Zohran Mamdani Wins and It Is a Celebration of My New York
Mamdani will be New York City’s first Muslim, socialist mayor. But his victory does—and should—mean much more.
Eman Abdelhadi
When I was 21 and had just arrived in New York City, I could not believe everyone knew what halal meant, or that you could see bismillah etched onto food carts at every street corner, or that Egyptian vendors would blast DIY music from Cairo’s working-class corners into the streets of Midtown.
But the Halal carts were not an aberration.
Coming from mid-Missouri, where I was once asked if I “spoke Islamic,” I marveled at the Brooklyn mosques that played the adhan out loud, at the bearded uncles who read the Quran quietly under their breath on the subway, at my own ability to walk down the street in a hijab without turning a head.
New York was a revelation. An American city — it turns out — could be Muslim. And Jewish and Catholic and Christian and nothing-in-particular and atheist, too!
New York also nurtured me as a leftist. I had lived only in small Midwestern towns; the city unleashed my radical potential. It was there that I learned to organize in a union, to lead chants at a rally, to live in a protest camp. Struggle in the city taught me how to fight — usually alongside other leftist Muslims — for abortion, for Black lives, for immigrants, for Palestine, for a world worth living in.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory — a socialist, Muslim one — feels like a celebration of my New York.
It could not come soon enough.
It’s cliché to complain that the New York where I spent my 20s is no longer the New York of today. How many American writers have loved, left and lamented New York? Too many to count. But please, permit me a walk down this well-trodden path.
When I returned to my beloved Brooklyn in 2022 for a summer, sandwiches cost $15 and a studio in Bed-Stuy was $2,500 a month. The playground of the rich portion of the city had expanded into the places where I used to be able to feed myself on a grad student salary and my love of Caribbean food.
Everyone I know that has stayed is either lonely and isolated by the demands of more and more work to survive, or they’re facing catastrophic financial precarity. Or both. The rich are squeezing working-class New Yorkers of all races into the corners of the city, into impossible lives and implausible futures.
And then: Mamdani.
I remember seeing the campaign in its infancy on social media and through friends’ posts. I’ve become a poster child for left unity and optimism, but I admit I had my doubts. This sweet kid with his 1990s aesthetics, a former rapper, a one-time open anti-Zionist (we’ll come back to that) — what chance could he have against the Democratic machine?
Turns out, a big one. Mamdani is charismatic and smart and hardworking and principled, but those things would not have been enough if he did not have game changing movement support. His victory is the result of a working-class uprising. An uprising of the young and the tired, of the taxi drivers and the food delivery guys, of everyone who makes the city great, staking a claim to its future.
When we celebrate Zohran’s victory, we’re celebrating New York fighting to save itself.
As his campaign soared, he also faced criticism from the Left. Some have pointed out that his rhetoric on the police and on Palestine has softened, while others retort that his policies remain steady. I still believe in Mamdani, and I appreciate his critics.
Our role in the movement is not to elect progressives and then step back. There are no prophets and no heroes — not even our fresh-faced Mamdani. Our movements will keep having to fight across all fronts — through ballots and community meetings and protests.
New Yorkers will only win free buses, affordable housing and cheaper groceries — the campaign promises Mamdani ran on — if they keep the movement that elected him alive, if they keep him accountable to the masses. The people will have to serve as guard rails for their candidate, pulling him back as he faces inevitable courtship from capital and the Right.
Here in my second city — Chicago — I spent a recent weekend distributing signs for local businesses to bar ICE from entering after Mayor Brandon Johnson — a former organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union — issued a city-wide executive order banning them from city property. Since Johnson’s election, we have learned how difficult it is for a movement elected to fight a layered city machine built to protect the interests of power.
But as we have faced the onslaught of state violence from Trump and ICE, we have also seen that we are safer with progressives at the helm. To meet the moment, we have needed our rapid response teams and our mutual aid networks, but our progressive mayor and alderpeople have also been a crucial backbone as we defend our city. Electoral politics cannot be the sum of our aspirations, nor can they deliver much on their own.
But they do shape the terrain on which we wage struggle, especially as fascism continues to ascend.
I hope Mamdani’s win today signals more than the ascendance of this nation’s first Muslim, socialist mayor. One of many, inshallah. I hope it signals the end of an approach to politics that awaits pure candidates, pours all its energy into them before the election, abandons them once they’re in office and then condemns them when they disappoint.
I hope Mamdani’s victory signals our commitment to stay in struggle, our acknowledgement that there is more work to be done than can be accomplished with one election. I hope we continue to organize our friends and neighbors, to work with movement candidates — both supporting and criticizing them as necessary.
I hope that tonight we celebrate, and tomorrow we get back to work.
Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities. She is co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 – 2072.
