This is a freedom struggle
A Muslim, a priest, and a rabbi get on a bus...
(epistemic status warning: Much of this comes from first-hand accounts recorded long after the event.)
In 1965, a prisoner in Alabama used his one phone call to contact the Ugandan Embassy in Washington, D.C. Uganda had only just won independence, and the embassy didn’t exactly have a legion of attachés to field these calls, so it was Ambassador Solomon Bayo Asea himself who listened to the young man’s story. He was a Ugandan citizen, he said, and was less than a year into an undergraduate fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. He’d been roughed up and arrested while protesting outside the capital building in Montgomery.
“What are you doing,” asked the ambassador, “interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country?”
“This is not an internal affair,” the student responded. “This is a freedom struggle.”
He was there because local student protestors, from the Universities of Alabama and Tuskegee, had put out a nationwide call for help. Activists were trying to march from Selma to Montgomery, protesting the denial of the vote to Black southerners. That nonviolent protest was being met with violent, sometimes deadly, resistance. Students in the SNCC, which at the time stood for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had decided to open up a second front in Montgomery.
Mahmood Mamdani had come to the U.S. planning to become an electrical engineer. But in the U.S., he discovered, for some reason that meant taking a lot of liberal arts classes, and he began to be seduced by the humanities. Moreover, this was a college campus in the sixties, so he also very quickly found himself growing his hair long, wearing jeans, and becoming more political than he’d ever been, despite growing up during the fight for Uganda. He didn’t have a lot of context, but he’d learned enough to answer the call.
He boarded a charter bus with other Pitt students and some local clergy. Stan Goldberg, another student on the bus, remembers fending off theological discussions from Father Carroll and Rabbi Rubenstein. Priests, rabbis, and imams were everywhere at these protests. The rabbis, wanting to be just as visible as the collar-wearing priests, wore yarmulkes. Many of the Black protestors started wearing them too, calling them “freedom caps.” Counter-protestors did not miss the Jewish presence.
I’m emphasizing the Jewish involvement here because today, when I google Mahmood Mamdani’s name, I’m seeing a lot of articles calling him anti-Semitic. Most of them were written in the past week. I don’t believe he is.
The Language of Justice
Alabama was even less interested in sparking an international incident than Uganda was. The Ugandan embassy made a call and got their citizen released from American jail. But, of course, Mamdani was now on record as a seditious foreign national. A few weeks later, he got a surprise visit from two FBI agents.
Which was pretty cool! “Just like in the movies!” he remembers thinking. They didn’t arrest or deport him or anything, just asked him some leading questions about some guy named Karl Marx, who he’d never met. The next day, he went to the library to look him up. From that point on, his fate was sealed: he’d been corrupted from an apolitical engineer to a political scientist and academic.
His life continued to force him to think critically about his own identity. When he graduated and returned to Uganda, he thought of himself as an African—he believed in pan-African nationalism. But Idi Amin and his followers saw him as an Asian invader.
Mamdani was born in India, but his family moved to Uganda when he was young. They were part of a boom in Indian immigration to East Africa, driven by British railway projects. After independence, people began to blame their continued poverty on people like Mamdani. When Idi Amin took power in 1971, one of his first acts of despotism was to expel all South Asians.
Idi Amin was almost always framed as a “Black supremacist,” and there’s some truth to that framing. But, fresh from the American civil rights movement, Mamdani was reluctant to view his exile that way. Amin was speaking in racial terms, but the root causes of the hatred also included political and economic grievances. Asians in East Africa were benefiting both from independence and from the legacy of colonial racism. Their initial advantage in being able to afford better bribes had turned into, Mamdani would write later, an “informal apartheid.”
I realised that Amin spoke the language of justice, however crudely, and that was the reason he was able to ride the crest of a historic wave of popular protest.
He was always indelibly marked. In Pennsylvania he was an African. In Africa he was an Indian. In India he was a Muslim. There wasn’t a national identity he could belong to.
