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.
The post Zohran Mamdani
and How to Be a ‘Good’
Muslim in America appeared first on New York Times.
