When you've internalised the message the establishment keeps putting out. This is also one reason why modern American Muslim grievance will not be appeased the same way early-mid 20th century American Jewish grievance was.
Islam in America
What will the future hold?
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 were the displays of solidarity among New Yorkers
and the many pronouncements from public officials decrying anti-Muslim
hatred. Though civil libertarians objected to 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.
Notably, while Mamdani and other young
American Muslims see Islamophobia as a pervasive threat, it does not
appear to have stymied the rapid growth of the American Muslim
population, which now stands at somewhere between 4 and 4.5 million, or
close to triple its size in 2000. Though some of this growth can be
attributed to the relative youth and fertility
of America’s Muslim minority, its chief driver has been legal
immigration. If current trends hold, Muslims are poised to surpass Jews
as the nation’s second-largest religious group by 2040.
The question for policymakers is not
whether American Muslims are a growing political force — that much is
beyond dispute, as evidenced by the rise of Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib,
Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and other stalwarts of the Democratic Left.
It’s whether American institutions are thinking clearly about what that
growth portends. The answer turns on two ideological tendencies within
the American Muslim population that are distinct in their character,
different in their dangers, and yet mutually reinforcing.
The first is Islamism, a transnational
revolutionary ideology that seeks to capture state power in order to
impose Islamic law and that rejects any separation between religious
authority and political life. Islamism commands the allegiance of a
distinct minority of American Muslims, but its most dangerous
manifestation — jihadism, or the turn to violence in pursuit of Islamist
objectives — is an urgent threat. The second is Third Worldism, a
fusion of anti-Zionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalism that places
the sacralized victimhood of Palestinian Arabs at the center of a
larger struggle against American imperialism. Unlike Islamism, Third
Worldism is not primarily a religion-based ideology. Its most committed
adherents, such as Mamdani himself, tend to lead largely secular lives.
But, in important respects, it presents the more consequential long-term
ideological challenge. Where jihadism targets American civilians as
part of a larger struggle to overthrow “apostate” regimes in the Muslim
world, Third Worldism endeavors to transform the nation’s
ideological-intellectual milieu, shaping how Americans — well beyond the
Muslim minority — understand their country and its place in the world.
Islamism’s violent potential was
underscored in March this year when Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old
naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon, rammed his truck into the
entrance of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where 140
children were attending the synagogue’s early-childhood center. He drove
down a hallway with a rifle before his vehicle burst into flames.
Ghazali had reportedly lost several family members to an Israeli
airstrike in Lebanon — two of whom have been identified by the IDF as
members of Hezbollah. Rather than seek revenge by making his way to
Lebanon to fight Israel, he chose to slaughter Jewish children in
suburban Michigan.
Ghazali was not an aberration. That same
month, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, of Sierra Leone, and Ndiaga Diagne, of
Senegal, carried out similar deadly lone-actor jihadist attacks in
Virginia and Texas, respectively. The previous summer, Mohamed Soliman,
an Egyptian national, firebombed a hostage-solidarity rally in Colorado,
killing one. Each was an immigrant; each imagined he was acting in
solidarity with Muslims abroad. They are part of a broader pattern of
jihadist violence in America stretching back decades — a pattern that
includes not only immigrants who brought their grievances with them but
also native-born and long-resident Americans who acquired them here.
Lone-actor attacks are by definition
difficult to anticipate and interdict. Hardening potential
targets — securing buildings, increasing physical barriers, posting
armed guards — can mitigate the damage, and it has undoubtedly saved
many lives. But it cannot address the upstream failure that allowed
these men into the country in the first place.
Why, for example, did the United States
grant a spousal visa and then citizenship to Ghazali, a man so
intimately connected to a designated foreign terrorist organization?
There is a meaningful difference between the “total and complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that Donald Trump called
for in December 2015 and the targeted, constitutional vetting reforms
that these cases make plainly necessary. Rather than putting the onus on
consular officials to definitively prove that a Lebanese national is
not aligned with Hezbollah, federal law ought to shift the burden of
proof to petitioners, requiring them to demonstrate that the individuals
they are sponsoring are willing to live in accordance with American
norms. Federal law already criminalizes fraud on sponsorship forms, but
punishment after the fact is no substitute for rigorous screening before
the visa is granted. Thoughtful vetting of newcomers from societies
rife with extremism and religious intolerance is not an act of bigotry.
