From NYPD surveillance to City Hall: Muslim New York’s political rise
Community once spied on as security threat has become organized force that helped elect city's first Muslim mayor
NEW YORK (MNTV) — The rise of Muslim New Yorkers from targets of mass surveillance to a decisive electoral force marks one of the city’s most striking political transformations — one that culminated in Zohran Mamdani’s election as its first Muslim mayor.
That shift was forged in a dark period.
After 9/11, the NYPD under Mayor Michael Bloomberg built an expansive surveillance operation targeting Muslim neighborhoods, mosques, businesses, and student groups, placing informants inside communities in the name of counterterrorism.
The program produced no meaningful terrorism leads while sowing deep mistrust — even charities offering food and social services became objects of suspicion.
The 2012 exposure of an informant inside a Muslim charity helped trigger a federal civil-rights lawsuit, waged for years by community activists, the ACLU, and CUNY law, that ended in a 2017 settlement forcing policy changes — a landmark over constitutional rights and government accountability, not just one community’s protections.
That history set the stage for Mamdani.
By 2024, Mayor Eric Adams faced corruption charges and had alienated Muslim and progressive voters over Israel’s war in Gaza. Mamdani, then a state assembly member and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, built a coalition treating Muslim New Yorkers as an organized political force rather than a symbolic constituency — though, given the community’s ethnic and theological diversity, his support had to be earned, not assumed.
He campaigned at more than 50 mosques and mobilized hundreds of volunteers for a mosque-based voter drive, and, according to the Associated Press, ultimately won roughly 90 percent of the Muslim vote.
The symbolism runs deep: the civil-rights attorney who challenged NYPD surveillance later became Mamdani’s chief counsel.
For years the question was how Muslims could protect themselves from government overreach; now, advocates note, it is how they can shape the government itself.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Muslim New Yorkers are no longer merely demanding recognition — they are helping decide who governs the country’s largest city.
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