Last summer, when I was eight months pregnant, I found myself in the velvet–dark glow of the Beacon Theatre for a comedy show. At one point in the night—put on by Egyptian-American comic Ramy Youssef—Youssef pulled Palestinian-Algerian student activist Mahmoud Khalil onto the stage, and then, unexpectedly, Zohran Mamdani walked out—our Muslim mayor-elect and someone whom I had been working alongside for years as an activist. It was the political moment that even I, a Muslim political organizer born in Queens, could never have imagined.
My son shifted, kicked, and I pressed a hand to my belly. In eight years, he’ll be eight, I thought. In eight years, inshAllah, he may grow up having only ever known a New York City where a Muslim was the mayor. A city where his name won’t be a liability. A city where his mother’s hijab won’t be a target. Maybe.
When I was eight years old, this city had already taught me how quickly your sense of belonging can be taken. It was after 9/11, and the FBI abducted and surveilled people who lived on our block. Overnight, uncles who used to bellow with confidence on Steinway Street shaved their beards and called themselves Joe instead of Youssef, Moe instead of Mohamed, Al instead of Ali; whatever felt safest. Women traded hijabs and abayas for baseball caps and jeans, anything that might help them blend into the background.
My identity shifted from Egyptian to Muslim to just suspect in the span of a week. And even when I found the courage and self-love to embrace the hijab, even when I found the softness in myself to pronounce my name as my mother did—Rana, with a gentle r—I also found myself face-to-face with a world that did not know how to look at a girl like me except with distrust.
The first time a man tried to pull my hijab off, the force of that moment stayed with me longer than his grip. It changed the trajectory of my life. I became a martial artist, then a self-defense instructor. At 16, I founded Malikah, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women feel powerful and safe.
For almost 20 years, I taught Muslim women in New York City how to defend themselves against shoves and hijab grabs, techniques literally created in response to the violence we endure. And for almost 20 years, I’ve watched every election cycle stir up the same old demons: Islamophobic fearmongering, coded language, explicit threats.
The night at the Beacon Theatre should have been pure joy. A Muslim mayor-elect in New York City would have been unthinkable when I was a child. It should have been my peace. But even as we celebrated, the context was impossible to ignore. Zohran’s campaign was a battleground, amplified by trolls, bots, and political opportunists who understood exactly how to weaponize his—as well as my and one million other people in this city’s—identity. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that after Zohran accepted the Democratic Party’s candidacy for mayor, anti-Muslim and xenophobic tweets reached unprecedented levels, with 35,522 messages variously labeling Zohran as a “terrorist” or a “radical,” reaching more than 1.5 billion people. And all that did not occur in a vacuum, but amid an increasingly hostile political environment both across the country and abroad. At the Malikah Safety Center, the mutual-aid hub I run, we heard from hijabi nurses who were followed home from working the night shift. Workers who were fired for their political opinions. Teenagers disciplined for wearing pro-Palestinian pins. Grandmothers afraid to speak Arabic on the bus. This city has not yet learned how to keep Muslim communities safe. If anything, our Muslim mayor’s visibility has only revealed how fragile the progress has been.