Zohran Mamdani, Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism

As I see It - Part 2

“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

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American Third-Worldism

There are many ways to chart the evolution of ideologies. Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement remains one of the sharpest accounts of how legal and political revolutions create new moral hierarchies. I do not contest his thesis, but I sense something deeper taking shape alongside it.

Perhaps this resonates more with me because I work in foreign policy, but I am always interested when domestic politics are refracted through international issues. Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel, Islamophobia, 9/11, and minimizing Hamas’ atrocities does not emerge from the American civil-rights tradition, progressive politics, or constitutional thought. It stems from a decolonial vision of the world.

Three foundations sustain Third-Worldism and the political style it produces in the United States.

1. The first is the belief that imperialism is not an episode in Western history but its permanent feature. As Samir Amin argued in Unequal Development and Eurocentrism, capitalism depends on maintaining the periphery in a state of dependency. Anti-imperialism, therefore, becomes by definition anti-Americanism since the United States is cast as the final form of empire, the axis through which global exploitation flows.

2. The second is that the bourgeois persists. Third-Worldism inherits the Marxist critique of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class, but extends it to a civilizational and, often, geopolitical scale. The bourgeoisie becomes synonymous with the West, and capitalism becomes closely associated with Western modernity. Within that frame, the Jew is placed at the symbolic center of the system, identified with finance and cosmopolitan life. This produces a subtler form of antisemitism, and anti-Zionism becomes the ethical language through which anti-capitalism is expressed.

3. The third is the redefinition of the proletariat. For Marx, the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. For the Third-Worldists, there is a global hierarchy, global struggle, global cause, and therefore the proletariat becomes the collective of the world’s oppressed peoples.

I believe Mamdani draws, consciously or not, from this tradition.

The Future of Third-Worldism

Several forces explain why Third-Worldism is resurging today. I want to highlight three of them:

• The first is the institutionalization of its language within universities. I am not opposed to decolonial studies per se. Understanding decolonization is crucial to comprehending global history. Civilizations rise and fall, people migrate, mix, and transform one another, and every culture bears the imprint of conquest, triumph, and exchange. In that abstract sense, the study of decolonization is a study of human history itself. However, what passes for decolonial thought in the modern academy often departs from this universal and honest inquiry. It has evolved from a study of historical processes into a moral enterprise.

  Students are encouraged not to analyze but to condemn, approaching history as a courtroom where the past must answer for the present.

• The second is the exhaustion of domestic progressive politics. The racial and sexual paradigms that once energized the Democratic coalition have reached saturation. Wokeism, built on individual identity, has failed to deliver material change. Third-Worldism offers a new kind of enthusiasm and energy through its collective, global, and seemingly economic aspects. It shifts the terrain from the personal to the planetary, reintroducing class and empire in a language that feels both righteous and modern.

• The third is the expansion of anti-Israelism under a broader ideological canopy. Within the decolonial imagination, Israel is not viewed as a nation among others but as the visible machinery of American power, the frontier through which U.S. hegemony operates. This view inherits a distinctly Marxist logic that interprets nations and conflicts as reflections of economic structures. Zionism, in this sense, represented a bourgeois accommodation to the capitalist order. Within this logic, Israel can achieve peace only when American power collapses, and America can only purify itself if it gives up on its ally in the Middle East, since Israel is portrayed as the instrument of that power rather than an independent state.

Unfortunately, I fear it will spread further.

China and Russia use the language of anti-imperialism, Global-South solidarity, and “multipolarity” to legitimize their ambitions. Moscow presents its wars as struggles against Western domination, while Beijing portrays its rise as a peaceful alternative to U.S. hegemony. Through their media, diplomatic networks, and development programs, both powers now disseminate this narrative across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, lending the ideology the support of state sponsorship and a global reach. There is nothing more effective in an asymmetric struggle than convincing the population of another country that it no longer deserves its own success. That is the essence of contemporary ideological warfare. The danger is that this message is gaining traction within the United States itself, carried by intellectuals and activists who echo its language. Figures like Alexander Dugin devoted their lives to this project.

More importantly, anti-Americanism, once the banner of the ultra-radicals, now passes as moral talk under the guise of “decolonization”. Older leftist movements broke apart over class and identity, but Third-Worldism binds them together through enmity. It subtly gathers cultural bitterness and moral righteousness into a single story with a single villain: the United States. It’s a winning talking point for groups that have exhausted all rhetorical options.

On Islam

I found a poll about Mamdani fascinating, as it revealed that he was unpopular among Protestants (36%), Catholics (28%), and Jews (16%), but favored by Muslims (50%) and voters with no religion (71%). One would expect Mamdani to command far greater support among Muslim voters.

Many today label every political expression of Islam as “Islamist,” but that is a mistake. Islam’s fusion of theology and politics gives it an activist edge, but its meaning is always contingent on who invokes it and to what end.

Under a decolonial lens, Islam assumes a different, explicitly ideological function. It is no longer treated as a faith rooted in ritual and law (sharia), but rather as a symbol of protest. In the decolonial framework, Islam is the religion of the oppressed, a universal language through which the marginalized can articulate resistance to empire and hierarchy.

Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, wrote that “religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other hand, the protest against real misery.” Religion, in his view, both reveals the suffering of man and gives that suffering a voice. Mamdani’s version of Islam follows this logic almost perfectly. Faith is a social instrument, a language of protest against injustice rather than a structure of divine truth. Islam, for him, does not reveal God, it reveals oppression.

The irony is that this worldview subverts Islam itself. It is almost amusing to see Gulf Arabs, whose societies still link religion to prosperity, honor, hierarchy, and self-assertion, mocking Mamdani on social media. Their reaction is revealing. They instinctively recognize that what he promotes is a sort of victimhood mentality that is incompatible with a religion that promoted merchants and warriors. Perhaps the Muslims in New York with this sensibility did not vote for Mamdani precisely because of this, and why they voted for Trump 2025.

In a way, what Mamdani does with Islam is similar to what Soviet ideologues once attempted to pursue. They tried to recast Islam as an anti-imperialist ally, a revolutionary theology compatible with socialism and valuable to the state. My point here is not to draw a crude parallel but to explain the ideological function that religion assumes in a modern, urban, and cosmopolitan setting. This helps explain why Mamdani, despite his background, fails to command overwhelming Muslim support.