Zohran Mamdani’s dishonest take on the Koran and immigration

Andrea Widburg | Am Thinker | February 7, 2026

Whether it’s true delusion or garden-variety taqiyya, this interpretation is a snare that will destroy the West.

Mayor Mamdani explaining how Islam and Muhammad should inspire immigration. Screengrab via X 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is both a Marxist and a Muslim. Marxists, of course, are all about open borders because they know that flooding the West with the raff and scaff of the Third World, people who are communists, Muslims, criminals, welfare cheats, and other grifters, will swiftly destroy the West, paving the way for the socialists’ imagined paradise.

Muslims also support open borders…for Muslims. That is, they long ago realized that an enervated West, one that had ceased having children and embraced mindless Marxist “peace” slogans, was ripe for a slow conquest. Muslims move in, have children, and, as their numbers grow, they bully Westerners into submission, first gently and then, when they reach a critical mass, through brute force.

Things get interesting when the mayor of what is arguably America’s most famous city espouses both points of view—but has to make them palatable to the lumpen masses of Americans who avoid digging into the news, have three-second attention spans, are fascinated by the latest shiny objects, and, while assiduously ignorant, are nevertheless affected by media narratives.

Sadly, I know people like this. They’re the ones who say, “I don’t trust the media,” while then assuring me that the media narrative, which they’ve seen in passing on social media or at grocery store checkout stands, is correct.

Mamdani recently tried to thread the Marxist-Muslim immigration needle with a quite amazing statement about what the Koran has to say:

Here’s a transcript for those who don’t want to listen to him:

I think of the freedom from suffering that Buddhism teaches us is only possible if we remove the three poisons of desire, hatred, and ignorance from our daily lives.

We need not accept suffering as unchangeable. We need not treat hatred as the natural state. We have the power to set ourselves free.

And I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration. The story of the hijrah reminds us that Prophet Mohamed [presumably he interjects “peace be upon him” in Arabic at this point] was a stranger, too, who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina.

Surah Al-Nahl 16:42 tells us, “As for those who immigrated in the cause of Allah after being persecuted, we will surely bless them with a good home in this world.”

Or as the Prophet Mohamed [again, “peace be upon him”] said, “Islam began as something strange and will go back to being strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.”

If faith offers us the moral compass to stand alongside the stranger, government can provide the resources. Let us create a new expectation of City Hall, where power is wielded to love, to embrace, and to protect. We will stand with the stranger today.

Isn’t that sweet? Islam loves the stranger. Clearly, we must destroy America’s borders.

But if you know your history and pay a little attention to Mamdani’s religious discourse, you notice a couple of things, both in what he said and what he didn’t say.

First, note that quotation from Surah Al-Nahl: “As for those who immigrated in the cause of Allah after being persecuted, we will surely bless them with a good home in this world.”

Mamdani rushed past that one, but its meaning is remarkably clear: The only good immigrant is a Muslim immigrant, one who is relocating “in the cause of Allah.” These are the immigrants who will be blessed with “a good home in this world.” History shows us that Islamic theology interprets this to mean that the good home is obtained by brutally taking it from Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists by violent warfare and oppression.

Second, Mamdani nicely glosses over that little bit about Mohamed fleeing Mecca and finding succor in Medina. It’s true that, when Mohamed was kicked out of Mecca for his preaching and fled to Medina, he was treated kindly there, especially by the Jewish population.

However, what Mamdani left out is that, when the Jewish population looked at this “prophet” with his factually and morally bastardized version of their Torah, they refused to follow him and, according to him, violated treaties into which they had entered. (We know this history only from Mohamed’s viewpoint, not from the Jews’ point of view.) Mohamed then waged a violent war against Medina’s Jews. In victory, he slaughtered the men and enslaved the women and children.

The Jewish remnants of Medina relocated to Khaybar, where they again got under Mohamed’s skin. Once again, Mohamed prevailed. To this day, when Muslim fighters go to war against the world’s Jews, they shout “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud,” to whip themselves into a murderous frenzy.

In other words, the peaceful Mohamed of Medina swiftly morphed into the murderous Mohamed whose followers, within a few hundred years of his death, had effected the most violent and largest colonial takeover in the world, transforming once thriving Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities into bloody wastelands that soon became purely Muslim domains.

Mamdani is either a fool, which I doubt, or he is practicing taqiyya. Islamists would have you believe taqiyya means prudently hiding their faith in dangerous circumstances. The real world establishes that it means lying about their faith to trick gullible non-Muslims into letting down their guard.