phobia of democracy, the phobia of secularism, the phobia of liberalism, the phobia of every other religion, and even the phobia of every other sect within Islam? Muslims are anti–diversity, anti-pluralism, anti-modernity, anti–America, and anti-West. In short, they are anti everything that is not Islam.
Contemporary Islam defines itself in opposition to modernity and its place of origin, the West. In the last 150 years, the largest corpus of Islamic literature has been produced on this theme. There are fancy words for this; one being Westoxification. From Jamaluddin Afghani to Allama Iqbal to Maulana Maududi to Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Khomeini to Al Qaida and ISIS—they have all been anti-modern, anti-secular, anti-liberal, and anti-democracy. A detractor might say that they have been anti-humanity.
It remains to be seen if the young Mamdani, as he matures, opens his eyes to the blind spots of his identity. If he doesn’t, those who are applauding him will see in his victory the redemption for the defeat at the Battle of Tours, the failure of the Siege of Vienna, and the loss of Spain.
They must derive the right morals from this development—rising above the tribalism of identity, acceptance of diversity, and celebration of humanity. If they take Mamdani’s victory as proof of the truth of their religion and the divine right of their community to rule the world, they cannot go very far in their misuse of the civic space that the secular liberal societies offer them.
As a generational talent, he has not just the charisma, but also the opportunity for a moment of reckoning over 9/11 that some around the world expect.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)