The New York Cycle and the Emergence of Muslim America

On New Year’s 2026, Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as the first Muslim mayor of New York City. His sudden ascension surprised most. Virtually unheard of, his victory demonstrated the arrival of Muslims as a new factor in city politics and elevated Muslim presence nationally.

While his election seems unexpected to outsiders, the foundation for it has been laid over many years, mirroring the trajectory of past groups within New York’s evolving social fabric. This cycle offers both valuable lessons, but also presents real risks for Muslim Americans and the broader Western Muslim diaspora. As NYC history has shown, when new groups gain influence in America, they are often co-opted, neutralized, or absorbed, especially during periods of societal uncertainty and transition. Muslims are not immune to these forces. Thus by taking a history based approach, one can paint potential paths of secure growth in western societies such as the Big Apple.

The Cycle

In the late 1800s, the earliest group of my maternal family arrived in New York from what was then the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires. As with many Ashkenazi Jews, they settled into the tenements of the Lower East Side neighborhood. They bought buildings and rented rooms out to newly arrived family members from the old country and eventually moved into working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Over time, some started kosher businesses, while others became involved in the Jewish Labor Socialist Movement of the early 20th century. This was around the time Edward Smith-Green I, an ancestor of mine, arrived from British Guiana. An intellectual pan-Africanist, he settled in the African-American neighborhood of Harlem, becoming actively involved in the city’s black nationalist movement, and later served as secretary of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line.¹

Many residents of the city have stories similar to this as descendants of those who arrived in New York for opportunity and refuge. Sociologists have long described the recurring phenomenon as ethnic succession,² similar to that of Ibn Khaldun’s aṣabīyyah concept.³ The cyclical process through which new groups, starting at the margins of society, come into conflict with the dominant groups of the time. Then they gradually rise through persistence, organization, and demographic change, reshaping the political and cultural order.

The pattern has repeatedly appeared in New York City history. When predominantly Catholic Irish immigrants arrived in the mid-19th century, they were seen as undesirable by the city’s Anglo-Protestant elite. Over time, they gradually gained influence through accessible institutions like parishes, unions, and eventually the police and fire departments. Eventually, they became an essential part of the city’s political machine, Tammany Hall, turning it into a tool for Irish political control.

By the early 20th century, the city’s Protestant establishment and Irish middle class directed similar anxieties toward the new Eastern European Jewish and Italian arrivals. Italians were commonly portrayed as clannish or criminal, possibly more loyal to the Vatican than to the American Constitution. Eastern European Jews, unlike their more established German and Sephardic counterparts, were linked to radical labor movements, socialist politics, and a foreign Yiddish-speaking non-Christian religion. Both were seen as threats to the city’s moral and civic order, reflecting deeper fears that New York’s identity was shifting beyond the control of its older elites and being shaped by foreign, non-Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Over time, these conflicts gave way through persistent growth and eventual synthesis. Many Jewish New Yorkers transitioned from blue-collar trades to professional and small business ownership, while Italians, through Catholic parishes and civil institutions, followed paths similar to those once taken by the Irish. The election of Fiorello La Guardia in 1933 marked the culmination of this transformation. The son of an Italian Catholic father and a Sephardic Jewish mother, La Guardia embodied the merger of once-marginalized immigrant groups into a new urban coalition during the global economic Great Depression. As mayor, he led New York through crisis and became a vital New Deal ally to Franklin Roosevelt, channeling federal resources to rebuild the city and institutionalizing Jewish and Italian inclusion within its governing structure.

By the mid-20th century, Jewish and Italian Americans had moved from the sidelines to the center of New York and the national political order. Their experience followed a wider American pattern of political integration, followed by economic success, under the umbrella of a broader Jewish American and white racialized identities. Yiddish words like schmooze entered everyday speech, while bagels and pizza became staples of New York street cuisine. Yet with that acceptance came new tensions, especially for Jews. As many embraced the values of postwar liberalism, they faced the challenge of preserving religious and cultural distinctiveness amid accelerating liberal secularization and assimilation into whiteness.