Okay, there is one place where people like him belong, but for a long time he resisted its pull. The U.S., he told an interviewer, was a “habit-forming society.” If he came to New York City before learning who he was, he worried, he’d melt into the pot and disappear.
So he moved from country to country, university to university, figuring it out.
The War of All Against None
I’d be doing Mamdani’s long career a disservice if I tried to summarize his entire philosophy in this space. Humans are complicated, the world is big, there’s no good model of people that reduces to a slogan.
But he already had the core of it when he called the ambassador from Montgomery jail. A state is only legitimate if, and to the extent that, it serves the welfare of all the people under its rule. Oppression is therefore never an “internal affair” because an oppressor is never a rightful sovereign.
This doctrine, when combined with his lifelong commitment to nonviolence, implies a global struggle for freedom. But it’s not a struggle between two sides—if anybody is meant to be losing, you’re doing it wrong. Or we could say that all of us are rightfully on the same side, in a struggle against oppressive systems and ideologies. We don’t embody oppression or being oppressed; we participate in one, the other, or both.
Some of this only crystallized after Mamdani finally stopped kidding and moved to New York City. He’s been a professor at Columbia University since 1999. In 2002, at an anti-war teach-in, he watched students grapple, uncomfortably, with the idea of Israel as a “settler-colonial state.” The debate reminded him the most, he wrote, of his Tanzanian students in the 1970s grappling with the same question about Liberia. In both, the people being described as “colonizers” saw themselves as returning home, ending a brutal diaspora their ancestors had been forced into. It was a narrative with more than a little truth to it. Maybe they weren’t entitled to the land they were seizing, but they were certainly entitled to freedom and safety.
The problem was this modern idea that freedom and safety can only be granted by a benevolent nation-state. Coupling an ethnic or cultural identity to a state necessarily means excluding some of the people who live there. It doesn’t matter whether you call it nationalism, colonialism, separatism, or supremacy—the ideology of the nation-state is inherently one of genocidal violence.
Jews and Muslims, he said in an interview last year, demonstrably need a safe homeland. But since violence can never be a guarantee of safety, the only way to establish one is to abandon the idea of an exclusive state, and return to the model of diversity that existed, for example, in the Iberian Peninsula before Spanish nationalism. Safety for Jews and Muslims today, he says, means New York. The New York City metropolitan area is the world’s second-largest Jewish city, and the world’s fifth-largest Muslim one. It’s a safe place for us, without either of us claiming it.
That’s another way the freedom struggle crosses borders. If New York became a worse place for Jews, Israel would, as a pretty direct consequence, become a worse place for Palestinians. Fighting anti-Semitism in New York is part of the fight for a free Palestine.
Or, in other words…
Globalize the Intifada
Mahmood Mamdani’s son, Zohran, is running for mayor of New York City. As of this writing, he’s a very heavy favorite to win. That’s despite falling into a classic trap recently—he answered a sensitive question, not like a politician, but like an academic. His interviewer, Tim Miller of The Bulwark, asked him how he felt about the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
His answer emphasized that he sees anti-Semitism in New York, especially today, as a real and important problem. But, when pressed, he said that he didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of censoring, or even censuring, words in themselves. “Intifada” doesn’t mean violence to everybody, he said. And it certainly doesn’t inherently mean violence against Jews. The word, he said, “has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw ghetto uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means struggle.” That line, which must be his father’s words falling out of his mouth, has been the fodder for some fierce attacks.
What he said next, not so much.
And as a Muslim man who grew up post 9-11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that’s where it leaves me. With a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe.
I’m pretty sure that Zohran Mamdani’s win would be, as we say, “good for the Jews.” He’s the standard-bearer for one of the few ideologies in the world that doesn’t, at the end of the day, want to kill us. A Muslim mayor making speeches in defense of American Jews would have a rare level of authority.
So I’m beyond frustrated that not all Jewish organizations see things that way. B’nai B’rith, the people who marched at his father’s side in 1965, are talking about organizing against him. They see him as a threat, and I suppose he is. Their equivocations, their conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, may finally be undone.
Politics has been kind of awful recently. Let’s take the win.