A generation ago, debates about Islam in America centered on assimilation and religious freedom. Today, they are bound up with some of our most urgent political questions. Few people are better placed to make sense of this important subject than Reihan Salam. As president of the Manhattan Institute, Reihan is one of the most astute observers of politics and policy debates in the country today. He is also an American Muslim raised by immigrants from Bangladesh. In this essay, he examines two forces he sees reshaping segments of American Muslim life: Islamism, a transnational ideology seeking to impose Islamic law, and Third Worldism, which casts America and its allies as the primary drivers of global injustice. Reihan looks at where each is taking root and what it means for America. This essay was first published in the Spring 2026 issue of SAPIR Journal, and we are pleased to republish it in our pages today. —The Editors
Just days before his historic victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani gave remarks outside the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx. He claimed that his aunt had stopped taking the subway after the September 11 attacks because she “did not feel safe in her hijab,” and he spoke of the “fear and humiliation” that she and other Muslim New Yorkers had been forced to endure in the years since. Soon afterward, critics observed that Mamdani’s only living aunt at the time resided in Tanzania and was not known to wear a hijab. Mamdani later clarified that he was referring to a distant deceased cousin of his father’s, a woman named Zehra, whom he referred to as an “aunt” in accordance with cultural tradition.
Having grown up as a Muslim in Brooklyn, I can say that Mamdani’s bleak sense of Muslim life in that era of New York City does not ring true to me. What I remember most vividly from the aftermath of 9/11 are the displays of solidarity among New Yorkers and the many pronouncements from public officials decrying anti-Muslim hatred. Though civil libertarians objected to New York Police Department (NYPD) surveillance of Muslim houses of worship and other organizations in the years that followed, these measures by and large struck me as defensible, not least because they were grounded in a desire to understand Muslim communities and to protect them along with the rest of the city.
Nevertheless, Mamdani’s belief that modern America is rife with Islamophobia is ascendant among younger American Muslims. In conversations with Bangladeshi Americans a generation younger than myself, I’ve been surprised by how estranged from America many of them feel, and how natural and even ennobling that estrangement seems to them. One survey from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley found that 60 percent of Muslim respondents believe that Islamophobia in the United States is a very big problem, and that concern about Islamophobia was most acute among younger, female, and U.S.-born Muslims—the very Muslims most thoroughly incorporated into the American mainstream.
