Zohran Mamdani and the Making of a “Muslim Menace”: Islamophobia and the politics of belonging (Tazeen M. Ali, June 24, 2025, ARC)
In a campaign mailer designed by a PAC supporting disgraced former New York governor and current mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo, Queens assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s image appears with his beard digitally altered to look longer, fuller, and darker. This manipulation invokes tired Islamophobic tropes that cast bearded brown Muslim men as dangerous, violent, and in Mamdani’s case, unfit for public office. While the mailer was never distributed by Cuomo’s camp, the image leaked online. Mamdani responded to the image by calling it what it was: Islamophobic and “meant to make me look threatening.”Moreover, the manipulated beard image is a part of a long-standing tradition in American politics: altering minoritized candidates’ physical features to further racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic tropes, and cast them as inherently other. Cuomo’s camp condemned the altered image, but this smear was not an isolated incident: it was part of a broader pattern. As Mamdani’s campaign has surged in the final days before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary—which ends Tuesday—he has faced a wave of coded and overt attacks. Cuomo has warned voters that to elect Mamdani would be “reckless and dangerous.” Mamdani has also received multiple death threats replete with Islamophobic language, calling him “a terrorist who is not welcome in New York or America.”
These attacks are not just about politics. They are also about identity. Mamdani, a Twelver Shia Muslim, African-born immigrant, and democratic socialist, represents a challenge to entrenched racial, religious, and political hierarchies. As with other progressive politicians of color, from Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the backlash against him reveals the limits of establishment tolerance for candidates who refuse to conform.