The US right still paints Muslims as the ‘enemy’. But they are fighting for a brighter future for Americans | Nesrine Malik

Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad

T wenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “ Habibi City ”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”

Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.

I use the descriptor “of Muslim background” rather than “Muslim” because this diasporic identity is a diverse one that is rooted in a religion but expands to encompass everyone from the practising to those for whom Islam is a cultural totem.The capaciousness of this heritage is demonstrable in its integration – without compromise – into mainstream American society. Mamdani and the Democratic Senate nominee for Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, recuse themselves from the rote fealty to American glory and dare to point out both US support for Israel and the calamitous outcomes of the “war on terror” in the Middle East.

This is the result of this new generation of Americans coming from an immigrant background that has cultivated a less parochial and supremacist view of the US. There is something historically inevitable in this. Immigration from countries and backgrounds against which the US has waged military and ideological war eventually yields not a cowed assimilation, but a sort of political cosmopolitanism – kryptonite for American exceptionalism.

Growing up in the shadow of Islamophobia is another formative experience that ironically forced many to identify in terms of religious background rather than race or national origin. “In a way,” said American comedian Ramy Youssef, in a now legendary standup comedy segment , “9/11 made me more Muslim.