The Professor Behind Mamdani
Investigating Mahmood Mamdani’s Politics and His Influence on New York’s Mayor
Long before Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City, another Mamdani had spent decades developing an influential critique of the West, nationalism, colonialism and Israel. Mahmood Mamdani is not simply the mayor’s father. He is a Harvard-trained academic, longtime Columbia University professor and internationally recognized political theorist whose work has repeatedly challenged conventional Western explanations for terrorism, ethnic conflict and the modern nation-state.
That makes his intellectual relationship with his son worthy of examination.
There is no evidence that Mahmood Mamdani secretly groomed his son for an Islamic takeover of American government. There is, however, abundant evidence that Zohran grew up inside an unusually political household and that several ideas central to his father's scholarship can now be heard in the son's politics.
The more revealing story may therefore be ideological rather than religious.
Mahmood Mamdani's Worldview
Columbia describes Mamdani's academic specialties as colonialism, anti-colonialism, race, sovereignty, political violence, the Cold War and the War on Terror. He has taught at Columbia since 1999 and previously held positions at universities in Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Across decades of scholarship, one argument appears repeatedly: modern political violence cannot be understood simply by examining the ideology or culture of the people committing it. Mamdani instead emphasizes colonial history, state power and Western foreign policy.
That framework became particularly prominent after September 11.
His 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror argued that contemporary political terrorism should be understood partly through the history of the Cold War and American support for militant forces fighting Soviet influence.
Columbia's own Center for Palestine Studies lists not only the book but subsequent Mamdani writings with titles including “Contemporary Political Terror: Its Origins in the Late Cold War,” “The Secular Roots of Radical Political Islam” and “America, the Cold War and the Origins of Terror.”
This is important because Mamdani's approach fundamentally changes where responsibility is placed. Rather than starting with the religious ideology of Islamist movements, he frequently begins with the geopolitical conditions that produced them.
Supporters see that as historical sophistication.
Critics see something different: an analytical framework that can shift attention away from extremist ideology and toward Western culpability.
That debate has followed Mamdani for decades.
His Controversial Approach to Political Violence
Mamdani's scholarship has sometimes produced fierce criticism precisely because he complicates narratives involving perpetrators and victims.
His work on Rwanda, Darfur and terrorism repeatedly argues that atrocities need to be situated within longer political histories rather than treated as eruptions of inexplicable evil.
New York Review of Books columnist Nicholas Kristof sharply criticized Mamdani's treatment of Darfur in 2009, arguing that Mamdani's analysis was excessively hostile toward the humanitarian movement and too accommodating toward governments or political forces accused of brutality.
That does not make Mamdani an advocate of terrorism.
But it demonstrates an important feature of his intellectual method: he is consistently suspicious of the categories through which Western governments and institutions identify villains.
That same instinct is visible throughout his writing about the War on Terror.
His Most Radical Argument May Be About the Nation-State
Mamdani's critique extends far beyond American foreign policy.
He questions the legitimacy of one of modern politics' most basic institutions: the nation-state organized around a dominant national identity.
Discussing his book Neither Settler Nor Native, Mamdani told The Nation that nationalism and colonialism were essentially historical twins. He argued that constructing nation-states has repeatedly involved ethnic cleansing and political violence.
This is not a minor academic distinction.
It provides the intellectual foundation for understanding his position on Israel.
If the fundamental problem is a state identifying itself with one particular national, ethnic or religious population, then the concept of a specifically Jewish state becomes objectionable under Mamdani's framework. Of course, this critique is completely missing from the 50+ islamic nation-states which target Israel. And he has followed that argument to its logical conclusion. Israel must go.
Israel and the South Africa Analogy
Mahmood Mamdani has participated directly in Columbia's Palestine-related programming. In December 2014, Columbia's Center for Palestine Studies hosted BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti. Mamdani was one of the principal speakers and discussed what the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa could teach Palestinian activists.
His analogy between Israel and apartheid South Africa is not merely rhetorical. He has argued that Israelis should undergo an “epistemic revolution” and recognize that Jewish security does not require a Zionist state.
In remarks subsequently reported by Jewish media, Mamdani compared the political transformation he wants for Israel to South Africa's transition away from white political dominance. He argued that Jews could retain a home in Israel-Palestine without maintaining a Jewish state.
Asked about a one-state outcome, Mamdani has said he is sympathetic to a single state based on equal citizenship and the rule of law.
That position is important because his son has subsequently expressed strikingly similar language.
Father and Son
Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly emphasized “equal rights” when discussing Israel rather than endorsing its existence specifically as a Jewish state.
