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WHEN I LOOK AT ZOHRAN MAMDANI, HERE’S WHAT I SEE  
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Meher Ahmad
October 13, 2025
The New York Times
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_ 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 lexicon of Americans. I’m still a little shocked
every time I hear non-Muslims say “inshallah.” _

Illustration by Susana Blasco / New York Times; Source photograph by
Damon Winter/The New York Times,

 

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],” accused him
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enforce Shariah and insinuated
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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
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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
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prevent nonprofit corporations from supporting illegal Israeli
settlements, led a five-day hunger strike
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front of the White House and was arrested
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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
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the Police Department in a sprawling surveillance program —
later declared
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— 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.

 
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 a middle 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
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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,
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hold to account” those deemed guilty of antisemitic harassment under
a 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
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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
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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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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 a middle
school all the way up to the White House.

It’s not like nothing has changed. Slightly more than half
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American adults now have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of
Israel, and a clear majority
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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.”

_[MEHER AHMAD is an editor in the Opinion section.]_

* Zohran Mamdani
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* Muslims
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* Muslim community
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* Muslim culture
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* Islamophobia
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* xenophobia
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* Racism
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* New York City mayoral election
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* multiculturalism
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* 9/11
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* Sept. 11
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* Oct. 7
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Palestine solidarity
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* Jewish community
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* New York City
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* Muslim Americans
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* Jewish voters
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* anti-Semitism
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* Project Esther
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