Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Madmani delivered a speach on Saturday from a Bronx mosque to explain to voters how the World Trade Center attacks had made New York unsafe for Muslims. Madmani recounted personal stories about being questioned at airports and mocked by political rivals, using the attacks of 9/11 as a backdrop to frame Muslims as the city’s most maligned group. “I will always remember the disdain that I faced, the way that my name could immediately become Muhammad,” Madmani said, suggesting that his faith continues to make him a target in post-9/11 New York.
Madmani’s address repeatedly tied his mayoral campaign to religious identity, invoking his “aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11th” and claiming that political opponents have compared him to terrorists. He accused former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and current Mayor Eric Adams of Islamophobia, saying, “Andrew Cuomo laughed and agreed when a radio host said that I would cheer another 9/11.” His speech painted the city’s politics as defined by “bipartisan Islamophobia.”
“To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity,” he declared, before accusing elected officials of selling “t-shirts calling for my deportation.”
Madmani also urged Muslims to stand up to the alleged Islamophobia: “One can incite violence against our mosques and know that condemnation will never come. More than 1 million Muslims in this city existing all while being made to feel as if we are guests in our own home. No more. Will we continue to accept a narrow definition of what it means to be a New Yorker that makes smaller every day the number of those guaranteed a life of dignity? Will we remain in the shadows or will we together step into the light?”
He concluded with a pledge to lead that shift: “There are 12 days remaining until election day. I will be a Muslim man in New York City. Each of those 12 days and every day that follows after that. I will not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I am proud to call my own. But there is one thing that I will change. I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”