A burgeoning set of Muslim creatives and intellectuals are thriving amid the backdrop of Zohran Mamdani’s rise. We ask 18 of them about this historic moment in New York City life
Against the backdrop of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral rise is a dynamic scene of Muslim creatives and intellectuals who are helping usher in a new era for New York City. Their prominence represents a rebuke of the ugly Islamophobia that defined the period following 9/11, and is in many ways an outcrop of the mass movement for Palestinian rights forged over the last two years. We ask 18 Muslim New Yorkers to discuss their work and what this moment means.
How Muslim New Yorkers are changing the city’s cultural landscape
A celebrated Palestinian-American writer and poet, Hala Alyan explores themes of exile and belonging in her work. Based in Brooklyn, the 39-year-old hosts a popular live performance series called Kan Yama Kan (One Upon a Time in Arabic), which fundraises for causes from Gaza to Sudan to reproductive justice. Her recent memoir, I’ll tell you when I’m home, excavates her family’s history of displacement throughout the Middle East and the US, alongside her own struggles with infertility. A psychology professor at New York University, Alyan believes stories like hers resonate because audiences are hungry for connection. “People are quite starving for emotional touch, psychological touch, narrative touch, to be let into other people’s worlds,” she says. “That’s what art is – a conduit for curiosity, right?”
