In a campaign mailer designed by a PAC supporting disgraced former New York governor and current mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo, Queens assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s image appears with his beard digitally altered to look longer, fuller, and darker. This manipulation invokes tired Islamophobic tropes that cast bearded brown Muslim men as dangerous, violent, and in Mamdani’s case, unfit for public office. While the mailer was never distributed by Cuomo’s camp, the image leaked online. Mamdani responded to the image by calling it what it was: Islamophobic and “meant to make me look threatening.”
Moreover, the manipulated beard image is a part of a long-standing tradition in American politics: altering minoritized candidates’ physical features to further racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic tropes, and cast them as inherently other. Cuomo’s camp condemned the altered image, but this smear was not an isolated incident: it was part of a broader pattern. As Mamdani’s campaign has surged in the final days before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary—which ends Tuesday—he has faced a wave of coded and overt attacks. Cuomo has warned voters that to elect Mamdani would be “reckless and dangerous.” Mamdani has also received multiple death threats replete with Islamophobic language, calling him “a terrorist who is not welcome in New York or America.”
These attacks are not just about politics. They are also about identity. Mamdani, a Twelver Shia Muslim, African-born immigrant, and democratic socialist, represents a challenge to entrenched racial, religious, and political hierarchies. As with other progressive politicians of color, from Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the backlash against him reveals the limits of establishment tolerance for candidates who refuse to conform.
On these terms, Mamdani, who has rapidly emerged as Cuomo’s chief rival, is threatening. As a democratic socialist, his values threaten the status quo of Democratic establishment politics. His campaign has mobilized a grassroots coalition around a progressive platform: rent freezes, free public transportation, universal childcare, and city-run grocery stores. These proposals respond directly to the concerns of middle- and working-class New Yorkers struggling to get by, in a city increasingly unaffordable to them. And his momentum is real. Polls show him closing in on Cuomo, with some placing him in the lead.
In other words, Mamdani’s platform speaks to many New Yorkers. He has secured high-profile progressive endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the New York Working Families Party. To dismiss Mamdani’s growing popularity—built on a grassroots, multiethnic, and multifaith coalition—as misguided is to misunderstand the appeal of progressive politics to a new generation of New Yorkers.
The manipulated beard image is a part of a long-standing tradition in American politics: altering minoritized candidates’ physical features to further racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic tropes, and cast them as inherently other.
Mamdani’s personal story reflects a kind of New York City mythology: an outsider who finds belonging. A practicing Twelver Shia Muslim, he was born in Uganda to filmmaker Mira Nair, an Indian American Hindu, and Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, an Indian Ugandan Shia Muslim refugee. His background ties him to a little-known but significant diaspora: South Asians who settled in East Africa during British colonial rule, many of whom rose to the property-owning middle class, earning the resentment of native Ugandans. In 1972, this community was expelled by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, which led to generations of displacement; Mamdani’s father eventually moved back in the 1980s. Zohran Mamdani spent his early childhood in South Africa before moving to New York at age seven. A product of city public schools, a naturalized citizen since 2018, Mamdani is the first South Asian man, and the third Muslim, ever elected to the New York State Assembly. His campaign has been marked by its inclusivity and grassroots ethos, focusing especially on housing justice for low-income families.
Yet Mamdani is polarizing. His vocal criticism of Indian and Israeli Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has called “war criminals,” has alienated segments of Hindu and Jewish voters. So has his unwillingness to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” which he has never used himself but has nevertheless become the subject of headlines. Mamdani interprets the phrase as “equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He is also not performing well among older African American or Latino New Yorkers, who tend to identify with more establishment Democrats.
But among younger, college-educated, progressive voters of all backgrounds, especially under the age of forty-five, his support is strong. For many, Mamdani is more than a candidate, he is a symbol of political possibility. A volunteer from his campaign, a 41-year-old Muslim woman from Queens, who preferred to remain anonymous due to fears of Islamophobic online harassment, described his campaign as electric. “The energy is infectious and the solidarity and camaraderie I’ve found with other volunteers is truly incredible. It feels like a movement,” she told me. “He doesn’t single out Muslims—his plans are for all underserved, marginalized people of our city and that is really important to me.”
Mamdani’s candidacy as a Twelver Shia Muslim has also created a rare moment of intra-Muslim unity. The majority of the global Muslim population is Sunni, with Shia Muslims making up 10-13 percent, concentrated in Iran, Pakistan, India, and Iraq. In the United States, Shia Muslims are a minority within a minority. Yet Mamdani has drawn support from Muslims across sectarian lines, defying often-overlooked internal tensions. Prominent Sunni leader Khalid Latif, the chaplain of New York University and director of its Islamic center, has publicly supported and voted for him. This cross-sectarian solidarity stands as a powerful rebuttal to the narrative that Muslim communities are inherently divided or incapable of unified political engagement. Mamdani’s campaign, by contrast, has become a site of Muslim communal unity, where support is grounded in shared values and a collective vision for justice rather than sect-based.
