Twenty-five years after Muslim terrorists killed 2,800 people in New York City on September 11, 2001, a self-identified Muslim has, for the first time in that city’s history, become mayor.
What is the significance of this, and what does it really tell us?
On January 1, 2026, Zohran Mamdani — 35 years old, born in Uganda to Indian parents, Shia Muslim, former housing counselor and rapper (“Young Cardamom”), self-described democratic socialist — was sworn in as mayor of New York City. He has been described by many, including the President of the United States, as a “100% Communist Lunatic.”
Others accuse him of being a closet Muslim radical working to subvert New York to Islam. Their concerns are not unwarranted (not least since Shia Islam is notorious for internalizing taqiyya, a doctrine that promotes dissembling).
For starters, Mamdani has associated with controversial and radical figures, including commentator Hasan Piker, who once said “America deserved 9/11.”
Then there was Mamdani’s October 2025 visit to the Brooklyn mosque of Imam Siraj Wahhaj. He posted a smiling, arm-in-arm photo and called Wahhaj “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community...”
That said, this “pillar” was also named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and testified as a character witness for the unsavory “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman. In earlier sermons, Wahhaj spoke of “jihad” against “the American government,” and urged Muslims to oppose it “by any means necessary.” He was earlier tied to the Nation of Islam and engaged in rhetoric about establishing an Islamic state in the United States.
Mamdani has also cited Imam Talib Abdul-Rashid as a mentor who helped “him to integrate his faith with his political vocation” (a rather revealing formulation). This same Abdul-Rashid defended individuals convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, such Sami Al-Arian, whom he framed as political prisoners. He described America as “a land ruled by non-Muslims, according to public laws based on other than the Sharia.”
This is significant. In Arabic, the phrase “laws based on other than the Sharia” (الحكم بغير الشريعة) is formulaic among diehard Islamists and “radicals” who seek to install Sharia wherever they live. Put in context, then, Mamdani — who now, as mayor, swears to uphold the Constitution — was mentored by an open Islamist dedicated to supplanting the Constitution with Sharia.
Then there is Mamdani’s governing philosophy. Recently he declared: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”
This is totalitarianism 1.0—the modus operandi of both communism and Sharia.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence places all human actions under five categories — obligatory, recommended, permissible, disliked, and forbidden. From theology to inheritance law to dietary habits to which fruits one may consume (Ibn Hanbal, founder of one of Sunni Islam’s schools of law, famously obsessed over such minutiae including whether it is permissible to eat watermelons)—nothing lies outside Sharia’s jurisprudence.
Totalitarian instincts can rhyme, even when the ideologies—communism vs Islam—differ.
Or consider Mamdani’s symbolic gestures. In 2020, he gave the middle finger to Christopher Columbus — condemning Western history while ignoring the enormities of Islamic history. He denounces the civilization that took him in and elevated him, while giving a pass to his own civilization, which his family abandoned for a better life.
More revealing still was a recent speech invoking the hijra — Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina. Mamdani said:
I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration. The story of the hijra reminds us that the Prophet Muhammad — sala allahi alihi we salim — was a stranger too…
He cited Koran 16:41–42 about those who emigrated “in the cause of Allah” without context, implying that the passage was advocating for openness and inclusivity for the “stranger.”
In fact, Muhammad was not “persecuted” for wanting peaceful coexistence. He was challenging and seeking to overturn Mecca’s religious and political order. Hence they drove him out—without killing him, which they could have easily done. He migrated to and was welcomed in Medina — including by Jewish tribes. He quickly became supreme ruler, ended up executing hundreds of men of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza, and launched raids — jihads — subduing most of Arabia, including Mecca, whence he was driven out less than a decade earlier.
Hijra is not a parable of pluralism. It was — and is— strategic relocation, consolidation, and eventual domination.
Hijra traces back to and has an important role in Islamic jurisprudence, which divides the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb — the abode of Islam and the abode of war. Voluntary emigration to non-Muslim lands (the abode of war) was and is forbidden Muslims — except if done as a form of “jihad,” for example, to help subvert infidel territories to the rule of Islam.
Modern clerics regularly portray migration as a form of demographic jihad. Yusuf al-Qaradawi famously said, “Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor after being expelled from it twice [from Spain and the Balkans] … [T]he conquest this time will not be by the sword but by preaching and ideology.”
Either it is still profoundly ignorant of what Islamic scripture and Sharia actually teach — and this, after centuries of global jihad and documented jurisprudence — or it knows but is too apathetic to act.
Either/or, these are symptoms of a civilization in terminal decline.
More explicitly, in 2015, at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Muhammad Ayed addressed migrants during Europe’s refugee crisis. He openly framed their migration— their hijra to Europe — as a path to demographic and ideological conquest:
No force is more powerful than the human force of us Muslims. Oh Muslims, the Germans say, in their economic reports, that they need 50,000 young workers. Now, they have got 20,000, and they want another 30,000 and more, to work in their factories… They have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in our midst. We will give them fertility! We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries. Whether you like it or not, oh Germans, oh Americans, oh French, Oh Italians, and all those like you. Take the refugees! We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming Caliphate. We will say to you: “These are our sons. Send them or we will send our armies to you!”
Finally, consider the words of Fr. Daniel Byantoro, a Muslim convert to Christianity, on the ramifications of Islam’s unchecked entry into what was once a non-Muslim but today is the largest Muslim nation:
For thousands of years my country (Indonesia) was a Hindu Buddhist kingdom. The last Hindu king was kind enough to give a tax exempt property for the first Muslim missionary to live and to preach his religion. Slowly the followers of the new religion were growing, and after they became so strong the kingdom was attacked, those who refused to become Muslims had to flee for their life… Slowly from the Hindu Buddhist Kingdom, Indonesia became the largest Islamic country in the world. If there is any lesson to be learnt by Americans at all, the history of my country is worth pondering upon. We are not hate mongering, bigoted people; rather, we are freedom loving, democracy loving and human loving people. We just don’t want this freedom and democracy to be taken away from us by our ignorance and misguided “political correctness”, and the pretension of tolerance. (Facing Islam by Ralph Sidway, endorsement section).
As if all this was not problematic enough, now let us turn to Mamdani’s oath.
bxyx He was sworn in as mayor on multiple Korans — including a historic Ottoman-era copy and family heirlooms. He joins other Muslim politicians like Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib in swearing public oaths on Islam’s holy book.
But here lies the irony: The Koran repeatedly instructs believers not to take non-Muslims as friends and allies (3:28; 4:89; 4:144; 5:54) — “even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin” (58:22).
Nor is it enough to reject and wage jihad on non-Muslims (Koran 9:5, 9:29); the Koran calls on Muslims to hate all non-Muslims: “We renounce you. Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us — until you believe in Allah alone.” This, the Koran preaches, is an “excellent example” for all Muslims to follow (60:4).
So, what does it mean when a Muslim man, who was mentored and is befriended by “radicals,” swears allegiance to a constitutional order that rules with laws “other than Sharia”—and he does it all by placing his hand on a book that calls for the subjugation and destruction of that very order?
What could possibly go wrong?
Still, the deeper issue is not Mamdani and his ilk. It is the West itself.