Zohran Mamdani — when being a 'good Muslim' isn't enough

Zohran Mamdani's political rise — and the backlash against it — exposes the limits of Western liberalism when confronted by a Muslim who refuses to conform.

Until a few years ago, the only Mamdani I knew was the Columbia University professor Mahmood. My introduction to Mahmood Mamdani was through his lectures and writings, primarily his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. In this widely acclaimed work, Mahmood critiques the reductive division of Muslims into “good” (pro-Western) and “bad” (religious), a framework rooted in colonial stereotypes and completely devoid of historical, political, and social context. He shows how the West weaponises this distinction — persecuting the “bad” Muslims it disapproves of while tokenising the “good” ones it accepts.

This is how Mahmood describes the binary Muslim identity as the West sees it: “Even the pages of the New York Times now include regular accounts distinguishing good from bad Muslims: good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernised, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, antimodern, and virulent.”

This binary isn’t just theoretical — it plays out in lived experiences, even among those considered “good” Muslims by the West’s own criteria. Mahmood, an Indian-born Ugandan citizen, is married to a Hindu filmmaker and teaches at an Ivy League institution. By Western standards, he fits the mould of a “good” Muslim. His son, Zohran, a secular democratic socialist married to an artist, is also a good Muslim — or so one would have thought until his recent political elevation. The virulence of the backlash against Zohran’s rise has been revealing.

In the ongoing New York mayoral elections, Zohran Mamdani has just secured the Democratic Party nomination. Despite this milestone (first Muslim nominee from a major political party), he has come under fire from within his own party, as well as from large sections of New York’s establishment and Jewish groups, for his position on Israel. His outspoken opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — which has, even by the most conservative estimates, claimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives, the majority of them women and children, and turned Gaza into a real-time Holocaust, unfolding before the world — has made him a target. His milquetoast insistence that occupied Palestine should not be a state exclusively for Jews, but a democratic one where Muslims, Christians, and Jews live together with equal rights, has been greeted with vitriol.

And this is the crux of the problem Mahmood Mamdani laid bare two decades ago: in the Western political imagination, a Muslim is only “good” so long as he does not challenge the imperial status quo. The moment he does — especially by criticising Israel — he is reclassified. The “good” Muslim becomes the “bad” Muslim, the tolerated becomes the threat.

Zohran Mamdani’s case is a textbook example. He is a secular, liberal politician, fluent in the language of American progressive politics, a champion of democracy and racial justice — the very kind of figure liberal institutions claim to uplift and celebrate. He has served as a New York State Assembly member since 2021, representing a diverse Queens district and advocating for housing rights, police accountability, and public transit reform. In other words, he has been a fixture of the city’s progressive politics — embraced, celebrated, and elected. And yet, the moment he dared to call Israeli actions in Gaza what they are — genocidal — the mask slipped and how! He has been accused of harbouring “Islamist” sympathies, of planning to “impose sharia law” in New York, of being un-American.

Some of the backlash has been vile. Supporters of Israeli genocide — or rather, of what they imply is its right to exterminate the indigenous Palestinians, have circulated doctored images of the Statue of Liberty wearing a niqab, warning that Zohran’s win is the beginning of an “Islamist takeover.” Online trolls and right-wing and left-wing columnists alike have accused him of being a Trojan horse for “radical Islam.” Fringe groups and even prominent pro-Israel lobbyists have labelled him a “security threat,” a “Qatari plant,” or a “Muslim Brotherhood sympathiser.” None of this is grounded in fact — but that’s precisely the point. In this political climate, facts matter less than perception, and perception is shaped by Islamophobic tropes weaponised for political expediency.

And what precisely is Zohran guilty of? Saying that Palestinians deserve to live. That democracy means equality. That genocide is not a justifiable instrument of foreign policy. Mind you, he even affirms the most sacred shibboleth of Western orthodoxy: Israel’s “right to exist” — which no nation-state is legally endowed with.

Yet, he is being vilified.

What we are witnessing is not an isolated incident but a systemic phenomenon. Mahmood Mamdani’s book predicted this with chilling precision. The so-called “good” Muslim — secular, assimilated, politically moderate — is only good as long as he is useful. The moment he threatens power, and especially when he says the truth about the Western sacred cow, Israel, the distinction collapses. He becomes just another Muslim to be feared, vilified, excluded.

This isn’t just Islamophobia. It is empire’s demand for loyalty, enforced through cultural binaries. American politics doesn’t simply reject “bad” Muslims — it constructs them. The test of “goodness” is never about values or conduct. It is about whether one upholds or challenges US imperial and genocidal Israeli interests.

For decades, but more so for the last two years, Gaza has been revealing the moral bankruptcy of the Western political class. In the face of unspeakable atrocities — hospitals bombed, children buried under rubble, journalists and aid workers deliberately targeted, civilians forced into famine, civilians herded into pens with the promise of aid before being gunned down — silence is complicity. And yet, those who dare to speak are the ones branded as dangerous.

Zohran Mamdani is not dangerous. What is dangerous is a political culture so beholden to the Israeli cult that it would rather silence one of its own than confront the truth. That culture rewards performative liberalism but punishes substantive justice. It applauds Muslims who mimic the values of empire but attacks those who challenge its crimes.

Mahmood Mamdani saw this coming. In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, he argued that the “good” Muslim archetype was never about Muslims at all. It was about power — who is allowed to speak, and who is expected to remain silent. Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy has made this academic insight brutally tangible.

And perhaps that is its most powerful contribution. It reveals that the real test for Muslims in the West is not whether they fit in — but whether they conform. Conform so well that they cheerlead genocide, even when it is of their co-religionists. When they don’t, no amount of liberalism can shield them from being turned, overnight, into the enemy, into a “bad” Muslim.

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