Life was never the same for New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, with every resident coping with the trauma and devastation of that day. But for Muslim New Yorkers there was an added burden: the suspicion and sometimes physical harm now lurking around every corner. Vigilante violence against Arabs and Muslims exploded across the city and around the country. Mass arrests swept up Muslims on flimsy immigration pretexts, with many being held under extremely abusive conditions. The contemporary national security state was born atop the vestiges of Muslim civil rights.
Twenty-four years later, the situation in New York appears completely different. The country’s largest city is now poised to elect its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won the Democratic slot in the ranked-choice primary earlier this summer. What accounts for this profound change? The practically unstoppable rise of Mamdani can be explained by his oratorical gifts and political skills, but his success is also part of a larger story of how young Muslim New Yorkers have been organising themselves after the dangerous situations they faced after 9/11.
Spurred by the necessity to counter a rising tide of Islamophobia, young Muslim New Yorkers have spent years developing political power in the city, building local political institutions, and leaning into a different kind of politics that embraces identity yet moves beyond its sometimes shallow appeal. That movement has been growing quietly and steadily for years. Mamdani is now its best and most accomplished expression.
As the Muslims of New York have been organising, their numbers have also been steadily growing, making it impossible to ignore Muslim voters for anyone who wants to run for office and win. The city probably has about 1 million Muslims, roughly the same number as Jews in New York City. The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates more than 350,000 Muslim New Yorkers are registered to vote, though only about 12% voted in the 2021 mayoral election. That is now changing: Muslim and south Asian voter turnout in the mayoral primary this summer was up 60% compared with the 2021 primary, according to the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.
“People are looking at Zohran as being a very unique candidate, and he is,” said Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. “But his prominence in this election is built on the work of Muslims over the past decades, in the post-9/11 era.” That work began immediately after the 2001 attacks, with the government using federal immigration law to arrest anyone suspected of having a connection with terrorism, often meaning little more than being an immigrant and having a Muslim name. Hundreds were detained, and the justice department refused to release their names, leaving families scrambling to find those who had been effectively disappeared into jails around the country.
Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), recalled the moment. His organisation, he said, was doing “the work of finding people in jails, organising them on the inside, organising their families on the outside, and warning community leaders about working with the FBI and the NYPD”. Most efforts in the years after 2001 were often reacting to crises rather than building alternatives. The Bush administration began requiring all adult males from two dozen Muslim-majority countries to register with the government, and the FBI interviewed Muslim community members as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began.