It is common sense. It is also, despite the objections of the
civil-libertarian Left, an act of protection for the millions of
American Muslims who want nothing to do with the violence committed in
the name of their faith.
Vetting reforms, however carefully
designed, address only one failure mode. They cannot screen for the
radicalization that happens after arrival — in prisons, in online
communities, and in the darker corners of American Muslim life. That
problem is harder to see and address, because it is inseparable from the
changing character of American assimilation itself.
The conventional wisdom holds that American Muslims are a success story — and by many measures, they are. According to a 2025 survey
from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), 36
percent of Muslim Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, roughly
comparable to the Protestant share and above that of white Evangelicals
and Catholics. Nearly a quarter report household incomes above $100,000,
broadly in line with those of other religious communities, and well
above the incomes of white Evangelicals. Relative to their counterparts
in the United Kingdom or France, American Muslims are more tolerant
toward other religious faiths, more likely to identify with the country
they live in, and less likely to live in Muslim-majority enclaves, even
after adjusting for income, education, age, and sex. One long-standing
hypothesis is that while European societies tend to have more rigid
ethnic identities, America’s more inclusive national identity, its
history as an immigrant-rich society, and its openness to religious
observance have made it much easier for Muslims, including observant
Muslims, to feel at home.
Feeling at home, however, is not the same as feeling content. Political scientists Justin Gest and Richard Nielsen have observed
that American Muslims are less trusting of societal and government
institutions than their European counterparts are, a gap they attribute
to the greater integration of American Muslims. The more you see a
society as your own, the more entitled you feel to voice frank opinions
about its supposed deficiencies — a phenomenon that has been dubbed “the
integration paradox.”
Efforts to understand Muslim assimilation are further complicated by religious attrition. A significant and growing share of Americans raised Muslim have quietly stopped identifying with the faith altogether. As analysts at the Cato Institute have argued,
surveys of American Muslims tend to exclude ex-Muslims, so the data we
have systematically overstate the share of the broader Muslim-origin
population that retains a Muslim identity. What remains in the surveys,
then, is a population skewed toward those who do retain that identity,
whether as a matter of sincere religious practice or, increasingly, as a
matter of political commitment. For a subset of younger American
Muslims, the faith has become less a set of devotional practices than an
emblem of resistance to Westernness and whiteness.
Together, the integration paradox and
religious attrition explain something that might otherwise seem
puzzling: why the most committed and articulate voices of Muslim
anti-Americanism in the United States are not marginalized,
dispossessed, under-assimilated newcomers. Rather, they are privileged,
cosmopolitan, first- and second-generation insiders who lead largely
secular lives. Consider Mamdani and Hasan Piker, two hyper-assimilated
American Muslims who have risen to prominence on the strength of their
anti-Zionism, one through electoral politics, the other through a mass
cultural platform that has made him one of the most followed political
voices in the country.
Having successfully navigated the
institutions of American meritocracy, many young American Muslims have
rejected the quiet gratitude that one associates with immigrants and
their children of earlier eras. Instead, they have undergone what the
political scientist Robert Leiken has called “anti-West westernization”
or “adversarial assimilation”: a process by which incorporation into
American institutions produces not attachment to patriotic narratives of
American freedom, individualism, and benevolence but hostility toward
them. This phenomenon is especially common, I suspect, among younger
South Asians broadly — a highly educated, upwardly mobile group
increasingly overrepresented in the uppermost echelons of the American
Left. Regarding South Asian Muslims specifically, the ISPU’s 2025
American Muslim Poll offers suggestive evidence: While 59 percent of
Asian Muslims identified the war in Gaza as their top policy priority in
the 2024 presidential election, the same was true of only 32 percent of
white and 12 percent of black Muslims.
It is in this restless, estranged
population — secular in practice, Muslim in political identity — that
Third Worldism finds its most fertile ground.