During a June 2026 ABC interview, Mayor Mamdani was directly asked whether he supported Israel as a Jewish state. He responded that he supported Israel as a state with equal rights and added that he could not support a state that privileged one religion over another.
The resemblance to his father's position is difficult to miss.
Mahmood argues against political systems privileging particular identity groups. Zohran says a state should not privilege one religion.
Mahmood applies South Africa's transformation to Israel. Zohran has long promoted Palestinian activism and BDS.
That does not prove the son simply copied the father. Political ideas can arise independently, and Zohran has had many influences.
But the intellectual continuity deserves examination.
BDS as a Family Political Theme
Palestinian activism appears to be one of the clearest areas of overlap. Mahmood participated in Columbia programming with BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and has publicly defended distinctions between criticism of Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
Zohran went substantially further as an activist.
Before becoming mayor, he publicly advocated BDS and described his support for the movement as one of the reasons he joined the Democratic Socialists of America. In an archived speech, he linked struggles in New York directly with the Palestinian cause and argued that pressure analogous to the international campaign against apartheid South Africa should be applied to Israel.
Again, the parallels with his father's South Africa analogy are striking.
The Household Where These Ideas Developed
This was not an apolitical childhood. The New Yorker has described Mahmood and Zohran as maintaining a close intellectual relationship and reported that the family continues to gather regularly and discuss politics and ideas.
The magazine also notes that father and son have sometimes disagreed, including arguments surrounding Mahmood's earlier work, but portrays politics and intellectual debate as deeply embedded in the family environment. Zohran himself has publicly acknowledged that he comes from parents distinctly associated with the political left.
His father's experiences also shaped the family's political vocabulary.
Mahmood Mamdani was expelled from Uganda with other Asians under Idi Amin in 1972. Questions of citizenship, belonging, colonialism and exclusion subsequently became major themes of his academic career.
Those themes, who belongs, who holds power, who is classified as an outsider and whether political institutions reproduce historic inequality, also recur throughout contemporary progressive politics.
Not Islamic Theocracy—Postcolonial Politics
This distinction is critical.
Attempts to understand Zohran Mamdani primarily through Shia theology may actually obscure the more obvious intellectual lineage.
Mahmood's published career is not principally a campaign for Islamic government.
It is a campaign against a particular understanding of nationalism, Western foreign policy and colonial political structures. He doesn’t criticize Islamic nation-states and only focuses on the West.
His intellectual universe is predominantly postcolonial, but never focused on the Islamic conquests which forced the Muslim faith across the Middle East and Africa, committing horrible genocides til today. The focus for Mamdani’s is on one enemy, Israel, while ignoring the worse behavior amongst Islamic leaders. That arguably makes his influence more relevant to American politics, not less.
The ideas do not require conversion to Islam. They can move through universities, activist organizations, socialist politics, racial-justice movements, Palestine activism and debates about national identity.
Mahmood Mamdani has spent decades developing precisely that kind of intellectual framework to protect Islam and it’s attempt to enter every house in the West, while demonizing anyone who stands against it and calling them “colonizers”.
Columbia as an Intellectual Platform
Mamdani's importance also cannot be reduced to his relationship with his son. He occupies one of America's most prestigious academic platforms.
Columbia identifies him as the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, appointed jointly in political science and anthropology. He has also been associated with Columbia's Center for Palestine Studies and Center for the Study of Muslim Societies.
His work has earned substantial international recognition. Columbia notes that he has been included among leading global public intellectuals and has written extensively on political identity and violence.
This means his ideas were circulating through elite academic institutions decades before his son entered elected office and has only increased with the billions of dollars pumped in by Qatar to make his radical ideas seem intellectual, rather than the violent jihad it actually represents.
The Question New Yorkers Should Ask
The provocative question is not whether Mahmood Mamdani spent decades preparing his son to carry out an Islamic takeover.
The more substantial question is whether one of America's most influential postcolonial scholars helped provide the intellectual architecture for the political worldview his son eventually carried into City Hall. On Israel, nationalism, colonialism, Western power and Palestinian activism, the parallels are significant enough to merit investigation.
Mahmood Mamdani has spent more than half a century arguing that political institutions should be understood through histories of colonialism, identity and power. The frame work of oppressor versus oppressed that only sees white European’s as evil, while ignoring the modern day evils committed by the Islamic state. Zohran Mamdani now governs America's largest city while advancing politics shaped by many of those same questions.
That is not proof of a conspiracy, but proof that he’s been able to normalize an ideology which imprisons millions and violates human rights across the globe. It is something potentially more consequential: the movement of dangerous ideas from the university, into a family, into activism and ultimately into American governance.