New Arrivals

The passage of the 1965 Immigration Act brought a new wave of immigration into New York, this time from the global south, portions of whom were from majority Muslim countries. Many arrived as students, laborers, or refugees from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. They joined but remained separate from an existing population of African-American Muslims, whose presence dated back through the Nation of Islam and earlier Black Muslim movements. These new arrivals settled in neighborhoods that earlier generations of New Yorkers had left for the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, regenerating local economies and beginning the familiar cycle of immigrant ascent. Like earlier arrivals, they took up work as taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and small business owners, building livelihoods within the city’s working-class fabric. Yet this wave differed from its previous ones in that it was not a single ethnic bloc but a diverse grouping of South Asian, Arab, African American, West African, Balkan, and Central Asian communities. This diversity was unique, but also complicated the formation of a coherent political and religious identity.

By the 1990s, New York’s growing Muslim population began formalizing Islamic and civil life through the establishment of masajid and organizations such as Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), and various ethnic and cultural groups. While these institutions provided structure and greater visibility, they reflected the community’s ethnic divisions, with separate mosques and organizations often serving distinct linguistic or cultural groups, e.g., MUNA, run by Bengalis, and MAS, run by Arabs. Many masajid imported patterns of old-world “Uncle” organizing, frequently governed by an elder-led board, leading to internal rivalries and frequent splits over funding or leadership.

Growth was disrupted after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The strikes hit not only a symbol of American economic power but also the very heart of New York’s identity. The events unfolded in the same neighborhoods built by earlier immigrant generations and Irish and Italian accents can still be heard in the archival footage of 9/11 first responders. Muslim New Yorkers, many of whom were present and also victims of the event, found their loyalty questioned. Fear and suspicion spread through the community as they endured the force of state-sanctioned targeting, similar to what African American Muslims faced decades earlier in the mid-20th century. Federal agents infiltrated mosques, Imams were detained, and the NYPD launched an extensive surveillance campaign on MSAs and community centers. Some stopped attending the masjid altogether, fearing harassment or arrest.⁴ The result was a period of stagnation and retreat.

Despite setbacks, New York’s Muslim community continued to grow through steady immigration, reversions, and natural population increase. Muslim life became more visible in the city’s social and economic landscape. Yemeni-owned corner stores and halal carts became part of everyday street culture, replacing hot dog stands as new symbols of working-class New York. Within city institutions, Bengalis in particular began joining the NYPD,⁵ following similar paths once taken by Irish and Italian immigrants, though not without controversy, considering the department’s history of surveillance and debates about whether joining law enforcement outside of Dar-al-Islam is acceptable. Meanwhile, second-generation Muslims pursued traditional paths of upward mobility through higher education, professional careers, and municipal civil service, with many moving into Manhattan’s professional class from across the country and the world.

As the community’s presence grew, Democrats and liberal coalitions started courting Muslim voters as a new source of support. The key theme of the alliance was its focus on identity rather than religious values, emphasizing the cultural and ethnic ties of Muslim populations rather than a broader Islamic identity, so that liberal institutions could portray an embrace of American diversity.

The first clear demonstration of emerging Muslim political power came in Eric Adams’s 2021 Democratic primary victory. A former NYPD captain and Brooklyn Borough president, his campaign recognized the potential of the Muslim electorate and leaned on it during his run. This voting bloc was crucial in helping him secure a narrow victory over former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia in the 2021 Democratic primary. In return, Adams appointed Muslims to senior city positions, marking one of the first moments when the community’s political influence translated into real power inside City Hall.⁶

Another earthquake came in the wake of the Hamas October 7th attacks and the Israeli initiation of the Gaza genocide. New York emerged as a focal point of protest due to its centrality as a cultural and media hub. Marches, encampments, and student demonstrations filled streets and campuses. Muslims, now having a larger part of the city’s activist and civic fabric, became central to the pro-Palestinian and “uncommitted” movements that swept the country, creating a rallying point for Muslim collective organizing.

These mobilizations particularly unsettled the city’s organized Jewish community, many of which, throughout the 20th century, became deeply tied to New York’s economic, political, and cultural institutions. This process occurred at the same time as Zionism became a core part of Jewish identity, especially after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League increasingly shifted from a broad civil rights focus to one centered on defending the Israeli state, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This framing influenced how protests were portrayed in the media and policed. While the Jewish community is not monolithic, many hold influential roles in the city’s political, media, and business sectors, with some using their influence to advocate for a crackdown on student encampments and protests, framing them as threats to public safety.⁷

As the high-stakes 2024 presidential election approached and the destruction in Gaza continued, frustration grew. Many Muslims who had aligned with the Democratic establishment began to see its defense of Israel and refusal to demand a ceasefire as a moral betrayal. The rhetoric of liberal universalism, which was seen as a shared civic ideal, appeared hollow in the face of liberal indifference to mass slaughter.

