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Zohran Mamdani was not just another candidate running for mayor of New York City; he was a democratic socialist, a proud Muslim born in Africa, and someone who very publicly supported the Palestinian cause. Who Mamdani was and what he believed guaranteed that he would be considered outside the pale of serious politics. From being an improbable contender (polling less than 1% at the start of the campaign) to becoming the resident of Gracie Mansion, Mamdani had to overcome not only the expected enmity of his electoral opponents but also resistance from his own party leadership, bullying by entitled billionaires, a fulminating fourth estate goaded by social media, and the incredulity of New York voters. He was accused of being both a communist and an Islamist, of being “woke,” and of wanting to introduce sharia law, and his very presence in the mayoral race was framed as an affront to “American values and sensibilities.” He became a poster child for one of the most pernicious and persistent tropes of Islamophobia: Islamogauchism, the alleged sinister alliance between “Islamic extremists” and the Left.
Mamdani saw his unlikely election triumph as a defeat for Islamophobia, proclaiming in his victory speech: “No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.” Trafficking in various kinds of racism (including Islamophobia) has been a feature of elections in Western plutocracies at least as long as there have been meaningful elections. Despite the advances made by anti-colonial movements and the Civil Rights struggle, racism and colonialism have not been exorcised from the world. In the shape of Islamophobia, these forces have returned with a vengeance. Would it not be a very tall order to expect the election of the first Muslim mayor of New York to signal the end of Islamophobia as an electoral strategy? Certainly, Mamdani’s success is a setback for those who have been peddling Islamophobia. What is not clear is whether the suite of strategies that made Mamdani’s win possible could be scaled up or franchised out. Nor is it certain that the poetry of campaigning will not give way to the prose of governing that is patterned on Zombie technocracy that reinscribes Islamophobia. Thus, the question remains: What is the nature and extent of this setback?
Despite the advances made by anti-colonial movements and the Civil Rights struggle, racism and colonialism have not been exorcised from the world. In the shape of Islamophobia, these forces have returned with a vengeance.
The pertinence of this question, however, seems almost overwhelmed by the events that have unfolded since Mamdani took office: the assassination of Ali Khameani and his family, the intensification of the fifty-year war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro; killings, abductions, and disappearances carried out by ICE; territorial claims on Greenland; threats directed at non-nuclear, sovereign states of the Global South; alongside the establishment of an Orwellian Board of Peace to curate genocide in Gaza. The managed anarchy of the post-1945 international order has now given way to the more blatant gangsterism of Washington. In this context, the election of a democratic socialist Muslim mayor of New York appears, at first glance, little more than a localized blip, with no significance beyond the precincts of Gotham.
To help us appreciate why Mamdani becoming mayor matters beyond New York, we have to understand Islamophobia. This task is complicated because the category of Islamophobia is itself contested. Some reject the term altogether, dismissing it as a word invented to prevent criticism of Muslims. Others argue that a different term is needed to appease such objections, proposing a range of circumlocutions around whether anti-Muslim bigotry, hatred, prejudice, or hostility might be more appropriate.
These disagreements connect with competing explanations of the phenomenon itself. Here again, some see Islamophobia as being present from the beginning of Islam, others see it as something that takes off with the “war on terror,” while otherssee it as a mask for capitalism, the military-industrial-academic complex, or social media. These discussions are thick on the ground but, in general, light on conceptual depth. The lack of such depth reduces the concrete specificity of Islamophobia to its most overt manifestations: interpersonal violence and abuse, or negative media representations. Islamophobia appears as something that affects Muslim minorities primarily in the West.
Such accounts, however, neglect the global occurrence of Islamophobia as evidenced by the murderous repression of Muslim communities in Burma, China, India… to name just a few obvious examples. Nor is Islamophobia simply a phenomenon confined to Muslim minorities. As I have shown elsewhere, many of the tyrannies that rule so-called “Muslim-majority” countries have actively promoted it, often through a generalized form of Kemalism, that is, projects of Islamophobic nation-building pioneered by Mustafa Kemal in Türkiye and subsequently emulated by Westoxicated elites throughout the Muslim Ummah.
