London and New York’s Muslim Mayors: Hope for Many - The Right’s Fixation
Obvious, if superficial, parallels can be drawn between Zohran Mamdani and Sadiq Khan: both are mayors of some of the most influential cities in the world and are left-leaning in their outlook, but it is their Islamic faith that seems to most grip the minds of the global right. Sadiq Khan makes himself known as the son of a Pakistani bus driver. Mamdani takes pride in being an immigrant himself, born in Uganda to Indian Muslim parents. Their Muslim and immigrant backgrounds have positioned these men as representative of all that is wrong with urban multiculturalism in the far-right imagination. Why is this the case? And why the global obsession, among the right as a threat, and among the left as a hope, with these mayors?
Whether Leftists or Islamists - Always a Threat
Mamdani’s and Khan’s policies have strong parallels. Both have proposed rent controls. Mamdani wants a $30 an hour minimum wage, while Khan wants a voluntary London living wage of £14.80 an hour. Mamdani wants to introduce a 2% levy on earnings above $1 million a year, while Khan is seeking similar cash-raising powers. Both Khan and Mamdani have expressed pride in their Muslim and immigrant background, and pride in the diversity of their cities. London and New York are both significantly religiously and ethnically diverse. In the 2021 census of London, 15% of its residents identified as Muslim. In New York, a survey found that 6% of the city belonged to a mosque, with a Jewish community nearly double the size.
via Wikimedia Commons.
In Khan’s London, there has been an enacted commitment to multiculturalism. Muslims have held iftar (the meal breaking the Ramadan fast) at the heart of London, evocatively multicultural under the Lions of Trafalgar. Khan chose to be inaugurated in 2016 in a Christian cathedral, and has marched in official pride parades and has consistently voted for same-sex marriage.
Mamdani’s election campaign was similarly defined by an explicit commitment to multicultural politics—implicit against the politics of the White House. His viral Instagram videos featured Arabic, Yiddish, Spanish, and Hindi. Mamdani’s election victory rally on Wednesday expressed solidarity with immigrants, the trans community, and the many black women fired from federal jobs. Mandani outlined his vision of New York, thanking “those so often forgotten”: “I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”
(Wikimedia Commons: Mamdani at the Taxi Workers Alliance Rally, New York City Hall)
Mamdani, in his victorious November mayoral race, joins Khan among the small ranks of successful Muslim candidates who have won against vitriolic Islamophobic campaigns in some of the West's largest cities. In the far-right space, Khan and Mamdani’s immutable and innate Muslimness means that, by extension of their victory, far-right commentators have felt emboldened to suggest that London and New York are to become Caliphate cities, governed by shariah Law, where whiteness and Christianity will make you suspect. Their opponents have tried to depict them as aligning with the far-right rendition of the Muslim - as dangerously dark, with backwards views towards women. In the recent campaign, Andrew Cuomo’s team intentionally darkened Mamdani’s beard in their campaign flier, a widely recognised Islamophobic trope. This is part of a wider pattern of Islamophobia.
Both Mamdani and Khan have come under sustained accusations of anti-semitism, with Donald Trump tweeting on Truth Social that “Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self-professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!”. Unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X that under Mamdani, “there will be another 9/11 in NYC”. New York City council member Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”.
“Mamdani, in his victorious November mayoral race, joins Khan among the small ranks of successful Muslim candidates who have won against vitriolic Islamophobic campaigns in some of the West's largest cities.”
Cuomo’s campaign against Mamdani drew from a developed playbook of Islamophobic tactics. In the London mayoral race of 2016, the Conservative rival to Khan, Zac Goldsmith, was accused of “pursuing arguably the dirtiest campaign in British politics”. Tamils, Hindus, and Sikhs were sent letters warning that their jewellery was unsafe—a manipulation of Khan’s Muslim identity playing into Islamophobic politics from the Indian sub-continent. Goldsmith claimed in an article that Khan represents a party that “thinks terrorists are its friends”, alongside evocative photos of a London bus blown up during the 7/7 terror attacks. Michael Gove, then cabinet minister, described as the architect of the contemporary anti-Muslim nationalist wave, suggested that Khan would implement shariah law if elected. MP for Coventry, Zarah Sultana, has also written of being “subjected to a barrage of hate”, a layering misogyny to these established Islamophobia attack patterns.
(Wikimedia Commons, Sadiq Khan at the 2019 Eid Trafalgar Square celebration)
The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, in 2015, fantasised in his book Submission of the takeover of Paris by a Socialist Islamist coalition. The fascination with Houellebecq in far-right circles is suggestive; Houellebecq seems to speak to a sense of compounding and magnifying civilisational, political (and sexual) threat that the right envisioned in a left-wing-Muslim coalition. To explain the demonisation of both Khan and Mamdani, their dual identities are significant: Khan is both Muslim and Labour, Mamdani is both Muslim and a Democratic Socialist. Khan identifies as a ‘son of a bus driver’—a statement of class. Mamdani’s democratic socialist beliefs were more prominent in his campaign than his faith. As imagined in Submission, it is the dual identity that is a threat.
