Three days before the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, conservative politicians stood with victims’ relatives on the steps of City Hall to repeat their demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani not participate in the formal ceremony on Friday memorializing the tragedy.
But in truth, Mr. Mamdani has been commemorating the anniversary for weeks.
He met with firefighters at firehouses that suffered grave losses on that day, including Ladder 118 in Brooklyn and Engine 24 and Ladder 5 in SoHo. He went to Bellevue Hospital to talk with survivors of the attacks, families of victims, and patients suffering ongoing health complications related to the day.
Last week, he issued executive orders formally honoring victims and their families and empowering city agencies to better respond to sudden emergencies. On Tuesday, he released a trove of documents about the air quality near ground zero in the months after the attacks.
And as the commemoration ceremony began on Friday, Mr. Mamdani took his place alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul; her husband, William Hochul; Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey; and former Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who had called on the mayor to skip the ceremony. They listened solemnly as family members read the names of their more than 3,000 loved ones who died in the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
Before the ceremony began, Mr. Mamdani shook hands with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor who has been critical of Mr. Mamdani and said that his presence at the memorial service “offends him.” Mr. Mamdani also spoke with former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Ms. Hochul. Vice President JD Vance, who has also criticized the mayor, was just a few feet away.
As New York’s first Muslim mayor, Mr. Mamdani has been forced to navigate a delicate dynamic. He must speak about Sept. 11 as the city’s top elected official, but also as a member of a religious group that has faced hostility and suspicion since the attacks, and is still being vilified by right-wing factions of the Republican Party.
“It’s been 25 years and I think America has gained a better understanding of Muslims,” said Husein Yatabarry, executive director of the Muslim Community Network, “and have come to accept Muslims holding positions of power and being in elected office and not looking at them as this boogeyman.
“But there’s a right-wing angst to bring back that level of Islamophobia against prominent Muslims in political life or even in regular daily life.”
Mr. Mamdani has experienced this firsthand. During Ramadan in March, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, used social media to recirculate side-by-side images of the mayor’s iftar dinner and the burning twin towers, adding his own caption, “The enemy is inside the gates.” In New York, Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and Republican candidate for governor who lost his nephew on Sept. 11, said the mayor was “un-American.”
“He shares the philosophy of the people that murdered my nephew and all those other people,” Mr. Blakeman said in an interview.
In recent weeks, families of those who died in the attacks circulated a Change.org petition arguing that the mayor’s presence would be a distraction from the somber event. It has so far garnered more than 96,000 signatures.
That unease was evident on Wednesday at the firehouse in SoHo, where 11 firefighters perished on Sept. 11. Craig Monahan, a retired 60-year-old firefighter who responded to the attacks at ground zero, was not there when Mr. Mamdani visited, but said that he and relatives of the fallen firefighters “didn’t want him here.”
Mr. Mamdani, who declined a request to be interviewed for this article, has tried to keep the focus of the 25th anniversary on the survivors, the family members of the victims and the medical workers who responded to the attacks.
“The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th terror attack is not about politicians,” said Anna Bahr, a spokeswoman for the mayor.
Mr. Mamdani’s aides have carefully planned the mayor’s appearances related to Sept. 11, but they said that the idea of keeping the focus off himself was his own. He wanted to avoid the distraction of constantly responding to critics such as Mr. Giuliani, his aides said.
The mayor’s visits to firehouses have been brief, lasting about 30 minutes. Mr. Mamdani has typically not spoken much, according to a person who has been with the mayor on multiple occasions. Instead, he has seemed more intent on listening to the experiences of the rescue workers and survivors.
At an event on Wednesday where the mayor joined volunteers to pack meals as part of a Sept. 11 day of service, Mr. Mamdani called the terrorist attacks the darkest day in the city’s history but also a day where “we saw thousands of New Yorkers show us what it means to love our city.”
A few hours later, at the Police Department’s unveiling of a Sept. 11 memorial wall, the mayor told the story of John William Perry, an officer who was at Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan putting in his retirement papers that day. After news of the attacks, he asked for his badge back and rushed to the scene where he was killed while rescuing others.
“Every officer present that day embodied the N.Y.P.D.’s creed that the duty to protect is not a job one clocked out of,” the mayor said at the ceremony, “but a calling one answers until the very end.”
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani also attended a wreath-laying memorial event for the New York Fire Department, and was scheduled to attend an interfaith service at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church near ground zero. He plans to stay at the memorial service until all the names are read, his aides said.
The mayor will also release a video in which he says that the anniversary presents a “sacred obligation” to honor those “who were stolen from us” by caring for one another.
It is not unusual for New York’s mayor to attend a blitz of Sept. 11 memorial events. Mr. Giuliani attended up to five funerals a day in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and made frequent visits to ground zero. Mr. Giuliani’s successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, oversaw the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan and helped develop the site that became the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. In 2020, Mr. de Blasio honored the victims amid widespread death from the Covid-19 pandemic.
But for Mr. Mamdani, the dual identities of being a young mayor and a Muslim has brought an added layer of pressure and scrutiny. He was 9 years old when the attacks took place and had been living in the United States for two years after moving with his family from Uganda. He has called the day a horrific tragedy for all Americans and one where a Muslim like him was officially marked as an “other.”
The Rev. Brian Jordan, who held services at ground zero for months after the attacks, said, “We all suffered on 9/11.”
“It’s not just for the Catholics or just the Protestants or the Jews,” he continued. “Muslims died in 9/11 and people tend to forget about that. Zohran Mamdani was not the cause of this terrible attack.”
Recent polling suggests that New Yorkers do not believe the mayor would be out of place at Friday’s ceremony. A September survey from Suffolk University found that nearly 74 percent of New Yorkers believed he should attend as an official representative of the city.
And to the mayor’s allies, his electoral record is proof that his support outweighs that of the forces wishing to keep him from fully observing the day.
“The mayor got a million people, most of them who are not Muslim, to vote for him,” said Ali Najmi, a longtime ally of the mayor who chairs his judiciary advisory board. “Islamophobia has not won the day in New York.”
Miles G. Cohen and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.
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