NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani is poised to become New York City’s first Muslim mayor — a breakthrough that’s also become one of the most polarizing moments in city politics in years.
His candidacy is historic in a city that’s home to nearly 900,000 Muslims. To many of them, Mamdani’s rise represents long-overdue visibility and a chance to prove that Muslim New Yorkers belong at the center of civic life. To his critics, it has become a flashpoint — a test of how religion, race and ideology collide in an era of rising polarization.
“I feel the excitement of winning a city where any New Yorker’s belonging isn’t up for debate,” Mamdani said last week. “That includes Muslim New Yorkers.”
Across the country, bias against Muslims is rising again, and Mamdani’s campaign is unfolding amid a renewed global backlash against immigrants and Muslim communities. In New York, where the trauma of Sept. 11 still lingers, his candidacy has become a mirror for the city’s contradictions — celebrated as a sign of progress and weaponized as a source of fear.
That a young Muslim man — born in Uganda, of Indian heritage and bearing an uncommon name — could be on the cusp of getting elected against the current political backdrop is viewed by many as a sign of hope. For many others, Mamdani is an existential cause for concern.
He is the frontrunner in the race for mayor, with a double digit lead in every poll over his nearest rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But like all “firsts,” if he wins on Nov. 4, he would carry with him the pressure and expectations of those who share his background.
Mamdani’s critics call him an extremist. And he is on the far left of his party, someone who previously and repeatedly called to defund the police, carried a bill to decriminalize prostitution and belonged to a protest movement that wanted to entirely abolish jails in New York City.
There’s also his strident criticism of Israel, including his support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, and his bill aimed at yanking the tax-exempt status from charities operating in Israeli settlements.
He repeatedly brought that to the streets, joining and then leading pro-Palestinian marches and actions. He was arrested in a civil disobedience protest outside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home as part of a protest calling for a ceasefire just days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. That record has led his critics to see him as, at the very least, condoning Hamas’ extremism by not immediately, harshly and unequivocally condemning it.
Some of Mamdani’s detractors have taken his leftist political views and his Islamic faith and made a leap in an attempt to yoke him to ultra-conservative, extremist Muslim ideology.
Throughout the campaign, social media has been flooded with posts suggesting Mamdani would commit a terrorist attack, or at least allow one. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) wrote on X on Oct. 27 that Mamdani should be “sent back to Uganda” because he “came to America for one reason: to turn America into an Islamic theocracy” — a statement that ignored the fact that the state lawmaker immigrated to the United States with his parents at age 7. The same day, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) posted on X that “radicals like Zohran Mamdani cozy up to extremists tied to Islamic t*rrorists and Hamas.”
Mamdani has faced attacks locally, too. Months after Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa pleaded to his party on Fox News to “leave the religion alone,” he stood on the debate stage and claimed Mamdani supported “global jihad.” Cuomo agreed with conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg when he said Mamdani would be cheering on a terrorist attack like 9/11. And an anonymous “push poll” sent to city voters suggested Mamdani supports policies like “making halal mandatory in all city restaurants.” When Mayor Eric Adams endorsed Cuomo, he justified the decision as fighting against “Islamic extremisms that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany, that have taken over the logical thinkers.”
Images of the falling twin towers on social media and TV ads with the words “global jihad” plastered over Mamdani’s face are meant to shock and provoke. The Democratic nominee’s supporters see pure, unfiltered Islamophobia and an effort to tie Mamdani to an ultra-violent, ultra-conservative movement based on his religion alone. The creators of that content and their defenders see any effort to stop Mamdani as justified.
The 34-year-old Mamdani was born in Uganda, of Indian heritage. His father is Muslim and his mother Hindu, but he was raised with his father’s religion and has embraced and promoted that identity throughout his life. He created a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine on his college campus, and pro-Palestinian activism has continued to be at the core of his politics. Mamdani favored kurtas over suits while running for the state Assembly and even took his official headshot wearing the South Asian garment. He’s since switched almost exclusively to a suit and tie on the campaign trail but hasn’t stopped dropping Arabic words like “habibi” and “inshallah” into his interviews. One of his first viral videos was on how to reduce prices at halal food carts.
Mamdani has campaigned frequently at mosques — he’s visited 60 over the course of the campaign, a spokesperson said — typically making stops for Jummah services every Friday while steadily climbing from near anonymity citywide to becoming a bona fide Muslim celebrity.
Still, when it comes to his background, caution has suffused his campaign. His spokespeople declined repeated requests for an interview about his Muslim identity.
