Recently, the 34-year-old Zahran Mamdani took the oath for the office of Mayor of New York. He took the oath on not one but three Qurans. Two of them were family heirlooms and another an old 18th- or 19th-century manuscript belonging to the New York Public Library. Mamdani is the 112th Mayor of New York City. Most of his predecessors are known to have taken oath on the Bible.
TRIUMPH OF ISLAM
It may be mentioned that Mamdani is of Indian origin, as his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a Gujarati Muslim, was born in Bombay in 1946. Mamdani belongs to the Twelver Shia sect of Islam. The majority of Shias owe their allegiance to this sect. Worldwide, the population of Shias is estimated to be between 170 million to 250 million. Most Shias consider Iran as their spiritual and temporal leader. Mamdani's emotional connect with Iran and Palestinians is overriding. In the elections, however, he managed to conceal his Iranian and Palestinian agenda in the cloak of revolutionary economic promises, and it worked because New York, being the global financial hub, is one of the most expensive cities in the world due to high housing, dining, and transportation costs; large presence of millionaires, i.e. 384,500; and general inflation. Mamdani's mayoral rise is not only a shot in arm for the Democrats, it is also being bandied as triumph of Islam. It was this mindset that drove Mamdani to emphatically display his Islamic agenda, by not just taking oath on a Quran, but three Qurans. The three Qurans had contemporary, ancestral, and historical message.
THE LONDON PARADIGM
The mayoral rise of Mamdani, when conflated with the mayoral rise of Sadiq Khan, of Pakistani Sunni origin, makes a strong geopolitical statement. Sadiq Khan's grandparents had migrated from Lucknow to Karachi after Partition. His father, Amanullah, and mother, Sehrun, arrived in England from Pakistan in 1968. In 2016, when Sadiq Khan went to Buckingham Palace to be administered oath, the Queen asked him as to which version of Bible he would prefer swear his oath. Sadiq insisted on Quran. The Palace did not have a Quran available. He nevertheless had brought his own copy. After the ceremony, when the Palace tried to return it, Sadiq insisted that they keep it for the next Muslim person. Sadiq has been serving as Mayor of London since 2016. During the 2016 election campaign as a Labour candidate, black flags were placed in backdrop during his speeches. Flags displaying white Arabic script on a black background is used by extremist
groups Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State. Sadiq is known to have links with the epicenter of “Cyber Jihad,” Babar Ahmed, a British-born of Pakistani descent. He spent eight years in jail on charges of cyber terrorism. He had set up his cyber terrorism website in the UK in 1996 and had deployed one server in the US. In 2022, the Pakistan government conferred the award Sitara-e-Pakistan for promoting UK–Pak relations, more than any other part of the Muslim world.
IMPACT ON INDIAN MUSLIMS
The Muslims of the subcontinent are overwhelmed by the ascendance of these two mayors in the West. Maulana Arshad Madani, the President of Jamiat Ulema Hind and head of teachers of Darul Uloom Deoband, said that while in India, a Muslim cannot even become a Vice Chancellor, he can become Mayor of New York or London. He further said that the present dispensation in India does not want Muslims to raise their heads and for 75 years Muslims have been sidelined in education, administration, and leadership. The morale of Muslims in India, he says, has been crushed. He then went on to say that the owner of Al Falah University is languishing in jail, and no one knows when he will be out. He castigated the Indian judicial system, wherein a prisoner is incarcerated in jail, even as charges remain to be proved.
Mr Madani needs to explain as to why no Hindu has become Mayor of Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, or Dhaka, and why no Hindu can become Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University or Jamia Millia. Why no Hindu can become principal of a madrassa? Why is Hindi in Arabic script being masqueraded as Urdu, a language of Muslims? How conveniently has Madani ignored the three Muslim Presidents, three Vice Presidents, four Chief Justices, five education ministers, and scores of Governors and Vice Chancellors? He may find it inconvenient to answer why no Hindu has been Chief Minister of J&K, pre-370 and post-370. He may have no answer to the question as to why Hindus were hounded out of the Valley in the beginning of 1990.
MAMDANI SUPPORTS INDIAN JIHADIS
There is no difference between Madani, Mamdani, and Sadiq Khan with regard to anti- India and anti-Hindu and pro-Pak agenda. No sooner Mamdani assumed office, he wrote a handwritten letter or note to Omar Khalid. It read: “Dear Omar, I think of your words on bitterness often and not letting it consume oneself. It was a pleasure to meet your parents. We are all thinking of you.” Khalid's family had met Mamdani during their visit to the United States in early December. The timing of the visit says it all. Apart from that, the priorities of Mamdani are suspect. After all, he is supposed to be the Mayor of New York, and with so much on his hands, his foremost concern is Omar Khalid, an urban jihadi, accused of conspiring and instigating the Delhi riots in 2020. He was the most visible character during the tukde-tukde protest in JNU in 2016, wherein Afzal Guru was
commemorated. His role in conspiring and instigating the Delhi riots was palpable across the media.