Increasingly, Islamophobia links projects of ethnonationalist revanchism, such as White supremacism, Sino-chauvinism, Zionism, Hindutva, Kemalism, and Burmese nationalism. These connections include the production, distribution, and consumption of Islamophobia in the form of texts, tropes, soundbites, memes, tweets, coordinating media campaigns, and lobbying and complex diplomatic efforts. It is also the case that most ethnonationalist revanchists were dismayed by the victory of Mamdani, seeing it as another example of creeping Islamization, another sign that the “great replacement” was happening; here was one more instance of Muslim expansionism being enabled by a duped demos, and treacherous progressives.
In the imaginings of ethnonationalist revanchism, Islam’s expansion has to be halted and rolled back. The discourse of a “reconquista” circulates widely, as Hindutva ideologues and White nationalists articulate their ambitions to “take back their countries.” This reconquest must be directed against those whose allegiances are not grounded in specificity or locality: the opposition between those deemed from “somewhere” and those from “anywhere.” Ethnonationalist revanchism is based on reclaiming an ethnically homogeneous society that is defending an ethnos under threat of being forever lost. But, as all concepts are contrastive and relational, defining one ethnos requires not only a contrast with other ethnoi but also the very idea of what is and what is not ethnic. Muslimness is both a marker of anti-ethnicity and a mark that differentiates some ethnic groups from others.
The fluidity of Muslimness, presented as part of its historical “nomadic” character, its lack of a telluric kernel in the form of a sacred homeland, its globality, and its alleged capacity for dissimulation (taqiyya), means it is imagined as not only everywhere but also including potentially anyone, even a Mayor of New York, born in Uganda with an award-winning film-maker and a globally renowned academic as parents. Muslimness is the mass analogue to the “Globalist” elite. Muslimness comes to connote a demotic cosmopolitanism that cannot be contained in one ethnos, or one country. It is the very antithesis of ethnonationalism.
Trying to Change the System From Within
It would be foolish to assume that the authority and scope of the mayor of New York are sufficient to roll back ethnonationalist revanchism. However, global cities like New York are a testament to a form of life that is anathema to ethnonationalist revanchists: postcolonial convivencia. That is, diverse communities jostling together without a single charter of homogeneity. Such cities have also been seen as a crucible of the future. If New York has a Muslim mayor, does it not suggest that Muslimness has a place in the future? London also has a Muslim mayor, but, outside the fevered imaginings of Islamophobes, the difference is that, in the case of New York’s mayoralty, it seems to have opened a path for expressions of Muslimness that are not restricted to displays of private piety for public consumption. Such a possibility, however, is tested when Muslim political actors refuse to disavow the silences that Islamophobia insists upon.
Mamdani’s refusal to abandon the Palestine cause during his campaign resonated far beyond the usual cut-and-thrust of political maneuvering. Palestine is the knot that has come to tie together the various strands of opposition not only to apartheid and genocide, but also to the bankruptcy of zombie technocrats whose political imagination extends no further than triangulation. The Palestinianization of Muslimness is central to the logic of Islamophobia. Palestinianization means the permanent subjugation of Muslimness and denial of Muslim political agency. Simultaneously, Palestinianization names not only what Islamophobia threatens for those marked as Muslim (regardless of their identification) but also resistance to that very threat. For Palestine is not only the site of a great crime; it is also a sign of a struggle against the formative processes that have made this world possible. It is a reminder not only of the continuing colonial-racial logic made concrete in an ethnostate, but also of resistance to the attempt to dehumanize a population. From Brazil to Bangladesh, whenever the Palestine flag has been raised, it has signalled that the solution to dehumanization is decolonization.
The Palestinianization of Muslimness is central to the logic of Islamophobia. Palestinianization means the permanent subjugation of Muslimness and denial of Muslim political agency.
