In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s historic primary victory in the Democratic race for New York City mayor, the familiar contours of the American Islamophobic imaginary have re-emerged with a vengeance. A progressive Muslim candidate of South Asian descent, Mamdani’s victory symbolizes both the possibility of a radically inclusive politics and the persistence of the racialized boundaries of belonging in U.S. public life. His candidacy and stunning victory have reignited debates not only about representation and ideology but also about the deep structures of fear, suspicion, and cultural anxiety that have long animated Islamophobic discourse in America, particularly in New York City. This is nothing new, and anyone who followed US politics since the early 1990s should be acquainted with the Islamophobic playbook.
The vitriolic backlash to Mamdani’s win echoes the controversy surrounding the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” over a decade ago. That incident—the opposition to the Park51 Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site—became a symbolic battleground over who gets to belong in post-9/11 America. In both instances, Muslim presence in the public and political sphere was not treated as mundane civic participation but as a provocative act, one demanding containment, scrutiny, and resistance. The same cast of characters and organizations that weaponized the Park51 Community Center are back at it again with the help of new cadres recruited into the Islamophobic crusade targeting Mamadni.
We are witnessing a national moment of manifest Islamophobia, which “is what is spoken and acted upon.” The obsessive pre-occupation of everything related to Islam and Muslims, the problematizing of Muslims as a class and Islam as a religion, congressional and parliamentary hearings criminalizing Muslims and violations of their civil and human rights, surveillance programs, extra-judicial use of force, interventions, military campaigns, torture, drones without limits, and policies rationalizing its exercise, are, in essence, what we see and bear witness toward the Muslim subject. Mamadni’s victory brought to the fore the multilayered latent Islamophobia built over decades of constant demonization of everything related to Islam and Muslims.
I maintain that “Islamophobia is not just about hate crimes or slurs—it is a structured system of exclusion that is embedded in institutions, media narratives, and policies.” The swift emergence of anti-Muslim tropes in response to Mamdani’s victory—accusations of antisemitism, concerns over “Sharia influence,” and warnings of cultural incompatibility—illustrates my point with painful clarity. These tropes are not new; they are part of a recurring pattern that weaponizes religion and race to mark Muslims as perpetual outsiders and insist on their exclusion. At such a historical moment and energizing the young democratic voters, the media and elite narrative shifted immediately into Islamophobia and a cowardly defense of Israel, as if Mamdani were running to be the mayor of an Israeli city.
The discourse surrounding Mamdani has been framed by what I call the Islamophobic social imaginary—a system of meaning through which Muslims are rendered suspect, alien, and dangerous. Salman Sayyid writes that Islamophobia “is not simply dislike of Muslims; it is a regime of truth in which Muslims are situated as a civilizational threat.” In the case of Mamdani, this social imaginary did not merely question his policies or political positions, but cast aspersions on his very presence as a Muslim political actor in a major American metropolis. Some posted on social media calling on Trump to arrest and deport Mamdani, which can’t be ruled out in the current political environment.
Even as Mamdani campaigned on issues like housing justice, rising cost of living, police accountability, and economic equity—concerns that resonate broadly across communities—his Muslim identity became the chosen site for panic and distortion. Much like the debates over Park51, his candidacy was framed by the Islamophobic industry and media through a lens that linked Islam to extremism, insularity, and opposition to “American values.” These narratives re-inscribe the Muslim as an existential problem in the body politic—a position Jasmin Zine critiques as “the securitized Muslim subject.”
Zine, in her work on Islamophobia and the war on terror, explores how Muslims are interpellated into public discourse through the logic of suspicion. “The Muslim presence is read through a hyper-visibility,” she notes, “but this visibility is saturated with negative meaning.” Mamdani, despite his efforts to center class solidarity and interfaith coalition-building, has found his image co-opted by those invested in perpetuating fear-based politics.
The “Ground Zero Mosque” moment was pivotal in crystallizing the idea that Muslim visibility in public space—especially near hallowed sites of national trauma—was inherently controversial. Mamdani’s victory, while separated from that controversy by time and context, reveals how little has changed in terms of public affect and media response. His success challenges the sedimented hierarchies of representation, and as such, becomes a site upon which American anxieties about pluralism and sovereignty are projected.
Ultimately, Mamdani’s mayoral run—and the reactions it has provoked—should be read not merely as a political event, but as a cultural reckoning. It surfaces the contradictions at the heart of American liberalism: the celebration of diversity alongside the disciplining of difference. As Salman Sayyid reminds us, “Muslim agency is always already problematized. The Muslim subject who speaks politically is seen not as participating in democracy, but as threatening it.”
In resisting these frames, Mamdani’s campaign offers a counter-narrative—one rooted in solidarity, mutual recognition, and the possibility of a city governed not by fear, but by hope. However, the deluge of Islamophobic discourse that followed his victory is a stark reminder that the struggle for inclusion is not merely about electoral outcomes, but about transforming the very social imaginaries that structure who is allowed to belong.