From Minarets to City Hall: Zohran Mamdani, Islam, and the American Conscience against war

From Minarets to City Hall: Zohran Mamdani, Islam, and the American Conscience against war

by George Cassidy Payne

1259 words

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” —Frederick Douglass

America likes to tell its story as a procession of wars won and enemies defeated. But its deeper moral history, the one that actually bends toward justice, has been written by those who resisted domination: slavery, empire, and the dangerous fiction that violence is the engine of progress.

On a cold January afternoon outside City Hall, Zohran Mamdani stepped into that unfinished struggle. As he raised his right hand and took the oath of office as mayor of New York City—the first Muslim ever to do so—he embodied a quieter American tradition: the insistence that conscience belongs in public life.

The headlines captured the spectacle. But Mamdani’s inauguration matters less as pageantry than as moral signal. It arrives at the crossroads of a long American argument—about power and belonging, yes, but also about whether a nation repeatedly shaped by war can ever learn to govern itself through restraint.

That argument predates the republic itself.

When North Carolina debated ratifying the Constitution in 1788, Anti-Federalist William Lancaster warned that abolishing religious tests might allow Muslims to hold office. “Papists may occupy that chair,” he cautioned, “and Mahometans may take it.” What he framed as alarm now reads as reluctant foresight. Even then, Muslims were already here—not as lawmakers, but as the enslaved.

Between five and twenty percent of enslaved Africans were Muslim. Many were literate, ethically formed, and rooted in traditions emphasizing humility, charity, and accountability beyond the state. Their faith was criminalized and crushed, yet never fully erased. America’s earliest Muslims did not arrive as conquerors. They arrived as victims of one of history’s greatest crimes.

The founding generation lived with this contradiction. Thomas Jefferson studied the Qur’an and treated Islam as a serious intellectual tradition, even as he enslaved Muslims whose lives exposed the violence beneath the republic’s lofty claims. From the beginning, Islam in America illuminated the distance between professed ideals and practiced brutality.

That distance exploded into catastrophe in the nineteenth century.

The Civil War is often remembered as a cleansing fire, but it was, in truth, a failure multiplied; four years of mass death born from the nation’s refusal to end slavery without bloodshed. When Muslims appeared in Union ranks, their presence did not sanctify the war; it underscored its tragedy.

Mohammed Kahn served in the 43rd New York Infantry. Nicholas Said, born Mohammed Ali ben Said in what is now Nigeria, fought with the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment. Captain Moses Osman held a senior post in the 104th Illinois Infantry. These men, many from communities already scarred by empire and enslavement, were asked to risk their lives to resolve a moral crisis they did not create.

Their service stands as testimony not to war’s virtue, but to the terrible price paid when justice is deferred too long. The Civil War did not redeem America; it revealed what happens when conscience is postponed until violence becomes unavoidable.

Crucially, Islam’s influence on America’s moral awakening did not rest primarily in combat. It emerged through witness and words. Senator Charles Sumner quoted the Qur’an to condemn slavery, drawing on its moral authority to challenge dehumanization. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo—Job ben Solomon—had already unsettled the Atlantic world through literacy, faith, and dignity, his story republished during the war as a reminder that humanity survives even under extreme coercion. Abroad, Hussein Pasha of Tunisia urged the United States to abolish slavery “in the name of humanity,” showing that Muslim moral critique of American violence came not only from within, but from beyond its borders.

This pattern would repeat in the twentieth century.

Muhammad Ali did more than redefine athletic greatness; he forced America to confront its addiction to war. When he refused induction into Vietnam, he spoke with the clarity of conscience rather than ideology. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he said, cutting through propaganda to name the human cost of empire. For that refusal, he lost his title, his income, and years of his prime.

Ali’s Islam did not make him militant. It made him restrained. His faith grounded a rejection of domination and a commitment to human dignity that extended across borders. His humanitarian work, feeding millions, aiding orphans, advocating for children, embodied a belief shared by peace movements everywhere: that life is sacred, and violence must always answer to conscience.

Ali showed America that dissent can be an act of fidelity to humanity rather than power. That faith can interrupt war rather than bless it. That Islam belongs not at the margins of American life, but at its moral core.

It is against this lineage of conscience, rather than conquest, that Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration comes into focus.

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Indian parents—academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair—but his political formation is unmistakably American. After early years in Cape Town, his family settled in New York City when he was seven. He came of age here, educated in its public institutions, shaped by its contradictions and possibilities. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s most demanding civic academies, before earning a degree in Africana Studies from Bowdoin College in 2014.

This is not the biography of an outsider arriving at America’s gates. It is the story of an American citizen formed by American schools, American cities, and American struggles, one whose worldview reflects the global entanglements the United States itself helped create.

In his inaugural address, Mamdani thanked his parents—“Mama and Baba”—acknowledged family “from Kampala to Delhi,” and recalled taking his oath of citizenship on Pearl Street. The geography mattered, but so did the point: belonging is not erased by movement; it is deepened by participation.

When Mamdani declared, “New York belongs to all who live in it,” he rejected the logic that has long justified war: that difference must be governed through force. By naming mosques alongside churches, synagogues, temples, gurdwaras, and mandirs, he affirmed pluralism as a condition of peace, not a threat to it. By speaking of halal cart vendors, Palestinian New Yorkers, Black homeowners, and immigrant workers bound together by labor and survival, he articulated a civic vision rooted in coexistence rather than coercion.

He did not defend his Muslim identity. He normalized it. “Where else,” he asked, “could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?” The question was not rhetorical; it was diagnostic. This is what peace looks like when it becomes ordinary.

Mamdani will not be perfect, nor should he be. Democracy requires accountability, not mythmaking. But what matters is not merely that a Muslim now governs New York City. It is that an old assumption, that difference inevitably leads to conflict, has been publicly undone by someone unmistakably American.

The long Muslim thread in the American story runs from enslaved Africans to abolitionist witness, from the tragic costs of civil war to Muhammad Ali’s refusal of empire, and now to a mayor educated in American classrooms who speaks the language of shared belonging. It reminds us that Islam has not merely survived in America, it has persistently called America back from violence toward conscience.

The work, as Mamdani said, has only just begun. But the story his inauguration tells—that Muslims were present at the nation’s birth, suffered under its crimes, challenged its wars, shaped its moral imagination, and now govern its greatest city as Americans—is no longer abstract.

It stands, unmistakably, on the steps of City Hall.

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George Cassidy Payne, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Rochester-based writer whose work sits at the intersection of politics, ethics, and lived experience. A poet, philosopher, and 988 crisis counselor, he covers issues of democracy, justice, and community resilience.