Real power in America is often built at dinner tables. That adage is particularly relevant to the past few years in New York City, where Muslims and non-Muslims have come together at Iftar and Eid events, marking the moment and reimagining traditions. In Chinatown lofts and Bushwick studios, Muslim artists and writers have gathered to pass around plates of papri chaat and basboosa. Some of these dinners have made the pages of Vogue and glowing New Yorker write-ups. The New York Times even described Eid morning prayers in Washington Square Park as the “Muslim Met Gala”.
At one Eid al-Fitr event in Bushwick last April, the guest list featured hosts Ramy Youssef, Hasan Minhaj and Zara Rahim, and guests such as Kareem Rahma, Rashid Khalidi, Cynthia Nixon and David Byrne, among others. After dinner, Zohran Mamdani – who was still an outside bet and yet to secure the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor – took the mic. “New York City is at a historic crossroads. Does it want to look to the future,” he asked, “or look to the past?” Six months later, the question was answered resoundingly.
Those dinners represent a broader current: a critical mass of Muslim artists and thinkers who have built the political capital and social clout to create a growing imprint on the city’s cultural landscape.
In the world of food, beyond the long-established restaurants of Jackson Heights, Brighton Beach and Atlantic Avenue, the shift is visible. It’s there in buzzy new destinations such as the Yemeni coffee houses or Ayat, the Palestinian restaurant that has opened more than half a dozen branches in five years, and Gehad Hadidi’s Huda, named after the community center he frequented growing up in Michigan. New York’s growing south Asian and Middle Eastern music landscape includes the Grammy-winning Arooj Aftab and eclectic singer Ali Sethi, alongside a thriving sufi music scene with intimate concerts at spaces like Barzakh, and live Arabic-language shows organized by Brooklyn Maqam.
Elsewhere, dance parties hosted by collectives such as Papi Juice (the club night where Mamdani made a campaign stop) and Laylit offer an outlet for the nightlife set. In art, Salman Toor – one of the most fascinating painters of his generation – has smashed all expectations while photographers and designers across the city are creatively managing identities and experiences. In literature, events like the Kan Yama Kan series and Acacia magazine launches draw crowds to hear writers read new work and network, turning bookstores and back rooms into temporary salons. (Many of these artists, thinkers and politicos are featured in the Guardian’s celebration of Muslim New Yorkers here.)
This pulsating cultural life and reimagining of traditions coincided with two profound shifts in the lives of New York’s Muslims. First, a rise in Islamophobia in the aftermath of 7 October, with mounting pressure from state and institutional powers on those who spoke publicly in solidarity with Palestinians. At the same time, Mamdani, a young state assemblyman from Queens, was quietly considering a mayoral run, one that promised not only to redirect the city’s politics but to recalibrate the place of progressive Muslims in American public life.
Kashif Shaikh is the co-founder and director of the Pillars Fund, a philanthropic fund that awards grants to Muslim creatives and co-hosted the Bushwick Eid al-Fitr event. When he reflects on what Mamdani accomplished in his campaign, he says: “This is what 20, 30, 40, 50 years of building power looks like in the United States.”
New York has one of the most diverse populations in the world, with many Muslim communities that have called the city home for centuries. The first Muslims to arrive in New York in the 1600s were enslaved Africans, but the first large waves of voluntary immigration came in the 19th century from the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-20th century, Malcolm X rose in Harlem, which became an important centre for the Nation of Islam. After the Immigration Act of 1965 Muslims from across the world began arriving in greater numbers and opening spaces for community and religious life. In 1991, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York became the first purpose-built mosque opened in the five boroughs.
Today the imprint of these long-ago arrivals are seen in the enclaves and artefacts that mark the city’s Muslim life: Little Pakistan in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, Little Palestine in Bay Ridge. In Harlem, the Malcolm Shabazz mosque, which was firebombed in 1965, and the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, where Malcom X was assassinated.
After September 2001, the city changed. Islamophobia was nothing new, but a culture of suspicion and surveillance became increasingly oppressive. In the months after 9/11, thousands of Arab, Muslim and south Asian immigrants were detained. The share of hate crimes against Muslims went up by more than 500% between 2000 and 2009, compared with an 18% increase in hate crimes overall. Federal agencies deployed thousands of informants, many to spy on Muslim communities throughout the country.
“Muslim New Yorkers were being disappeared,” says Ramzi Kassem of the immigrant roundup. In December, Mamdani handpicked Kassem to be the New York City’s chief counsel. It was a notable choice; Kassem was part of a team that brought a lawsuit in 2013 against the NYPD for its surveillance program targeting Muslims and co-founded a legal clinic called Clear that served people caught up in the post 9/11 dragnet. “Of course, the vast majority of those New Yorkers, nobody was charged with any crime,” Kassem says. “The vast majority were immigrant workers in New York City, people who sell you coffee in the morning from a cart or sell you a bagel.”
Muslim New Yorkers came to understand that without leaders at the table, their concerns were easily dismissible. And so the last decades have seen an intensifying period of grassroots organizing.
In 2013, the Muslim Democratic Club of New York was formed and became, as Moustafa Bayoumi has written, an incubator of Muslim political talent, helping get Muslims elected to local government positions. Mamdani served on the board of the Muslim Democratic Club between 2018 and 2019, shortly before winning his own seat as a state assembly member in 2020. As Ali Najmi, the MDCNY co-founder, lawyer and onetime political hopeful, told the newspaper amNewYork: “Zohran’s ascension is the culmination of a bunch of people losing, myself included. There’s institutional knowledge that was passed.” In 2021, Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to city council.
Another burst of political solidarity came in 2023, following the 7 October Hamas attacks. The war in Gaza became a nexus of solidarity among progressive Muslims, many of whom had their livelihoods and safety threatened for speaking out in support of Palestinians. “I think because we saw so much anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia in the aftermath of October 7, many people just naturally kind of gravitated towards one another,” says Deana Haggag, an arts program director who co-hosted the Eid al-Fitr banquet.
Mamdani was elected in November 2025. It was a moment which represented a rebuke of the ugly Islamophobia that pervaded the city for many Muslims in the 20th century, and is in many ways an outcrop of the mass movement for Palestinian rights forged over the last two years. His ascension to the most powerful position in the city is also a culmination of hundreds years of immigrant history, the latest group to redraw the boundary between outsider and insider in New York.
“In this country, outsiders have always fought their way in,” says the political strategist Waleed Shahid, now Mamdani’s deputy communications director of economic justice.
As late as the 1920s, Shahid says, Fiorello La Guardia was told it wasn’t the right time for an Italian to run for mayor. “This is a city of constant new arrivals and the story of the Irish and Italians in the cities, Jewish tenement workers, people from the Caribbean, Black families from the south. This city is constantly being renewed and it’s always a fight and it is never easy.”