Third Worldism is not a recent invention.
Its intellectual roots run through the Algerian War of Independence,
when Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon moralized revolutionary violence
as a cleansing, liberatory force, and through Edward Said’s Orientalism,
which recast Western knowledge itself as a colonial enterprise.
Institutionalized in American universities over the following decades,
these ideas hardened into what Hudson Institute scholar Zineb Riboua calls
a “political theology”: a worldview that treats any movement arrayed
against Western power as inherently righteous. By October 7, 2023, it
had migrated from the fringes of academia into mainstream political
life. The slogans that appeared within hours of the Hamas attacks were
not spontaneous expressions of outrage but the product of a conceptual
system built over decades, now fluently spoken by a generation of
American politicians and activists.
Third Worldism’s most visible
manifestation is not terrorism but what my colleague Tal Fortgang calls
civil terrorism: mass unlawful behavior designed to coerce people into
adopting unpopular political positions, typically by going just far
enough to break the law while stopping short of bodily harm. Think of
the college students who took over campus quads and libraries while
raging against “Zionists”; nonprofits that vowed to keep blocking roads
until Americans stopped supporting Israel; or vandalism that lionizes
terrorist groups. None of these actions are constitutionally protected
protests. They are harassment, intimidation, and antisocial behavior — a
deliberate strategy to maximize disruption at minimal personal risk.
That protesters so often hide their faces and evade accountability is
itself the confession: Theirs is a politics of coercion, not conscience.
The secular character of Third Worldism
also explains phenomena that might otherwise seem incoherent. Consider
the seeming contradiction of “Queers for Palestine.”
Presumably, the activists behind this movement oppose the
criminalization of homosexuality, a core tenet of Islamism. Their choice
of ally, therefore, makes sense only if they understand Islam primarily
as a political identity rather than a religious one and if their chief
motivation is hostility to American power and its perceived proxies.
Third Worldism’s capacity to recruit across racial, religious, and
ethnic lines is precisely what makes it a more expansive and durable
ideological challenge than Islamism. It is also what makes it so
dangerous as a permission structure for Islamist violence. By
celebrating “anti-imperialist” resistance movements as inherently
righteous and insisting that the real violence is always structural,
always Western, and always Zionist, Third Worldism provides the moral
vocabulary according to which attacks like Ghazali’s become, for some,
not atrocities but acts of liberation.
The policy responses available are
imperfect but not negligible. First, states should vigorously enforce
existing laws against civil terrorism and raise penalties for antisocial
behavior that exploits the gray zone between criminality and
prosecution, as Utah’s legislature recently did. The logic is familiar
from “broken windows” policing: Tolerating minor disorder signals that
major disorder will be tolerated, too. Civil terrorists count on
prosecutors looking the other way. Vigorous prosecution would prove them
wrong. Second, the federal government should investigate the networks
organizing acts of civil terrorism for criminal conspiracy, nonprofit
law violations, and material support for terrorism. You can’t
criminalize Third Worldist ideas, but you can dismantle the
infrastructure that translates them into organized campaigns of
harassment and intimidation.
The deeper challenge is the ideas
themselves. Foreign funding of American educational institutions
warrants disclosure requirements and perhaps even outright prohibition.
But that only addresses the problem on the margins. Our universities are
already saturated with anti-Western orthodoxies that require no foreign
subsidy. The more fundamental reform is structural: increasing the
accountability of universities to their trustees and, through them, to
the public. The goal is not ideological coercion but the restoration of a
minimal civic commitment: respect for the society that makes free
inquiry and religious liberty possible in the first place.
Third Worldism, left unchecked, won’t
remain on the radical fringe. Consider the first months of Zohran
Mamdani’s mayoralty. In March 2026, two men inspired by ISIS attempted
to detonate shrapnel-filled improvised explosive devices outside Gracie
Mansion. Mamdani forcefully condemned the anti-Islam rally that preceded
the attack — but even after describing the bombing attempt as “a
heinous act of terrorism,” he declined to name or condemn the jihadist
ideology that inspired it. The following month, he vetoed a city council
bill establishing protest buffer zones around schools, citing concerns
about the rights of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Somehow, Third
Worldists always insist on maximum vigilance about Islamophobia while
offering little more than equivocation about jihadism.
