Waiting for Mamdani: The Inertia of Muslim Political Imagination

Muslim political engagement in North America has too often mistaken visibility for influence and inclusion for power. Representation has provided reassurance but failed to deliver strategy or leverage. What is needed now is a shift from symbolic participation to structural thinking: the creation of institutions able to articulate collective interests, cultivate political literacy, and translate faith into durable forms of civic influence.

I found myself lingering over a comment by a Muslim woman offering a heartfelt dua for Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York. She prayed that God bless his leadership with honesty, compassion, and justice. The words were tender, almost theatrical in their sincerity, the kind of reverent hope that surfaces when deeply disenfranchised people finally glimpse themselves in power. After years of marginalization, Muslims seemed to exhale together, relieved to see one of their own: eloquent, grinning, and unashamed of his faith, ascending a star spangled podium.

He will, undoubtedly, need those prayers.

Her reaction is entirely understandable for someone who has long sipped the sweet promise of representation whilst watching politics from the gallery and mistaking proximity for participation.

Then came the pièce de résistance: a prominent American scholar of Islamic mysticism posts an AI-generated vision of Zohran Mamdani as al-Khidr. In this digital revelation, Mamdani appears as a glowing mystical statesman in green flowing robes, with a radiant winged heart in his hands. The image distilled, with poetic clarity, the impulse that continues to shape Muslim political imagination: the habitual donning of sacralizing lenses that transform political contingencies into escapist idealization and emotional catharsis, leaving the community ill fated to interpret each election as prophecy or deliverance.

Political visibility is deceiving. It is an emotional substitute for the harder, long term, institutional work of building power. The sobering truth is that North American Muslims, for all their civic growth and professional achievement, have never forged a politically coherent community. There has been no long-term conversation about collective interests or strategy, only bursts of unity stitched together by emotion and spectacle. Politics, on the other hand, are guided by the enduring realities of power, interest, and circumstance. Representation may therefore console the many of the survival-minded elderly men hogging Mosque boards, but it rarely culminates in tangible influence or power.

A simple question exposes the depth of the void: where is the Muslim lobby? Not the polite civic councils that issue micro font sized press releases, pose for cliché interfaith photo opportunities or attend state banquets, but a disciplined policy institution, capable of shaping agendas, drafting legislation, and deploying capital and credibility when it matters. The absence of such a body is not a coincidence. It reflects a deeper crisis within Muslim institutions: a failure to grapple with the true nature of politics.

The Friday sermon is, by design, a forum for cultivating collective consciousness and addressing the moral and social challenges that confront the community. Yet it has been reduced to a narrow preoccupation with private virtue. Imams now speak at length about personal conduct and piety, but seldom address questions of governance, justice, or civic responsibility, as if the moral life could be sustained in isolation from the political one. The result has been a community politically underdeveloped but perpetually overexposed to the consequences of political life from zoning laws that determine where a mosque may stand, and surveillance programs that traumatize its worshippers, to foreign policies that pulverize their Muslim families abroad.

Attempts to bridge this gap exist but remain marginal. Yaqeen Institute’s Khutbah Toolkit on Civic Engagement offers imams a brief guideline to introduce civic literacy into their sermons. Yet such efforts remain isolated, and simplistic experiments. Most mosques, institutions, foundations, and student associations continue to operate as islands, unable to convert their social capital into political leverage. The public face of Muslim life in North America remains defined by annual conferences and charity galas that inspire but seldom mobilize or pursue measurable, long-term goals. The vitality seen in these gatherings testifies to a deep reservoir of faith and emotion, yet the absence of strategic institutions leaves that vitality without direction. Communities that fail to organize their sentiment into structure soon discover that goodwill alone cannot preserve their interests. The coming years will make this truth inescapably clear to North American Muslims, assuming that Gaza already has not.