The Mamdani campaign articulated affordability, the need for a fairer city with better housing, childcare, and transport, opposition to Islamophobia, and the idea of a government with transformative capacity, without endorsing the zombie order as the apogee of our possibilities. Combating Islamophobia implies struggle; in other words, it is a political undertaking. An election triumph stitched together with these demands suggests that a politics of change is not only possible but necessary. If this turns out to be the case, then the mayoral election in New York has significance beyond Manhattan: it will have promised a future rather than a recycling of the forever-present.
Political victories can generate insights. They are not merely indicators of the balance of social forces; they also reveal which narratives and arguments have succeeded in articulating a new world of possibilities. The intensity of political struggle is not only a function of the millions of dollars spent in trying to win an election, but also of what will change and what will remain the same as a result. At particular moments, some political victories do more than disrupt the conjunctural balance of socio-economic forces; they can also unsettle the epistemological regime that underwrites the political calculus, and they can change a particular way of understanding the world, i.e., the common-sense of a society, and in the process forge new political identities out of what hitherto had been only sociological classifications. Thus, to win in an election in a moment when Islamophobia seems to be so dominant suggests that there may be a way out of the slow surrender to revanchism of ethnonationalists or technocratic triangulation of the Zombie center-left. Major social advances, from civil rights to women’s rights, from anti-apartheid struggles to anti-colonial movements, succeeded to the extent that they transformed a society’s common sense. Common sense, however, is too often treated as timeless, as something that cannot change. But we know many societies in which racist, sexist, or ableist behavior was normal, part of the common sense, and which became places where such conduct was routinely condemned.
Common sense is often fragmentary, multitudinous, and contradictory, yet it is precisely this Whitmanesque quality that makes change possible. Despite appearances to the contrary, common sense is a product of history; its rhythms and dynamics are consequences of power, and politics is the craft of power. The contemporary Left, however it is configured or addressed, lacks any autonomous or serious means of understanding how political change actually occurs. A liberal conception of the political has colonized much of the Left, reducing politics to a shadow play of “treasons, stratagems, and spoils.” Liberalism comes in many forms, but it tends to elide questions of power in its privileging of individualism and rationalism. Politics is treated as the discovery of universal rationality; disagreement, dispute, and conflict are therefore seen as products of misunderstanding or confusion, arising from a failure to align properly with reason. Within such a conception of the political, those with whom we agree and those with whom we disagree correspond to those who possess reason and those who lack it. Those deemed to possess reason will be right; those without are invincibly ignorant, hence why liberalism has historically justified racism and imperialism while denying it. In this light, the genocide in Gaza reflects liberalism’s distinctions between reason and unreason, human and non-human, settler and colonized…
To win in an election in a moment when Islamophobia seems to be so dominant suggests that there may be a way out of the slow surrender to revanchism of ethnonationalists or technocratic triangulation of the Zombie center-left.
Many on the Left, however, argue that their understanding of politics is characterized by structural analysis. But very often this analysis is structural only in name: behind abstract nouns (capitalism, Big Tech, the media, the military-industrial-academic complex) lie mystical processes made intelligible only through a form of methodological individualism. This suggests that social change is only possible when the right people are in the right place doing the right things. It is not about changing common sense; at most, it is about understanding the world as it is, and imagining that nothing can fundamentally change. In contrast, the propositions and policies Mamdani has advanced suggest that a politics of change remains possible. His victory comes at a time when conventional wisdom holds that political success requires accepting the nostrums of a Gramscianism of the Right as the natural order of things.
