Maya King | NYT • March 12, 2026
As a wave of Islamophobic attacks began to spread late in the New York City mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani was quick to respond. He traveled to a mosque in the Bronx to denounce the offensive remarks, surrounding himself with a group of key allies: Muslim faith and community leaders.
It was a telling show of support and kinship among an emergent voting bloc that was quietly coalescing within their communities for years, but whose political power was only beginning to emerge.
Now, with Mr. Mamdani at the helm of City Hall, Muslim New Yorkers are moving to expand their foothold in the city’s organizing networks and to build on their progress after the mayoral election. And they have focused their efforts on the Bronx.
On Thursday, a group consisting mostly of Muslim organizers and faith leaders in the Bronx voted to join the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest nonpartisan organizing networks.
The group’s New York cohort has been at the forefront of a decades-long interfaith push for affordable housing and public safety, and includes the heads of the city’s most influential Black churches, community centers and synagogues. The group has also developed a cadre of organizers in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan who have trained in government accountability and community activism.
Now the foundation will incorporate a broader coalition under the moniker, the Bronx First, which includes dozens of churches and community centers as well as more than 40 mosques into its network. By the end of the evening, the self-funded coalition raised nearly $160,000 for their efforts.
Their aim is largely oriented toward policy goals, with their leaders more focused on accountability than access.
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On Thursday, roughly 2,000 people across faiths, generations and socioeconomic statuses filled an auditorium at Fordham University to vote to formalize their addition to the coalition. Their attendance marked a unique show of political power among groups of people not often seen in concert with one another.
“We all face the same challenges as everybody else in the community,” said Haji Dukuray, a board member with the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx who helped organize Thursday’s event. He added, “It’s great we have a Muslim mayor, but that’s just an example of when we come together as a group, how well we can do.”
A handful of speakers were critical of Mr. Mamdani, whose absence some perceived as a slight against the group that helped power his win months earlier. Mr. Dukuray highlighted the mayor’s failure to attend in his opening remarks, to some sneers from the crowd.
“We invited him, and he decided to ignore us. That’s a huge mistake on his part,” he said. “But we don’t need him here to organize ourselves.”
The group affirmed its top demands of city leadership, touching upon public safety, affordable housing and mental health resources. The group has kept a particular focus on the city’s affordable housing supply — efforts that have intensified amid ongoing housing and food affordability crises that have already pushed out hundreds of thousands of longtime residents.
But the group’s newer Muslim members have underscored the need for more public safety measures in their communities, pointing to instances of gang violence that have harmed their members. The increase in detainments and deportations in cities also have added more urgency, as many in the group are immigrants from West Africa and the Middle East.
Mr. Mamdani, a Muslim South Asian born in Uganda, brought his message of affordability to the city’s mosques and Islamic community centers during his campaign. His candidacy galvanized a record number of the city’s Muslim voters, who turned out in droves for him, and pushed his opponents to expand their campaign outreach to Muslim communities.
Democratic candidates have not heavily courted Muslim voters before Mr. Mamdani’s campaign. And when they did try to make inroads, their messaging to the bloc was often flawed, organizers said. The disinterest among Muslim voters was especially pronounced in the Bronx, where turnout has historically been the lowest of the five boroughs.
Still, Muslim New Yorkers more than tripled their turnout in the last mayoral election, growing from nearly 22,000 voters in the 2021 race to just over 66,000 in 2025, according to the polling firm L2.
Many Muslim leaders have been reluctant to become politically engaged and warned congregants to be wary, seeing politics as a corrupt and untrustworthy system. But in the past few years, more have come to believe that not becoming involved would only hurt Muslim communities, especially in the face of quality affordable housing shortages. The shortage has contributed to tragedies like the 2022 fire that killed 17 people — many of them Muslims from West Africa.
“This mentality of ‘listen, we’re here to do well for ourselves and our communities and to show our neighbors that we’re good people’ has kind of shifted over to ‘we’re being treated like crap and need to empower ourselves,’” said Afaf Nasher, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization. “This is not the Muslim community trying to gain power for power’s sake.”