If elected, Mamdani would be the city’s first Muslim, immigrant, South Asian, or African-born mayor—a historic milestone largely overlooked by corporate media. In fact, instead of recognition, his candidacy has been met with rebuke. In a telling display of bipartisan hostility, the conservative New York Post denounced him as “a uniquely awful menace, an utter guarantee of disaster for New York,” while The New York Times, reversing its decision to refrain from endorsements in this race, declared Mamdani “uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” The Times pointed to his progressive policies and lack of experience.
Beyond the fact that the warnings against Mamdani issued by corporate media do not resonate with his supporters, the attacks rely on a deep well of Islamophobic and racialized imagery: the threatening bearded Muslim man, the outsider, the dangerous radical. Indeed, Mamdani’s faith and ethnicity have become easy targets for coded insults. At the final mayoral debate held on June 12, Cuomo repeatedly mispronounced his opponent’s name, a familiar racialized slight for immigrants and people of color. Despite Cuomo’s defensive insistence that he was not “intentionally” doing it, mispronunciation isn’t neutral. It sends the message, “You don’t belong here.” It is a common microaggression: a subtle, if sometimes unintentional, form of discrimination, reinforcing exclusion.
Even beyond New York, Mamdani has attracted national Islamophobia. Florida representative Randy Fine recently posted on X, “Zohran Mamdani would do to New York City what Khomeini and Khamenei did to Tehran. We cannot let radical Muslims turn America into a Shiite caliphate.” The statement, absurd on its face, reinforces a deeply rooted American anxiety that Muslim political participation equals subversion. A more subtle example of anti-Shia sentiment is when an otherwise informative article describes Mamdani as being “discreet about his Shia Muslim identity,” even as it acknowledges how openly he identifies as being Muslim. This implicitly suggests that his Shia identity is something hidden, playing into sectarian tropes that portray Shia Muslims as duplicitous. And it is a fear that crosses state and party lines.
The escalating attacks against Mamdani as a Muslim and a democratic socialist expose a broader pattern of racialized tactics, used by the Democratic Party to marginalize insurgent progressive candidates. Young, progressive politicians of color like Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush have often encountered their fiercest opposition not from Republicans but from fellow Democrats. They have all faced smear campaigns and racialized double standards aimed at undermining the power of insurgent, intersectional, grassroots movements.
The Islamophobic tactics used against Mamdani are not new, but their function is specific: they serve as a gatekeeping mechanism, policing who gets to be seen as a serious candidate. Candidates like Mamdani, who bring immigrant, Muslim, and socialist identities to bear on their campaigns, are framed as too risky, too inexperienced, or too radical—even when their platforms reflect the material needs of the majority.
What these attacks reveal is not merely a fear of Mamdani, but a broader fear of what he represents: a city, and perhaps a country, in transition. In New York City, approximately 70 percent of the population identify as people of color, and a significant proportion are immigrants or children of immigrants. Politically, these younger generations lean left, supporting progressive policies on housing, climate, labor, and policing. Nationally, the picture is more complicated: the enduring strength of the Trump coalition indicates the deep roots of conservative politics across the country, and across ethnicities. But the rise of figures like Mamdani signals that the organizing power and future direction of urban politics are being shaped by a more diverse and progressive generation. The country may not be uniformly shifting left, but the ground is undeniably moving.
Mamdani’s campaign is powered by a multiethnic generation of New Yorkers who are politically engaged and ready for change. They are not primarily drawn to his identity but to his platform. Monica Rahman, a 28-year-old Bangladeshi Muslim in Queens who canvassed for his 2020 Assembly campaign, said of her experience: “I saw a coming together, not just of the hopeful South Asian Muslims looking for change in New York, but of a community coming together based on common values and dreams for the city … a community that saw Muslims as an extension of New York City rather than a threat to its integrity.” For supporters like her, Mamdani’s background may be meaningful, but it is his coalition-building and commitment to affordability and equity that resonate.
Ultimately, the Islamophobic attacks against Mamdani are a sign of his growing political power. The smears, distortions, and microaggressions are not just tools of repression, but also markers of recognition. They expose the discomfort of establishment figures and media voices who feel threatened by a movement that has galvanized young, diverse, left-leaning voters, not just in New York City but across the country. They mean that Mamdani is being taken seriously, and that he is feared. And whether or not he wins on June 24, the fear of a bearded Shia Muslim socialist leading the largest city in America is a testament to the threat he poses to entrenched power. A Muslim menace, indeed.