By Braham Singh
If you want to understand what’s happening with Islam, don’t look to Riyadh, Tehran, or Islamabad. Look to Queens.
Specifically, at Hizzoner Zohran Mamdani — routinely described online as an Islamic radical, a stealth Islamist, or in a particularly creative fusion of geopolitical anxieties, an Islamic socialist. It’s an impressive title, that last one. It also collapses under the slightest intellectual pressure.
The buzz around Mamdani is revealing — not about him, but something much larger: the possibility that American Islam is undergoing the kind of civilizational recalibration that a Post-Enlightenment Europe enforced on Christianity. And like any renaissance, it is messy, ironic, and deeply inconvenient for ideological purists from all sides.
The “Islamic radical” with a Hindu mother
Zohran Mamdani’s mother Mira Nair is an internationally celebrated filmmaker and a Punjabi Hindu. There is no evidence she converted to Islam on marrying Zohran’s father Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia.
Already then, we have a problem for the radical narrative. What we have instead is a Hindu mother, a Muslim father, and a childhood embedded in artistic and secular institutions. This is more an example of late-20th-century changes to the American social fabric than the origins story of an Islamist radical.
The Bohra complication
Mahmood Mamdani, Columbia University professor, Ugandan academic, and Zohran Mamdani’s father, is a Dawoodi Bohra Muslim — a community that comes from Gujarat, India. I lived amongst Dawoodi Bohras growing up, and my long-term business associate is one. He too has a Hindu wife, who remains a Hindu in spite of the marriage. The Bohras are a Shia mercantile community historically known for trade networks and education. They, along with the Parsis, built Bombay, where I grew up. If you were designing a Muslim subcommunity to incubate militant political Islam, you would not start with Bohra Muslims.
Enter the “Islamic socialist”
Mamdani is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. In the American rhetorical ecosystem, this instantly translates into “communist.” From there, the algorithm does what it does best: it merges anxieties. Muslim, in addition to being a socialist, equals Islamic communist, is the assumption. It is a label that manages to be internally contradictory and politically useful at the same time.
Classical Marxism is aggressively materialist and anti-religious. Political Islam is theologically grounded and morally prescriptive. The two are philosophically incompatible. Yet in online discourse they fuse into a single civilizational threat activating two American reflexes at once: Post-9/11 suspicion of Muslim political agency and Cold War suspicion of socialist economics. We get maximum outrage with minimal evidence.
The export of Hindutva hate
A fascinating layer of the Mamdani story is transnational. Much of the hostility directed at Mamdani in digital spaces does not originate in Brooklyn or America. It comes from the various Hindutva ecosystems — ideological networks aligned with Hindu nationalist politics in India working to mindscape the Indian diaspora.
In these spaces, Mamdani is not simply a New York politician. He is a Muslim critic of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mamdani becomes a symbolic continuation of the tiresome Hindu-Muslim conflict that consumes the Indian subcontinent. The Hindutva bots have co-opted him as an enemy in their ongoing war against a non-existent global Islamic-Libertarian alliance.
Hindutva hate is not the only example of the American system as a stage for imported culture wars. And yet the very fact that this fight happens through tweets rather than communal violence, is itself evidence of constitutional containment by the American system. The system absorbs the friction.
The wife problem
Mamdani’s wife is another inconvenient detail. A Syrian Muslim, Rama Duwaji is beautifully hip and thoroughly Western in dress and demeanor. She participates in civic life without visible markers of Islamic religiosity. Hardline critics claim Mamdani represents creeping Islamism. Yet the household structure looks indistinguishable from upper-middle-class urban America. If this is Islam, it is remarkably well assimilated.
America as a religious pressure chamber
As we learn from Post-Enlightenment Europe, religions modernize only when forced by external governance and constitutional constraint. Christianity would never have escaped the Dark Ages if Europe’s Enlightenment and state restructuring had not effectively disciplined it. The result was not extinction, but adaptation. Islam in many Muslim-majority countries remains entangled with state power. That entanglement inhibits reform. When theology becomes constitutional, dissent becomes treason.
In the United States, the First Amendment severs that fusion. Muslims here must operate within secular law, gender equality norms, electoral accountability, and competitive pluralism. We tend to focus on the ones who resist this by becoming insular. In the process we have missed counting the large number of American Muslims like Zohran Mamdani and my business associate, who are indistinguishable from the rest of America unless color is your thing.
The renaissance pattern
A renaissance requires intellectual freedom, institutional protection, and generational confidence. American Muslims increasingly own all three They are disproportionately educated. They occupy professional sectors. They litigate civil rights claims rather than demand parallel legal systems. They debate bioethics in hospital boards, not in underground clerical councils. They intermarry. They form hybrid identities. They contest policy through ballots. This is not Islam retreating. It is Islam recalibrating.
If Islam is to experience a sustained intellectual renaissance — one that harmonizes faith with secular governance, gender equality, and individual rights — it is unlikely to originate in regimes where clerics and state power remain fused. It is more likely to come about when faith is voluntary but private and firewalled from public institutions. In other words, America. We are currently witnessing Islam being processed by the most robust constitutional system in history. Unlike Europe and contrary to what White supremacists may say, America is a machine built to metabolize outsiders.
Zohran Mamdani may or may not become nationally significant. That is beside the point. What matters is that his biography — Hindu mother, Bohra Muslim father, Western-educated upbringing, Syrian Muslim wife, and integration into American civic life — is not an anomaly. It is a prototype. A prototype of what happens when Islam is immersed in constitutional modernity rather than insulated from it.
Assimilation under constraint is historically how religions mature. The American experiment has a way of imposing itself — not by force, but by structure. It disciplines religious ambition. It fragments absolutism. It rewards integration. If Islam is undergoing a renaissance, there will be no manifesto or fatwa announcing the fact. That change will emerge quietly — through interfaith households, constitutional campaigns, and the steady erosion of civilizational paranoia.
(Braham Singh is a leading figure and thought leader in telecoms and digital infrastructure. Having founded five companies, Braham is a technology buff having written several papers on sustainability and digital infrastructure. He is also a published author and his first novel “Bombay Swastika” was met with some critical acclaim. He is currently working on his upcoming novel, “The Middle Kingdom.”)