The Anarcho-Islamism of Zohran Mamdani
By Roberto de Mattei | 19 November 2025
The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York is an event of international significance, which deserves some consideration.
The election of a far-left candidate in America’s most influential city confirms first of all the existence of strong polarisation within the United States. The killing of Charlie Kirk on 10 September had already highlighted this. Tyler Robinson, the assassin of the young conservative leader, in fact represents a radical expression of that ultra-progressive American world which viscerally hates the traditional social order and is ready even to use violence to destroy it. Donald Trump, who survived an assassination attempt on 13 July last year, is considered the enemy par excellence of this world.
New York, while not representing the American heartland, is America’s showcase to the world, and its current leader is a socialist-communist, a sworn enemy of the United States president. Mamdani has presented his victory as a direct challenge to Donald Trump, insisting that his political battle does not end within the municipal boundaries. “New York will be the vanguard of the resistance”, he declared in his speech as the new mayor of New York at the Brooklyn Paramount, shortly after his election victory.
New York City is facing serious problems, like rising crime, the housing market crisis, precarious infrastructure, low-quality education and urban decay. The solutions proposed by Mamdani, “more activist than administrator”, as the New York Post highlighted on 24 October, are utopian and risk making matters worse. His priorities appear more attuned to ideological mobilisation than to pragmatic management. New York thus becomes the platform for a global battle. It is not by chance that in an interview on 16 June 2025, Mamdani used the expression “globalise the intifada” to indicate the worldwide horizons of a struggle with its foundations in the theatre of the Middle East.
Mamdani is New York’s first Muslim mayor, of South Asian descent, born in Africa and made an American citizen not many years ago, but his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a famous film director. Mamdani’s biography and programme thus bring together two seemingly antithetical identities: on the one hand, woke culture — the offspring of progressive American universities — and on the other, the pro-Islamism, increasingly widespread, as in Europe, among second and third-generation Muslim immigrants. Of these two worlds, the one celebrates relativism and identity fluidity, and the other looks to Sharia law.
The woke paradigm interprets the West as a power structure to be methodically deconstructed. It sees in it the origin of all “oppression”: colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, hetero-normativity. The ultimate goal is not reform, but the dissolution of identities, borders, traditions.
Political Islamism’s view of the West is the mirror opposite: it sees this not as an unjust cultural construct but rather as a civilisation in decline, marked by the corruption of customs, forced secularisation and a geopolitical expansion perceived as aggressive or hostile towards the Muslim world.
Mamdani’s political lexicon thus draws on the rhetorical reservoir of Islamist and far-left movements, which divide the world into oppressors and oppressed and consider the West a morally delegitimised bloc. As the New York Post headlined: “It’s not ‘Islamophobic’ to notice Mamdani hates Israel and the West”. The article doesn’t judge his ideas: it registers his hostility towards the pillars of Western culture.
The convergence between radical Islamism and woke activism is not built on a project, but on an essentially negative coalition characterised more by rejection than by a constructive proposal. In this sense the strategy that unites elements of Islamist ideology with practices typical of ultra-left movements can be defined as “anarcho-Islamism”.
The underlying idea is not to create international networks with institutions and society but to support expressions of radical protest and ongoing opposition in order to create a climate of social and cultural conflict, especially in big cities, giving the perception of Western society as being in “crisis”. Urban spaces, where tensions emerge most easily, become the preferred theatre of action: demonstrations that often erupt into violence, occupations, and counter-narratives on social media. This is the revolutionary logic: when Truth ceases to be the ordering principle of reference, the void is filled by its gainsayers, albeit in a chaotic and fragmented manner.
For decades New York represented the forum of global liberal-democratic culture. It was the city where the United Nations found its headquarters, where the most advanced forms of cultural pluralism were experimented with, where individual freedom — economic, political, artistic — was elevated to a universal paradigm. The city embodied what Francis Fukuyama, in 1992, called “the end of history”: the triumph of liberal democracy as the definitive model for global political organisation. This project has failed, and we must acknowledge it.
The election of Zohran Mamdani is not only a change of administration, but attests to the self-dissolution of a liberal culture that has not only shown itself incapable of confronting the enemies of the West but paves the way for them. The West can no longer identify with modern civilisation, the offspring of the French Revolution, but with Christian civilisation, rooted in the Middle Ages and Greco-Roman culture. We fight to defend this civilisation, and Zohran Mamdani, who wants to destroy it, is our cultural enemy.