Across New York and much of the Muslim diaspora, this moment seemed to have marked a turning point in the shattering of faith in the global and local philosophy that had promised equality while staying silent in the face of genocide.⁸ Kamala Harris proceeded to lose to Donald Trump under the weight of moral hypocrisy, establishment disillusionment, and an inflation-induced rupture of the American dream.

The Current Moment

Today, New York is straining under the weight of rising unaffordability and inequality. These are symptoms of the slow breakdown of the neoliberal consensus that had defined city governance for decades. Disillusionment with the political establishment and the democratic failure to defeat Donald Trump created space for new figures to emerge outside the traditional party machine and candidates who reflected the city’s shifting demographics and growing frustration with institutional sclerosis.

Zohran Mamdani, a Shia Muslim state assemblyman from the diverse neighborhood of Astoria, appeared from the vacuum. He grew from the world of progressive activism, one long affiliated with leftist and socialist movements that have often positioned themselves as political opponents to the economic and political order. These groups, such as the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have historically been more accommodating of engagement by Muslims, especially for millennials and Gen Z. However, these movements are usually secular in nature, viewing Islam primarily through an identity-based and spiritual lens. These spaces align with Muslim concerns on issues such as Palestine and inequality but often diverge sharply from orthodox Islamic ethics (akhlaq) in their approach to morality and social norms. Their ethical framework, shaped by Marxist and secular humanist thought, overly centers materialism and class as the overarching narrative of history while neglecting humanity’s tribalistic attributes and inherent fitrah. However, by being outside the mainstream, they have been able to speak more clearly in the language of popular discontent within a metropolitan society like New York.

Despite these philosophical issues, Mamdani seems to express a genuine desire to address the challenges facing New York. Like Fiorello La Guardia before him, he embodies the city’s ongoing demographic and political transformation, where once-marginalized groups rise to redefine the contours of power in a metropolis always in transition. However, transitions are often disruptive, and those who maintain existing orders fear losing control.

Within the city, Mamdani’s rise has sparked a wave of fear among parts of New York’s political elite and the national political elite, business leaders, cultural conservative communities, and organized Zionist Jewish groups. Some of the responses have come in the form of thinly veiled anti-Islamic and clash of civilizational rhetoric not seen since the immediate post-9/11 era, reflecting both cultural insecurity and fear of losing influence in a city whose population is demanding systemic change.

For much of the established Jewish community, this unease stems partly from a broader sense of decline and vulnerability. Once comprising nearly 30 percent of the city’s population, Jews now make up roughly 12 percent,⁹ only slightly more than the city’s growing Muslim population.¹⁰ New York’s Jewish community is far from monolithic, encompassing liberal/progressive secular Jews, Orthodox, and households across the economic spectrum. Yet many of the institutions and values that marked Jewish ascent in 20th-century academia, finance, media, liberalism, and Zionism are now perceived as waning in influence and legitimacy. Publications such as The Atlantic have described this moment as the End of the American Jewish golden age, capturing a deep unease about the erosion of cultural centrality.¹¹

Among conservative New Yorkers, like those descended from Irish-Italian Catholics, the fear is more cultural than institutional. Over generations, these groups assimilated into the American mainstream and merged into the broader white conservative identity that emerged after World War II. Andrew Cuomo and Joe Biden reflect this postwar identity: Catholic and working-class in origin but aligned with the stability and norms of the old political machine.

Mamdani’s and Muslim ascent represent a rupture in this unspoken norm. As scholars such as Sherman Jackson have argued in his book Islam and the Blackamerican, assimilation in the United States has historically required not just adopting American norms but proximity to whiteness itself.¹² Unlike other immigrant groups (Irish, Italians, Jews) who could and did eventually become white or a white-adjacent model minority, Muslims, especially those who are practicing and visibly brown or black cannot be fully assimilated into a racialized and/or secular conception of Americanness. Mamdani’s victory therefore challenges the deeper assumptions of 20th-century liberalism, signaling a shift away from a political order that was nominally pluralistic but ultimately structured around white centrality.