Muslim political energy in the US remains tethered to the Democratic Party, a relationship built less on shared ideology than on relief from Republican hostility. The logic is simple: one side bombs your family abroad while systematically treating your faith like a disease at home; the other bombs them while hosting an iftar at the White House.

The Democratic Party’s complicity in the violence of the past half-century is a matter Muslim communities must reckon with each election cycle. Bill Clinton’s sanctions regime in Iraq murdered half a million children; Barack Obama institutionalized drone warfare and the extrajudicial killing of American citizens; Joe Biden funded the annihilation of Gaza while speaking of restraint and “shared values.” Each administration has refined the art of moral dissonance, mourning civilians by night and approving weapons shipments by dawn. The Republicans are less politically-correct about their cruelty, but the Democrats aestheticize it. 

For decades, the Democratic establishment has maintained a structural alliance with defense contractors, Wall Street financiers, and pro-Israel lobbies; an axis that ensures that humanitarian rhetoric never interferes with geopolitical interest. The party’s strategy is clear: preserve American primacy at all costs, project moral legitimacy, and manage the disgruntled at home through symbolic inclusion. Muslims, for their part, have played the role of the well-behaved minority neatly mobilized for turnout. 

Muslim political participation under this arrangement has become a ritual of self-consolation. Every election season, candidates praise diversity and promise accountability; every term, the machinery of the empire grinds on. The logic is imperial in both directions: just as American democracy exports war in the name of freedom, it imports docility in the name of inclusion. The subject learns to speak the language of his oppressor so fluently that he begins to believe in its sincerity. 

The symbolic ascent of the likes of Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Zohran Mamdani has been hailed as evidence of the Muslim American dream of inclusion. Yet the very system that elevates these individuals ensures that their defiance remains safely contained. Progressive dissent is allowed to exist only as proof of liberalism’s tolerance, never as a threat to its structure. Each new subversive is absorbed, disciplined, and rebranded.

This containment mechanism is not unique to Muslims. It is the operating logic of liberal modernity. Muslims, once skeptical of Western politics, now find themselves fully inducted into its rituals: the warmly welcomed representative in a local mosque, the symbolic endorsement and ultimately the cycle of outrage and reconciliation that begins anew every four years.

Meanwhile, the devastation of Gaza has stripped this choreography of its illusions. The United States, regardless of administration, remains directly involved in the slaughter of Palestinians as well as arming, financing, and diplomatically shielding Israel while preaching restraint. The same party that celebrates “the first Muslim congresswoman” votes to criminalize solidarity with Palestinians. The same White House that invokes empathy for Ukrainians denies it to the besieged Rafah. This is not hypocrisy; it is hierarchy. And Muslims who continue to believe that access equals influence are deeply deluded.

In moments of political visibility, Muslims often find themselves caught in what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism—the attachment to an object that promises repair yet reproduces harm. The longing for representation, whether through figures like Mamdani or the imagined return of Islamic authority, serves as a psychic defense against collective loss. It allows a community to sustain continuity amid fragmentation, to believe that symbolic victories can substitute for structural transformation. Yet this narrativizing does more harm than healing. By clinging to images of empowerment that bear little relation to political reality, Muslims remain trapped in rehearsals of a world that does not exist and investing emotional energy in illusions of coherence rather than confronting the ruptures of the present.

Modern politics rewards participation while discouraging autonomy, welcoming inclusion only when it remains within the boundaries of existing structures. For Muslim communities, this creates a fundamental test of their willingness to test those bounds. The Islamic tradition emphasizes the inseparability of faith and action, yet contemporary participation often lacks the institutional means to give that principle real effect. Without organizations that can connect belief to governance, engagement risks becoming symbolic rather than substantive.