Ethnonationalist revanchism has demonstrated that it understands Gramsci better than the Left. In recent decades, it has marched through institutions such as political parties, social and legacy media, transnational corporations, think tanks, courts, philanthropic foundations, and university administrations. Ethnonationalist revanchism has established a conceptual vocabulary, so that political projects all need to be justified in its terms and on its terms. It has grasped what Gramsci theorized: before one can win enduring political power, one must first secure cultural hegemony. This does not require the manufacture of consent, but rather the “disorganization of dissent” (86). Alternative visions and different possibilities are prevented from combining into a meaningful challenge. Opposition is reduced to the fetishization of small differences, with disputes conducted not over substantive alternatives but at the margins of what has already been determined as the way the world is. As a result, these challenges to hegemony remain fragmented and lack an overarching narrative that connects the various points of critique into organized opposition. The inability to coalesce into an effective opposition is not only a tactical failure, but also an epistemological one, obscuring the capacity to read the current conjuncture and devise effective counter-measures.
So, when confronted with Islamophobia, appeasement is seen as the only feasible strategy. Such appeasement does not merely surrender Muslims (or those considered adjacent to them) on the altar of psephological calculations. In the train of that capitulation follow policies and propositions such as framing immigrants as invaders, curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security, and moral panics over diversity, along with the accretions that enhance executive authority and enlarge the scope of the state of exception. From Guantanamo to Gaza, we have witnessed the exception become the norm as Islamophobia becomes entrenched. To combat Islamophobia means not only preventing discrimination and violence against those tainted by Muslimness, but also struggling against the normalization of a permanent state of exception. That is, the re-establishment of an uncontested colonial-racial order.
It was the convergence between the struggle for Civil Rights and the anti-colonial movement that forced the retreat of the colonial-racial order. It is this retreat that ethnonationalist revanchists seek to reverse. A critical factor in enabling that retreat was the subversion of the distinction between racism and colonialism. In 1938, Magnus Hirschfeld deployed the term “racism” to describe Nazi rule in early 1930s Germany. Yet what Americans, Belgians, British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish were doing was little different from the Nazis, at least until 1941. As Aimé Césaire observed, Nazism was merely Western imperialism brought home to Europe. This observation, however, has been systematically obscured. Colonialism and racism have been partitioned off from one another, as Nazism is presented as the paradigmatic instance of racism, severed from the longer histories of colonial rule (See Hesse and Sayyid). In this way, racial logics are metonymically attached to Berlin rather than to Washington DC, Brussels, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon, or Madrid.
The result is a post-Nazi horizon that is also constitutively post-racial. The “post-racial” here has both a temporal and a conceptual dimension: it designates something that is understood to belong to the past, ending with the fall of the Nazi regime, and something that can only be recognized in the present insofar as it is traced to residual Nazi personnel or doctrines. Consequently, those who opposed Nazism, whether out of principled rejection or because they were targets of its enmity, are rendered largely immune from accusations of racism. Within this discourse, the violence inflicted upon Ireland, Algeria, and Palestine cannot easily be recognized as racist. The opposition to Islamophobia is, to a large extent, based on the refusal to acknowledge it as a form of racism. As long as Nazism is treated as the authentic and exclusive expression of racism, and as analytically distinct from colonialism, the conceptual resources available to resist genocidal forms of global re-colonization remain severely constrained.
A mayoral electoral victory over Islamophobia cannot halt the re-colonization of the planet. It cannot stop the expansion of Islamophobic apartheid to an increasing number of jurisdictions. It cannot dismantle a genocidal killing machine directed at Muslimness. The Mamdani administration may disappoint in the details; it may become another iteration of a zombie technocracy, it may even squander its promise altogether. And yet a political victory can show that Islamophobia is not inevitable or invincible. It can spark the recognition that Islamophobia links the local and the global, the metropole and the periphery, the racial and the colonial. It can help dispel the gaslighting that cloaks ethnonationalist revanchism. Its sparks can illuminate the struggle against Islamophobia as a fight for a future beyond ethnonationalist enclosures and erasures. It can fire a collective will to understand that, first, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
I would like to thank AbdoolKarim Vakil, Barnor Hesse, Atalia Omer, and Joshua Lupo for their comments on various drafts of this essay. I would also like to mention Zeliha Eliaçık and Johanna Loock whose en passant prompts and assistance helped what became this essay find its way.
