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What will the future hold?
Just days before his historic victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani gave remarks outside the Islamic Cultural Center of The Bronx. He claimed that his aunt had stopped taking the subway after the September 11 attacks because she “did not feel safe in her hijab,” and he spoke of the “fear and humiliation” that she and other Muslim New Yorkers had been forced to endure in the years since. Soon afterward, critics observed that Mamdani’s only living aunt at the time resided in Tanzania and was not known to wear a hijab. Mamdani later clarified that he was referring to a distant, deceased cousin of his father’s, a woman named Zehra, whom he referred to as an “aunt” in accordance with cultural tradition.
Having grown up as a Muslim in Brooklyn, I can say that Mamdani’s bleak sense of Muslim life in that era of New York City does not ring true to me. What I remember most vividly from the aftermath of 9/11 were the displays of solidarity among New Yorkers and the many pronouncements from public officials decrying anti-Muslim hatred. Though civil libertarians objected to NYPD surveillance of Muslim houses of worship and other organizations in the years that followed, these measures by and large struck me as defensible, not least because they were grounded in a desire to understand Muslim communities and to protect them along with the rest of the city.
Nevertheless, Mamdani’s belief that modern America is rife with Islamophobia is ascendant among younger American Muslims. In conversations with Bangladeshi Americans a generation younger than myself, I’ve been surprised by how estranged from America many of them feel, and how natural and even ennobling that estrangement seems to them. One survey from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley found that 60 percent of Muslim respondents believe that Islamophobia in the United States is a very big problem, and that concern about Islamophobia was most acute among younger, female, and U.S.-born Muslims — the very Muslims most thoroughly incorporated into the American mainstream.
Notably, while Mamdani and other young American Muslims see Islamophobia as a pervasive threat, it does not appear to have stymied the rapid growth of the American Muslim population, which now stands at somewhere between 4 and 4.5 million, or close to triple its size in 2000. Though some of this growth can be attributed to the relative youth and fertility of America’s Muslim minority, its chief driver has been legal immigration. If current trends hold, Muslims are poised to surpass Jews as the nation’s second-largest religious group by 2040.
The question for policymakers is not whether American Muslims are a growing political force — that much is beyond dispute, as evidenced by the rise of Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and other stalwarts of the Democratic Left. It’s whether American institutions are thinking clearly about what that growth portends. The answer turns on two ideological tendencies within the American Muslim population that are distinct in their character, different in their dangers, and yet mutually reinforcing.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Sapir Journal
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Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X/Twitter here.