For the corporate and financial elite, the threat is more structural. The collapse of the neoliberal order, rising inequality, and a public increasingly skeptical of market-centered orthodoxy have shaken confidence in their own permanence. To them, an anti-capitalist mayoralty represents not just a political risk but a potential reordering that questions the legitimacy of the very system that made New York the world’s financial capital.

Establishment forces are ready to defend their power by any means at their disposal. Corporate lobbies, real estate interests, and political operatives will challenge Mamdani’s executive orders in court, pressure the City Council to dilute or stall legislation, and lean on state legislators and the governor to block any meaningful reform. If it comes to it, powers will collude with those of the federal government and turn the city into an expanded version of the state crackdown on the Columbia University encampments.

Even if Mamdani manages to withstand the current and future barrage of political and media attacks, he will inherit a city beset by deep systemic and social crises—the same structural issues confronting nearly every global metropolis in the Western order, but magnified. It has long been trapped between capital-driven policy and liberal technocratic gradualism, an approach that privileges “expert” management and cautious reform over clear, decisive action. Beneath these governance problems lies a deeper moral one as well. Civic fragmentation is caused by hyper-individualism, commodified identity politics, and an overall erosion of shared public purpose.

It is too early to tell whether Mamdani will become a transformative figure or a more symbolic one. If the movement around him does not sustain its momentum, if it fails to confront the entrenched state and local political apparatus while avoiding the familiar pattern of leftist infighting, then at best Mamdani will become a more progressive version of Sadiq Khan or Bill de Blasio. Respectable, symbolic, but not revolutionary.

What Must Come Next

Whether or not these powers succeed in derailing reform, the political calculus of New York has already changed. The rise of new coalitions, in which Muslims have become a pillar constituency, signals a shift in how electoral power is built and maintained in the city.

This creates an opening for more deliberate Muslim coordination and long-term strategy. An opportunity to build or improve umbrella organizations like the Majlis Ash-Shura Council, as well as develop community foundations, lobbying groups, and think tanks that move beyond ethnic divisions, foster cooperation, and funnel resources to actions. These initiatives would require the redevelopment of traditional Islamic funding mechanisms, such as awqaf (Islamic endowments), which would sustain community institutions independent of short-term donor cycles or political patronage. Overall, efforts like this should assist in shaping an American Islamic-centered civic, religious, and cultural identity, one that is more secure and anchored than primarily ethnic and cultural identities that are vulnerable to American racial and ideological assimilation.

Organizationally, Muslim Americans should take inspiration from past Muslim American movements and historical Islamic organizing, such as adopting a communal independence ethos expressed by post-Hajj Malcolm X’s speeches, the civic structure of the early Muslim community in Medina under the Prophet (ﷺ), the Ottoman Millet system, and American Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, all of which seek to balance communal autonomy and participation in a diverse society.

When building coalitions with other New Yorkers struggling under the same pressures of inequality, housing unaffordability, and institutional neglect, Muslims can engage with Islamically grounded approaches to justice, social welfare, and community-building not only as local solutions but as a moral guide in the wake of a fragmented and exhausted order that has defined New York and elsewhere.

The Unknown Future

The history of the New York cycle warns of dangers ahead. When new groups enter and engage with the broader American system, they risk being co-opted, corrupted, or destroyed by that very system. Many of the Irish-Italian working class of the past became corrupted by Tammany Hall and then absorbed into American racial politics. Ashkenazi Jews were secularized and/or co-opted as arbiters of the liberal socioeconomic order and many embraced their own form of Jewish ethnonationalism. And the Black nationalist movements advocated by those like my great-great-grandfather, who sought to build an independent and revolutionary black identity, were systematically destroyed by the state and largely absorbed into the liberal Democratic establishment. Muslims are not immune to these same forces. Most immigrants came to America not to challenge its systems or give dawah but to benefit from the economic prosperity of the Western core.

It’s unknown what the future will look like, or what Muslims’ position within it will be. America and much of the world appear to be moving into a post-liberal, multipolar era marked by uncertainty and potential danger.¹³ Muslim Americans are now part of the same cycle as those who came before, including my own maternal ancestors who arrived in New York seeking refuge and opportunity in the new world. They played their role in the overarching American story, shaping the city while also being shaped by it. Their paths eventually converged during the civil rights movement, when my grandparents met at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee training in Brooklyn. In a way, this marked the completion of their group’s cycle that began in the 19th century. Only Allah knew that the next one would begin again, with their daughter taking her shahada at the end of the 20th.

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