Just over a week ago Zohran Mamdani decisively won the New York mayoral election, making the 34-year-old Democratic Socialist the first Muslim to lead the metropolis of 8.8 million.
What a difference 20 years makes.
Twenty-four years ago, we were living near New York when 9/11 horrified the nation and for months afterward I reported or edited stories on the aftermath as the Tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) went through the painstaking work of confirming the number of dead in surrounding cities, towns and villages.
As I did, I repeatedly witnessed or heard of Muslims being bullied or targeted. The terror attacks were orchestrated by a small number of extremists who just happened to call themselves Muslims. To some Americans, that meant that all Muslims and Islam itself were to blame.
Many Americans at the time probably had no idea Muslims make up 2 billion of the world’s population. Or that more than 50 countries have Muslim-majority populations, including Malaysia and Indonesia in Asia and Niger, Senegal or Mali in West Africa and Somalia in East Africa, in addition to the better-known nations that many Americans associate with Islam — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Or that most Muslims around the globe recoiled from the catastrophic violence perpetrated in their name and in the name of their faith tradition.
Flash forward 20 years, and now a man who was born in Uganda, lived briefly in South Africa as a young child and moved to New York at age 7 with his Hindu film director mom and Muslim university professor dad is the mayor-elect of what is perhaps the U.S. most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse city.
One can debate Mamdani’s political ideology and policies. That’s fair game. But his experiences abroad as well as his family connections in Uganda, India and South Africa make him a good fit for a global metropolis like New York City in my opinion.
We will see how he governs and what he is able to accomplish. But my wish for the United States is that most Americans will assess his tenure as mayor based on his governing, and not because of his identity as a Muslim.
I suspect most Americans will. But unfortunately, I anticipate a rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric after his victory last week. In fact, I’m already seeing it. A childhood friend posted a video on Facebook this week of a New Yorker predicting that Mamdani would have to adopt increasingly anti-LBGTQ and anti-women policies if he wanted to maintain support of the city’s Muslim population. That assumes all Muslims are all the same and adhere to very conservative beliefs.
I am skeptical. As a longtime political reporter, I tend to pay attention to high-profile political races around the country. I saw Mamdani visit queer and trans clubs in New York during his campaign. I saw the many women of all faith traditions (or none), races, ethnicities and financial wherewithal embracing his candidacy, too.
I told my childhood friend this. Assuming 2 billion Muslims around the globe are all the same is like saying the Westboro Baptist Church, with its rabidly anti-gay rhetoric, represents all Christians everywhere. It sounds crazy when you say it out loud. I told him that, too.
Then I asked him, how many Muslims he knew personally? Three, and none of them are radical, he acknowledged.
His experience matches my own. I’ve been around Muslims all my life. As a kid, an Egyptian family moved in around the corner from us in Augusta, Ga. As a professor at the Medical College of Georgia, the father helped to educate future generations of the state’s future doctors and medical professionals. My brother and I played occasionally with their boys, who were around our age. My mom befriended another woman whose husband was a Muslim from Egypt.
Later, living across the country put me in situations in which I befriended or became acquaintances with Muslims in Atlanta, California, Florida, Connecticut and here in New Mexico, as well as people who hailed from New York City and Washington, D.C. And in all those interactions, I’ve never had a Muslim tell me I was going to Hell or tried to convert me. It was Christians of a certain theological bent who did that.
I am not lionizing one faith tradition over another. I suspect the entitlement I associate with some Christians’ aggressive habit of judging others, especially adherents of other faith traditions, has more to do with the safety of feeling part of the majority than anything encoded in Christianity itself.
As of 2020, nearly two-thirds of people in the United States and Canada identified as Christian, according to Pew Research Center. That is down from more than three quarters in 2010. I suspect that decrease has more to do with former Christians who have left churches and congregations across Canada and the U.S. than the growth of the Muslim population.
In fact, if I am being brutally honest, it is my belief that the greatest religious threat to American democracy in 2025 are not adherents of other faith traditions. It’s a small subset of Christians who want to impose theocracy on the rest of us based on their very narrow understanding of what Christianity is.
But that’s a topic for another column.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.