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 and 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 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 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.
But that night at the Beacon has stayed with me. I imagined my son at eight years old, running down the same Queens streets I grew up on. Would he inherit the fear I learned at his age or something softer and freer? What I want for him is a city where pronouncing his name in Arabic is not an act of resistance. Where being Muslim is not a political crisis but a simple, unremarkable truth. Yet hope, for marginalized communities like mine, has never been enough. Our safety has always been something we’ve had to create for ourselves, whether through organizing, community, or just through the quiet belief that we deserve more.
A few weeks into Mamdani’s term, that work is continuing—in Astoria, in Jackson Heights, in Bay Ridge, in Harlem. Across WhatsApp chats and protest lines and healing circles. Across the classrooms where young people teach each other to intervene against hate. Across the mosques, delis, and bodegas and in living rooms where families whisper the same prayer: Let us be safe here. For us, a Muslim mayor is a milestone, but it is not a guarantee.
But what gives me faith is not just Mamdani’s election; it’s also the people who made it possible. The aunties, the delivery workers, the students, the organizers, the hijabis who continue to show up with trembling courage, the immigrant mothers building safety from scratch—they are the reason I believe my son might inherit a world gentler than mine. My son is being born into a story that is still being written. A story full of risk and beauty and resilience. A story where we fight for each other because we have learned that no one else will.
That is the New York I want him to know.