‘Sadiq Khan’s no-go hellscape’: The Multicultural City
In the far-right imaginary, London and New York seem to occupy a similar conceptual space. Donald Trump, addressing the UN General Assembly, alleged that London is full of ‘stabbings, dirt, and filth. London wants ‘to go to Shariah law […] both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something isn’t done immediately’. The far-right has explicitly tied the two cities together. A Fox News host suggested that a New York under Mamdani would turn into London, implicitly tapping into the far-right discourse of London as overtaken by street crime and Muslim immigrants.
“Donald Trump, addressing the UN General Assembly, alleged that London is full of ‘stabbings, dirt, and filth. London wants ‘to go to Shariah law […] both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something isn’t done immediately’.”
The combination of London’s multicultural body politic, pride in diversity, and Muslim mayor has solidified its place in the far-right imaginary as a ‘malign, seditious entity, a cesspit of violence and vice’. The obsession with crime - from phone theft, to stabbings, to sexual violence by immigrants - is a racialised phenomenon. The prevalence of anti-immigrant discourse is bound up with this demonisation of multicultural urban spaces. Jonathan Liew suggests that ‘anti-urbanism’ has long been the ‘first-cousin of white supremacy’ - an ‘authentic’, traditional, and pastoral homelands against the city, a site of foreignness, depravity, dirt, crime, and chaos.
In discussing the imagining of the city, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor discuss the ‘corporate city states’ movement, or, according to Trump, “freedom cities” - a new and improved Silicon Valley. These cities are imagined alternatives to London and New York: capitalist, clean, corporate, white, and wealthy. The head of these far-fetched, ultra-libertarian movements are figures including Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan who champion an “exit”—the idea that those with the means should exit cities of citizenship, responsibilities, and tax and move into a space of ‘hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens’, new cities dictated solely by wealth, ‘protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots, and financed by cryptocurrencies’.
Wikimedia Commons: Palestine Rally London, 2024
With the ascent of far-right politicians to power across the Atlantic, this discourse has moved into mainstream politics, used to legitimise state violence against immigrants and asylum seekers. Trump’s deportation campaign has been deemed a war against an “invasion from within”—a war fought on the streets and homes of black and brown communities.
The Trump administration has committed itself to a cleansing of these spaces. Since coming into office, the Trump administration has deported nearly 200,000 people. Masked ICE officers have kidnapped people off the street, separated parents and children, and have detained immigrants in insanitary and ‘inhumane’ conditions—a campaign defined as much by its cruelty as its illegality. Last week, armed ICE guards dragged a daycare worker out of her facility. The cruelty of this campaign has been glorified and almost pornographically publicised through “ASMR” videos by the White House on X featuring the sound of the clanking chains of shackled immigrants. Nigel Farage’s promised deportation campaign- ‘Operation Restoring Justice’- is an echo of this stance, promising that Britain would leave the ECHR, disapply the refugee convention, and seek to deport 600,000 asylum seekers in Reform’s first five-year term. Trump and Jared Kushner’s plan to build a real estate ‘Riviera’ over the charred ruins of Gaza is envisioned as a city necessarily cleansed of its ‘problematic’ Muslim inhabitants.
In an era defined by crises, these tech elites seek to escape to new cities, or new nations, cleansed of poor, immigrant bodies. Mamdani and Khan’s politics are radical in the contemporary climate—reiterating that the solution is a commitment to the needy, the rights of immigrants, and, above all, a commitment to affordability. This is a vision that many of the tech and Wall Street elite reject; the Cuomo campaign received considerable backing from hedge funds and billionaires such as Bill Ackman. Nonetheless, Mamdani won the election.
“In an era defined by crises, these tech elites seek to escape to new cities, or new nations, cleansed of poor, immigrant bodies. Mamdani and Khan’s politics are radical in the contemporary climate…”
“To every New Yorker […] This city is your city and this democracy is yours too […] New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants—and as of tonight, led by an immigrant”, said Mamdani on the night of his victory. Equally radical in the anti-immigrant British media space is the worldview of Khan, as summarised, that ‘he can be a Londoner, a Brit, a Muslim, from immigrant parents, liberal in his politics, but religious in his beliefs’. Khan and Mamdani have both embraced a vision of multiculturalism, where their identity as Muslims can sit easily side-by-side with their stances as feminists, progressives, and queer allies.
Wikimedia Commons, Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park, 2024
It remains to be seen what governance under Mamdani will look like—both in terms of how successful he will be as a politician and whether an openly hostile president, who threatened to withdraw state funding for the city in the case of his election, will constrain Mamdani’s progressive project. For Khan, in his third term in office, his legacy will undoubtedly be mixed. When asked about warnings that the wealthy would leave New York if Mamdani won, Khan responded that he would “roll out a red carpet” and welcome them to London, indicative of a more centre-left approach to Mamdani.
Nonetheless, New York and London seem to be holdouts where progressive, pro-immigrant policies can lead to electoral success. In this political climate, where politics seems drenched in islamophobic and anti-immigrant dog whistle politics, no wonder Mamdani’s victory is a rare moment of joy for the Left.