For years, Muslim New Yorkers have gathered at Washington Square Park on the Eid holidays for prayer services, putting the city’s religious and ethnic diversity on display.
But this year, right-wing influencers have been sharing footage of the gatherings, presenting them as a nefarious “invasion” tied to Muslim American New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
“The fear-mongering is insane,” said Asad Dandia, a local historian and Muslim American activist who supports Mamdani’s campaign. “I think the community and our leadership know that we’re on the radar now.”
Muslim Americans in New York and across the United States said the country is seeing a spike in Islamophobic rhetoric in response to Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primaries.
Advocates said the wave of hateful comments shows that Islamophobia remains a tolerated form of bigotry in the US despite appearing to have receded in recent years.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Dandia said.
‘Islam is not a religion’
It is not just anonymous internet users and online anti-Muslim figures attacking Mamdani and his identity. A flood of politicians, including some in the orbit of President Donald Trump, have joined in.
Congressman Randy Fine went as far as to suggest without evidence that Mamdani will install a “caliphate” in New York City if elected while Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa on X.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn attacked the mayoral candidate, arguing that Islam is a political ideology and “not a religion”.
Others, like conservative activist Charlie Kirk invoked the 9/11 attacks and called Mamdani a “Muslim Maoist” while right-wing commentator Angie Wong told CNN that people in New York are “concerned about their safety, living here with a Muslim mayor”.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer, a Trump confidant, referred to the mayoral candidate as a “jihadist Muslim”, baselessly alleging that he has ties to both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
And Republican Representative Andy Ogles sent a letter to the Department of Justice, calling for Mamdani’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported.
On Sunday, Congressman Brandon Gill posted a video of Mamdani eating biryani with his hand and called on him “to go back to the Third World”, saying that “civilized people” in the US “don’t eat like this”.
Calls for condemnation
“I’m getting flashbacks from after 9/11,” New York City Council member Shahana Hanif said. “I was a kid then, and still the bigotry and Islamophobia were horrifying as a child.”
Hanif, who represents a district in Brooklyn, comfortably won re-election last week in a race that focused on her advocacy for Palestinian rights and calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
She told Al Jazeera that the anti-Muslim rhetoric in response to Mamdani’s win aims to distract and derail the progressive energy that defeated the establishment to secure the Democratic nomination for him.
Hanif said Islamophobic comments should be condemned across the political spectrum, stressing that there is “so much more work to do” to undo racism in the US.
While several Democrats have denounced the campaign against Mamdani, leading figures in the party – including many in New York – have not released formal statements on the issue.
“We should all be disgusted by the flood of anti-Muslim remarks spewed in the aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral primary – some blatant, others latent,” US Senator Chris Van Hollen said in a statement.
“Shame on the members of Congress who have engaged in such bigotry and anyone who doesn’t challenge it.”
Our joint statement on the vile, anti-Muslim, racist attacks on Zohran Mamdani: pic.twitter.com/QRGOvh0jdG
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) June 27, 2025
Trump and Muslim voters
At the same time, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who represents New York, has been accused of fuelling bigotry against Mamdani. Last week, she falsely accused Mamdani of making “references to global jihad”.
Her office later told US media outlets that she “misspoke” and was raising concerns over Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalise the intifada”, a call for activism using the Arabic word for uprising.
Critics of the chant claimed that it makes Jews feel unsafe because it invokes the Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s, which saw both peaceful opposition and armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
While Mamdani, who is of South Asian descent, focused his campaign on making New York affordable, his support for Palestinian rights took centre stage in the criticism against him. Since the election, the attacks – particularly on the right – appear to have shifted to his Muslim identity.
That backlash comes after Trump and his allies courted Muslim voters during his bid for the presidency last year. In fact, the US president has nominated two Muslim mayors from Michigan as ambassadors to Tunisia and Kuwait.
In the lead-up to the elections, Trump called Muslim Americans “smart” and “good people”.
The Republican Party seemed to tone down the anti-Muslim language as it sought the socially conservative community’s votes.
But Corey Saylor, research and advocacy director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Islamophobia goes in cycles.
“Islamophobia is sort of baked into American society,” Saylor told Al Jazeera.
“It wasn’t front and centre, but all it required was something to flip the switch right back on, and I would say, we’re seeing that once again.”
Islamophobia ‘industry’
Negative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in the US media, pop culture and political discourse have persisted for decades.
That trend intensified after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 by al-Qaeda. In subsequent years, right-wing activists started to warn about what they said were plans to implement Islamic religious law in the West.
Muslims were also the subjects of conspiracy theories warning against the “Islamisation” of the US through immigration.
The early 2000s saw the rise of provocateurs, “counterterrorism experts” and think tanks dedicated to bashing Islam and drumming up fear against the religion in a loosely connected network that community advocates have described as an “industry”.
That atmosphere regularly seeped into mainstream political conversations. For example, then-candidate Trump called in 2015 for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.
Even in liberal New York, where the 9/11 attacks killed more than 2,600 people at the World Trade Center in 2001, the Muslim community endured a backlash.
After the attacks, the New York Police Department established a network of undercover informants to surveil the Muslim community’s mosques, businesses and student associations.
The programme was disbanded in 2014, and a few years later, the city reached a legal settlement with the Muslim community, agreeing to implement stronger oversight on police investigations to prevent abuse.
In 2010, the city’s Muslim community burst into the national spotlight again after plans for a Muslim community centre in lower Manhattan faced intense opposition due to its proximity to the destroyed World Trade Center.
While many Republicans whipped up conspiracy theories against the community centre, several Democrats as well as the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent pro-Israel group, joined them in opposing the project, which was eventually scrapped.
‘We are above this’
Now New York Muslims find themselves once again in the eye of an Islamophobia storm. This time, however, advocates said their communities are more resilient than ever.
“We feel more confident in our community’s voice and our institutional power and in the support that we will have from allies,” Dandia said.
“Yes, we’re dealing with this Islamophobic backlash, but I don’t want to make it seem like we’re just victims because we are able to now fight back. The fact that this was the largest Muslim voter mobilisation in American history is a testament to that.”
Hanif echoed his comments.
“Over the last 25 years, we’ve built a strong coalition that includes our Jewish communities, that includes Asian, Latino, Black communities, to be able to say like we are above this and we will care for one another,” she told Al Jazeera.
The post Mamdani’s New York victory sparks Islamophobic backlash in US appeared first on Al Jazeera.