Third Worldism is a serious challenge, but
it is not without precedent. Consider the trajectory of an earlier
immigrant population that gave rise to its own generation of radicals:
Jews.
Third Worldism is proving as seductive to
today’s second-generation American Muslim radicals as socialism,
Communism, and anarchism were to the second-generation Jewish radicals
of the 1920s and 1930s. The parallel is closer than it might appear.
Like today’s Third Worldists, the Jewish radicals of that era were
largely secular. Their radicalism was a substitute identity rather than
an extension of religious practice, a way of channeling communal energy
into political commitment. The Rosenbergs, convicted of treason by a
Jewish judge and executed in 1951, are the tragic extreme and long tail
of that tendency. Like Third Worldism, the Jewish radical movements of
the early- and mid-20th century were not marginal phenomena; they shaped
American intellectual and political life in ways that took decades to
work through.
What eventually brought the children and
grandchildren of Jewish radicals back was not suppression but
confidence: America’s mid-century commitment to its own liberalism, the
demonstrable reality of its promise of equality under the law. For Jews,
the arc from adversarial to patriotic assimilation was neither
automatic nor guaranteed. It required America to live up to its own
ideals. But it happened. Is a similar arc available to the
second-generation American Muslims now in the grip of Third Worldism?
And do American institutions have the conviction to make the case?
Needless to say, I am not a disinterested
observer of these questions. I am the son of Muslim immigrants whose
lives were profoundly damaged by Islamist violence in their country of
origin and who felt immense gratitude to this country for the
opportunity to build a life. The Islam of my youth was a syncretic
tradition deeply rooted in Sufism; it respected Hindu practices and
valued tolerance above all else. It is my decidedly imperfect religious
upbringing that has made me hostile to political Islam, which I’ve long
understood as an effort to subsume local identities and practices into a
sterile, homogenizing neo-imperial project, one more concerned with
subjugating religious minorities and other dissenters than with
achieving spiritual transcendence. That formation has left me alert, not
indifferent, to what Islamism and Third Worldism are doing to the
humane, tolerant traditions that I and many other American Muslims
actually come from.
And I am far from alone in this regard.
The millions of American Muslims who celebrate, identify with, and
depend on the freedom and pluralism that Islamism violently rejects have
as much at stake in this argument as anyone. So, too, do the lapsed
American Muslims who have quietly abandoned their religious inheritance
altogether, sometimes out of outrage and shame over the horrors
committed in the name of Islam.
We cannot ban noxious ideologies, nor should we try. What we can do is
defend the tradition that makes pluralism possible: the tradition George
Washington invoked in 1790 when he promised the Hebrew Congregation of
Newport that this would be a nation in which “every one shall sit in
safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make
him afraid.” That promise was made to Jews. It applies equally to
Muslims. It is worth defending.
Related:
Ihsan Horani on X
Reihan Salam just wrote something I recognise completely.
He is an American Muslim, son of Bangladeshi immigrants. His conclusion: the most radical anti-Western voices in Muslim communities are not the marginalised or the poor. They are the privileged. The cosmopolitan. The thoroughly assimilated. People leading largely secular lives who have benefited enormously from the Western societies they condemn.
I know this personality type. I have argued with it my entire life.
It is not radicalised by deprivation. It is radicalised by ideology. By a framework that casts the West as permanent oppressor and political Islam as legitimate resistance. By university campuses that reward that framing. By a media ecosystem that treats any Muslim who criticises Islamism as a traitor and any Muslim who amplifies it as authentic.
This is the type Europe's counter-extremism infrastructure keeps missing.
Prevent looks for poverty, isolation, immigration status.
It is not watching the English-speaking, university-educated, middle-class Muslim activist who uses the language of civil rights to shield political Islam from scrutiny.
I am a secular Muslim. That framing has been used against people like me my entire life.
Europe needs to understand what it is actually dealing with.
