Some conservatives have attacked New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as a “radical Islamist.”
“He refused to say Hamas should disarm,” noted one writer at the Federalist. “He won’t condemn the extremist phrase ‘Globalize the Intifada.’ He seeks associations with Brooklyn imams who encourage jihad.”
On the other hand, he has also been critiqued as a hard-left sexual revolutionary, posting about “Queer liberation,” placing pro-transgender ads, and calling for taxpayer-funded surgeries to make transgender people look like the opposite sex.
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There’s a clash between these critiques: Is Mamdani going to impose Sharia law, or is he radically pro-gay and pro-transgender?
Many of his supporters have pointed out this contradiction.
It’s a fair critique by Mamdani’s critics. And the answer is explained, indirectly, by this excellent essay by Zineb Riboua. In short, you can understand Islam not as a religion so much as a marker of oppression. And in the post-colonial ideology that Riboua describes, that means everything.
Here’s a key passage:
“The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.”
“Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.”
Riboua directly addresses Islam at one point in her discussion of Mamdani’s post-colonial ideology:
“It transcends socialism, unmoored from class or ownership, and eludes Islamism, unbound by theocratic aims. Here, Islam serves as an emblem of subjugation with universal resonance, a faith recast as resistance and moral cohesion against Western dominance.”
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She doesn’t explicitly address gay or transgender matters, and she doesn’t use the word “intersectionality,” but you can see how that idea — that all oppression is one oppression, and thus all oppressed classes are one — is half a step from this American version of post-colonialism.
I don’t know Mamdani’s personal beliefs and faith, except that he obviously doesn’t believe in Sharia law. But I think you’ll better understand him if you assume that he wears Islam and embraces Muslims not as a deeply held religious belief, but as an emblem of oppression and a source of resistance against the powerful.