The priority now is institutional design. Muslim civic life requires an integrated network of academies, research centers, policy institutes, and strategic councils capable of producing expertise, policy, and informed diplomacy. These institutions should not replicate religious or humanitarian work but extend them into the realm of governance, negotiation, and strategic thought. Their purpose is to consolidate intellectual capital and convert it into political and diplomatic leverage. Mosque boards, foundations, and national organizations must evolve structurally to cultivate legal and policy competence as part of institutional self-definition. Sustainable influence depends on the ability to generate knowledge, align interests, and operate within coordinated national frameworks where standards of quality assurance and institutional indexing regulate performance. Only through such institutional maturity can Muslim communities move from reactive participation to strategic agency.

Political neutrality is at times viewed by Muslims as prudence, but in practice it leaves communities exposed to the laws and policies that shape education, taxation, surveillance, and religious freedom. Disengagement is therefore not a protective measure but a slow withdrawal from relevance and yielding to predation. The early Muslim community combined spiritual purpose with civic responsibility and treated institution-building as an extension of moral duty. The same principle applies today. Communities that do not organize their interests will find those interests defined by others.

The Islamic juristic maxim that “what cannot be fully attained should not be entirely abandoned” offers a framework for political realism that guides when ideal conditions for justice and governance are absent, to withdraw from politics until the landscape becomes favorable is not a strategy but a surrender of agency.

Recent voting patterns illustrate this shift in consciousness: in the United Kingdom, Muslim voters rallied behind the Green Party as a moral rebuke to mainstream complicity in Gaza’s devastation; across the Atlantic, Arab and Muslim Americans coalesced around Jill Stein as an act of political dissent. These are not victories in the conventional sense, but they represent a nascent political rationality that values leverage over loyalty.

Mamdani’s election, for all its symbolism, is a mirror. It reflects a community that has mastered the art of participation yet remains uncertain about the trade-offs that politics inevitably demands. Muslim leadership, however, has grown comfortable within a palateable pluralism that emphasises visibility over vision. Too many of our institutions have adjusted to the tempo of electoral politics, preferring the safety of recognition over the risk of reimagining their role. Often it seems as though their vocabulary of engagement has seemingly expanded and been enriched, but the horizon of strategy has not. What is celebrated as pragmatism is often an unwillingness to confront the structural dependencies that define Muslim political life, or to imagine a future not bound to the logic of voting for the lesser evil.

A recent CAIR report celebrated the election of 39 Muslim officials across the United States and pledged to “mobilize the American Muslim community to reach even greater heights of civic engagement in the 2026 midterm elections.” The achievement merits acknowledgement, yet it underscores the same paradox. Electoral participation may reflect growing civic confidence, or the trade-offs of candidates. In either case, without institutional mechanisms that align priorities and mobilize resources, its effects remain haphazard and short lived at best. Many of these candidates, moreover, are unlikely to have participated in politics with distinct Muslim interests as their guiding frameworks; their orientations are conditioned by party structures, electoral incentives and the imperatives of coalition politics. The optimism surrounding such reports thus reflects a civic momentum and the unfinished task of envisioning a robust institutional framework and diplomatic leadership capable of exercising sustained influence with the wealth of the community’s own civic and intellectual energy.

The question, then, is not whether Muslims should participate in politics, but what forms of political and civic infrastructure can sustain meaningful agency. Communities that achieved longevity did so not through proximity to power but through the slow construction of intellectual, financial, and cultural ecosystems that could endure political fluctuation. What we lack is not enthusiasm but an intergenerational political culture, one that can think in terms of decades, not campaigns, and translate moral energy into strategic power. Muslim institutions today remain largely reactive, operating without the imagination or coordination such a project requires. We need quality institutions guided by clear benchmarks, think tanks and networks that generate original policy, civic academies that teach governance as a vocation, and endowments—one of the greatest and untapped legacies of our tradition—to guarantee independence of mind, means, and direction. Muslim spaces must  evolve into schools of civic literacy and strategy, spaces where theology and social analysis inform one another. Without such infrastructures, participation will remain emotional and episodic, unable to mature into a coherent project of power.

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