Accusations from Cuomo that Mamdani is a “zealot,” a “radical” and an “extremist,” as he said at a “Stand with Israel” rally in October, can easily be interpreted as suggesting guilt by association.
While Mamdani did not initially condemn the term “globalize the intifada,” he has since said that he doesn’t use the phrase and would discourage its use. He was interviewed by leftist streamer and activist Hasan Piker, a fellow Muslim, who said “America deserved 9/11” on a show in 2019. Mamdani has called that remark “objectionable and reprehensible;” Piker later said it was “inappropriate.” And Mamdani campaigned at Imam Siraj Wahhaj’s mosque, where several congregants tied to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 attended. Wahhaj was not charged in the ensuing case, but was identified as a potential unindicted co-conspirator in the plot, a designation later criticized for being too broad.
Cuomo has drawn on all of it to bolster his narrative that Mamdani is too extreme.
“He should be ashamed of himself. And he has had every opportunity to make it right,” Cuomo said at the rally. “We fundamentally resent the idea that a mayor of New York would be a divisive force.”
Ahead of the primary, Mamdani laughed off Islamophobic criticism in a cheeky social media video: No, the bandanas from his campaign weren’t hijabs — after all, they featured drawings of hot dogs. But with Election Day looming, his tone has grown more earnest when it comes to his faith. After Cuomo suggested Mamdani would cheer another 9/11, the Queens state lawmaker convened a press conference outside a South Bronx mosque where he lamented anti-Muslim attacks and pledged not to hide his identity. A video of the speech has been viewed 25 million times.
“There are 12 days remaining until Election Day. I will be a Muslim man in New York City each of those 12 days and every day that follows after that,” he said. “I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I am proud to call my own.”
Long-lingering feelings about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks complicated that message, though. Mamdani’s attempt to humanize what many Muslims experienced in New York City after 9/11 was picked apart by political opponents, including Vice President JD Vance, who homed in on an anecdote featuring a female relative of Mamdani, who he initially described as his aunt.
“According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks,” Vance posted on X.
When internet sleuths found that his father’s sister didn’t wear a hijab, Mamdani clarified that he was referring to his father’s cousin — a relatively small detail that nonetheless sent his critics into hyperdrive.
One could write off the whole incident as par for the course in the heat of an election. But it’s a fact that Mamdani’s rhetoric in general doesn’t sit well with some New Yorkers. Many — especially Jews — feel he didn’t give proper respect to Israelis killed in the Oct. 7 attacks; more recently, he was accused of not paying due deference to those who perished in the towers. Like any mayor, his statements will get the microscope treatment, and he’ll be expected to speak to the city in a way that unites.
Cuomo has also chided Mamdani for talking about Islamophobia, arguing it was “poison” by “trying to pit one against the other,” even saying at a press conference Thursday that “Islamophobia is not real in this race, is not real in this context.” His backers have joined in.
“The idea you’re going to turn the last ten days of the election into ‘vote for me because Andrew is a bigot?’” said Kalman Yeger, a Brooklyn state Assembly member who supports Cuomo. “It’s deliberate, intentional and divisive.”
The same sort of question could apply to any candidate in the homestretch of a bare knuckled campaign: will the winner unite or play into the divide? For Mamdani, it comes with the added weight of the very real potential that he’ll be the city’s first Muslim mayor, its first South Asian mayor, its first African-born mayor.
Mamdani has wielded his identity as an asset. Both he and his supporters celebrate how he embodies a contrast with the traditional centers of power. “I am Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, as a progressive, Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in,” Mamdani said in a primary debate.
New York City has not always been kind to its trailblazing mayors, though. Abe Beame, the first Jewish mayor of New York City, lost reelection after one term. So did David Dinkins, the first Black mayor, and John Purroy Mitchell, the last mayor elected in his 30s.
When Beame first ran for mayor in 1965, people drove through Jewish neighborhoods with a loudspeaker blaring “To hell with the Jews,” The New York Times reported. Beame lost that race, and the paper found that a quarter of Jews didn’t vote for him because they “feared the attention — and a possible surge of anti-Semitism — that a Jewish mayor might bring if things went wrong.”
Beame won eight years later. And while he may be appreciated for being the first Jewish mayor, he’s better remembered for being the feckless leader who presided over the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Half a century later, Mamdani will want to avoid the same outcome — but would hope to face the same criteria: judged, first and foremost, on how he did the job.
