While chatting with a group of younger millennials after Mass at a Catholic church in Brooklyn recently, the topic of the upcoming New York City mayoral election came up. One young, devout mother, holding an infant in one arm and pushing a carriage with a toddler in the other, complained that her biggest issue with Zohran Mamdani, the election’s front-runner, was not that he was too left-leaning. Rather, she found that his platform for social reform, however well-intentioned, was short-sighted mainly because he has yet to have any children. She cited other progressive politicians who respected traditional moral and cultural values and organized economic policy around the needs of families with kids. She went as far as positing that Mamdani would do better with family-oriented voters like her if he leaned into his Islamic faith—which encourages child-bearing as well as traditional moral values.
Up until this point, Mamdani has treated being Muslim largely as a marker of his “identity” that is a byproduct of his cultural heritage. While this choice may reflect the fact that he is not a particularly religious person, it could also be a strategic move. The mere mention of his Muslim background sets off far-right pundits, who have sounded the alarm that he would impose Shari’a law onto New York City if elected mayor. Some have even taken to posting AI-generated memes of the Statue of Liberty dressed in niqab, as a warning of what is to come.
But while it’s strategically understandable that Mamdani wants to starve these bigots of material, I concur with my friend: he would be wiser to play up his religious background rather than to treat it as a mere accessory to his intersectional identity. In addition to appealing to religious New Yorkers who lean right of center, he would also show an engagement with the political and economic wisdom to be gleaned from his Islamic tradition.
Mamdani has made a name for himself with his dynamic campaign style, spending more time out in the streets among voters than his adversaries. While he has visited numerous universities and labor union meetings, he has visited comparably fewer houses of worship (he’s visited several mosques, just a handful of churches, and even a few synagogues). One way he can start courting religious voters would be to visit more religious institutions, vocally acknowledging the key role they play in upholding the city’s moral and social fabric. By doing so, he can open the door to religious communities—even those that have reservations about his progressive stances on social issues—to collaborate with him in his attempts to uphold the rights and dignity of everyday New Yorkers, whom these communities are dedicated to serving. Furthermore, he can affirm his commitment to protecting the right to religious freedom—namely, the right of faith-based institutions to adhere to their conscience—from being encroached upon by state and corporate power. He could, for example, offer solidarity to home-schooling Christians and to Orthodox Jews who enroll their children in yeshivas in perpetual conflict with government.
One way he can start courting religious voters would be to visit more religious institutions, vocally acknowledging the key role they play in upholding the city’s moral and social fabric.
To be sure, many of Mamdani’s positions on social issues contradict the moral teachings of Islam. Though he isn’t likely to conform his platform to those teachings, the fact that he has downplayed his past emphasis on “woke” identity politics and has chosen instead to focus on material issues is a step in the right direction. Furthermore, there is much to be said about the convergence between his progressive economic platform and Islamic ethical and social principles.
In his volume on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek challenges the demeaning conventional narrative that pits freedom-loving Americans against backward Islamic fundamentalists. Both, he argues, are two sides of the same coin of the globalization of neoliberal economic policy. The Wahabi movement, he argues, is less a traditionalist reversal of secularism and modernism than an impotent reaction to it, ultimately placing it in a symbiotic relationship with its alleged “enemy.” Furthermore, Wahabism’s non-traditional approach to Islamic jurisprudence renders it just as modern as the West’s idolatry of capital and individualism.
Žižek goes on to laud Islam’s “great and sublime” legacy, arguing that its absolutist form of monotheism and total opposition to idolatry makes it the religion most fit to forge an alternative to the “godless” neoliberal economic paradigm. Many have expressed reservations about the particular brand of wealth redistribution Mamdani is promising, and rightly so. But what if Mamdani’s program to resist corporate interests and redistribute wealth could be framed as a testing ground for Žižek’s dream of an “Islamized socialism”?
Right now, Mamdani’s platform does not show sufficient regard for the role of families or sufficient respect for certain moral norms, or for public safety, a major concern for countless parents. He naively risks putting too much faith in the state and downplaying the agency (and responsibility) of individuals, local communities, and civic organizations. These concerns help explain why religious figures like Dorothy Day and G.K. Chesterton, despite their esteem for social and economic progress, never endorsed the welfare state: putting too much of the onus on the state risks making an idol of it (and has adverse economic, moral, cultural, and social repercussions).
Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in 1933, once observed that many prefer “getting aid from the state … to taking aid from their family. It isn’t any too easy … to be chided by your family for being a failure…. They prefer the large bounty of the great, impersonal mother, the state.” And yet, Day insisted “no matter what people’s preferences, that we are our brother’s keeper … that we must have a sense of personal responsibility to take care of our own, and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice.”
This thinking makes me wonder about a synthesis of Islam, state regulation of the market, and empowerment of civic bodies—the kind that appears in Michel Houellebecq’s 2014 novel Submission, in which a moderate Muslim candidate, Muhammad Ben Abbes, is elected president of France. Ben Abbes’s platform is quite literally an Islamized version of the distributist economic policy advocated for by figures like Day, Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Pope Pius XI.
“The normal form of economic life” under Ben Abbes’s government, Houellebecq writes, “was to be the family business. If certain branches of production required large scale organization, then everything was to be done to ensure that the workers were co-owners of their company, and co-responsible for its management.” His policy was centered around the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “no association (whether social, economic or political) should have charge of a function that could be assigned to a smaller association.”
While neoconservatives and right-wing populists have taken up the values of faith, family, and local communities as their own, it is time for the left to find a way to synthesize their concerns with respect for these economically progressive values. While he may only be a fictional character, Ben Abbes’s nuanced merging of traditional Islamic values with progressive economic policy could provide Mamdani with the framework to forge such a new path for the left. Not only would this prove to be a more effective economic project, it could also win him over religious voters and voters with children—without whom New York would not be the vibrant city, full of hope and promise, that it is.