Mamdani says U.S. should follow the example of Muhammad regarding migration

WATCH: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani suggests America should take notes from the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad

In denouncing ICE and Trump’s deportation of criminal migrants, Mamdani invokes Muhammad’s hijra from Mecca to Medina as a model for how Americans should regard immigration today. He quotes Qur’an 16:41: “And those who have emigrated for the sake of Allah after they had been oppressed, we indeed will give them good lodging in the world, and surely the reward of the hereafter is greater, if they only knew.” This gives the impression that Muhammad was enunciating a moral principle about welcoming the stranger, which Mamdani amplifies by also quoting a hadith in which Muhammad is quoted as saying that Islam entered the world as something strange and will leave it as something strange, which Mamdani bizarrely interprets as meaning that we should welcome the stranger.

The mayor does not mention, however, what it means in Islamic theology to “emigrate for the sake of Allah.” It means to move to a new land in order to Islamize that land, and impose Sharia upon it. That is what Muhammad himself did, according to Islamic tradition, when he moved from Mecca to Medina: he became in Medina for the first time a political and military leader as well as a preacher of religious ideas, and began making war upon the Meccans and others until all of Arabia was conquered and Islamized. To recommend that as a model for immigration to the U.S. is tantamount to recommending the conquest and Islamization of the U.S. As a knowledgeable and observant Muslim, Mamdani without any doubt knows this, but is counting upon the ignorance of his audience to give his words a benign patina.

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