Mahmood Mamdani says Palestine helped motivate son Zohran’s mayoral run

In early November, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election in a landslide, a victory that sent shockwaves across United States politics and galvanised the country’s political left.

It was a dramatic turnaround for a campaign that – less than a year earlier – had been polling at 1 percent support.

Among those who were most surprised was Zohran’s own father, Mahmood Mamdani.

“He surprised me and his mother,” Mahmood told Al Jazeera Mushaber reporter Allaa Azzam in an interview this week. “We wouldn’t expect him to become mayor of New York City. We never thought about it.”

But Mahmood, an anthropology professor and postcolonial scholar at Columbia University, framed his son’s electoral success as evidence of a shifting political landscape.

Zohran, for