JIHADIS OF THE SUBCONTINENT AND AMERICA
The jihadis or Islamic extremists, particularly of the Indian subcontinent, suffer from strange psychology and have queer proclivities in the sense that they hate America, which off and on berates them, flails them, and in turn they declare America as the biggest enemy of Islam, give a call for jihad against it, but rush to the same America with their problems. Umar Khalid's father is no exception.
Umar Khalid has inherited jihadi and anti-India ideology from his father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas. Qasim had been a member of Students of Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The Indian government has designated it as a terrorist organisation and banned it in 2001 in the wake of 9/11 attacks. The jihadi terror outfit Indian Mujahideen is an offshoot of SIMI. The group is linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba and the ISI. Qasim and his jihadi patrons lobbied hard and managed to rope in eight American legislators in support of his son, Umar Khalid. The six lawmakers from House of Representatives are James McGovern, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Tlaib, Lloyd Doggett, and Jan Schakowsky, and the two senators are Chris Van Hollen and Peter Welch. All these eight lawmakers are from the Democratic Party. Rashida Tlaib is the first American Palestinian woman to serve in the US Congress.
DEMOCRATS AND ISLAMISTS
The linkage between Islamists and the Democratic Party has blossomed over time. It was Jimmy Carter from the Democratic Party who created the jihadi machinery through the aegis of Pakistan to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80s. It was Barack Obama, a Democrat, who converted Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria (AQIS) into Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It was Bill Clinton who created the monster called Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh with the help of Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI). The Pakistani terrorist attack on Mumbai on 26 November 2008 took place during the transition period from Republican dispensation to a Democratic dispensation under Barack Obama. It was on 4th November 2008 that Obama won the presidency, although he took office on 20th January 2009. The planners of 26/11 had probably factored this transition period because of the inherent flux, uncertainty, and confusion. The Labour Party in Britain also has great bonding with Islamists. Pakistan was the creation of Labour Party. These observations and conclusions are made on relative terms.
Obama'S BID TO
ISLAMISE EUROPE
Between 2014 and 2016, there was massive exodus from the Middle East to Europe owing to the Syrian Civil War, in which ISIS played the role of a catalyst. If the US had wanted, it could have restrained ISIS and prevented the exodus, but Obama had probably
decided to change the demography of Europe with the objective of making them Islamic countries in the long run. In this venture, he got more than willing help from Turkey. Obama bombed Libya in 2011 and had Gaddafi assassinated so that Libya could be destabilised and turned into a perennial source of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean.
NO SENSITIVITY FOR HINDUS
Mamdani, Madani, and the US lawmakers seem to be so dismissive and callous with regard to jihadi terrorism against India and, by their inference, Hindus. They rather appear to be collaborative. They have no qualms about Umar Khalid masterminding the Delhi riots. They have no misgivings about his lead association with the tukde-tukde gang. Madani has no remorse about the Al-Falah University acting as the epicenter of jihad against India by the doctor module. They have no sympathy for the victims of the blast near the vicinity of the Red Fort, carried out by the doctor module, in which at least 15 were killed and more than 20 injured. They are not alarmed that jihadi terror in India has graduated to the level of biological warfare to cause mass casualties. In that pursuit, the doctor module were engaged in preparing ricin, a deadly poison without any antidote, to be delivered through water supply lines or used in the form of aerosol to cause mass casualty.
MAMDANI SHOULD BE FAITHFUL TO QURAN
By overemphasizing his Islamic identity by taking oath on three Qurans, probably to cater to different generations of Muslims, Mamdani demonstrated his radical Islamic mindset. This assertion is nothing but Islamic fundamentalism. While being so insistent and emphatic about Quran, Mamdani and Sadiq Khan are expected to unscrupulously and faithfully follow its tenets, i.e. Darul Harb and Darul Islam, Kafir, Jizya, Sharia, triple talaq, nikah halala, Ummah, and Ghazwa-e-Hind. If Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, do not abide by these tenets, then they are mainly treating Quran as a book of political science, bereft of any spiritual content, undeserving of any kind of oath of fidelity.
CONCLUSION
And finally, how is it that Mamdani's mother, Mira Nair, a Hindu, who runs a company by the name of Mirabai Films, a product of Harvard University, had no impact on the ideological and religious grooming of her son? Her first marriage was with a Christian, Michel Epstein, an American photographer and author. Her secular past, however, did not have any tempering effect on her son. How did she allow her second husband, Mahmood Mamdani, an academician, to determine the Islamic upbringing of the son? Well, this is an ubiquitous phenomenon in marriages involving Muslims and non-Muslims. The adopted Western country of Muslims also has no tempering impact on their jihadi mindset; otherwise, both Europe and the US would not have fed jihadis to ISIS so profusely.
RSN Singh
(The content of this article reflects the views of writer and contributor, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
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