What Mahmood Mamdani’s New Book Reveals About Zohran’s Politics

When Zahran Mamdani rose on the political scene in New York earlier this year and won the preliminary elections of the Democratic Party in the city, many wondered about the type of leader that he would make for the largest and most global city in the United States if he would become a mayor after the general elections in November.

From the heights of the banking sectors, real estate and media, the Medina Foundation looked at this possibility through deep concerns and even the explicit hostility that gave the 33 -year -old Mamdani identity as democratic socialism. Many of the great Jewish population in New York City, especially the older voters, objected to its support for Palestinian rights and for its previous use of the slogan “the globalization of the uprising”, which he now says he will avoid or think.

Others raised questions about Mamdani’s identification as an African American in an unsuccessful request for university study to attend the University of Colombia years ago. For the skeptics, as a possible student, he was manipulating or decepting, and he plays with the United States -rich and rich agreements of the ethnic identity. For Mamdani, whose parents go back to India but spent his childhood in Uganda, where his father grew up and enjoyed citizenship, there was much less here than Al Ain meeting.

It is important to remember that for most voters, at least in the town’s introductory elections, none of these questions raised uninterrupted objections. As far as the spokesperson for the candidate, his accurate dress and ready -made smile, as well as his steadfast focus on the high cost of living in New York, this may be a statement about the number of American cities that have become more international and open in the world, even at a time when the federal government has turned during the era of US President Donald Trump into migration.

Although no one can know any kind of certainty of any kind of leader like this young political expatriate who may turn to him if he is elected, it is possible, however, say a little about the family in which he grew up. Through a kind of coincidence, Zahran Mamdani’s nomination coincides with the publication Slow poison: Eddie Amin, Uri Museini, and the manufacture of the Ugandan stateWonderful notes by his father, Mahmoud Mamdani, a famous researcher for politics and anthropology at the University of Colombia. His mother, Mira Nair, is the Punjabiya that grew up in a Hindu family in India, famously famous as a film director, with credits, including Mnnalitan wind wedding ceremony The Academy Award candidate Peace Bombay! Since Mahmoud Mamdani began working in the notes years ago, and because of the long times between completing and publishing the writer, there is a little opportunity because he could form the story with his son’s workers’ campaign in mind.

Through another wonderful coincidence, one of the great intellectual concerns in Mahmoud Mamdani was the role of identity in national policy, especially how ethnic, ethnic and religious minorities secure their places against the background of a different and very dominant majority. It is a topic that is repeated through many of his books, and his new memoirs about Uganda are not different.

Al -Mamadani Bir was originated by the ethnic Indian fathers in Kampala, Uganda, a coastal colony in East Africa. He grew up in a neighborhood that was the racist separation an integral feature of British rule. As a boy, this meant playing in “sweat quotas”, studied in officially specific Indian schools, and praying in “racist mosques”. He asked, “How the descendants of a middle -class Asian family collapse from their political horizons that they pledged to race and distress.” In a temporary answer near the beginning Slow poisonHe said: “The political awakening began in the United States and matured in Dar Al -Salam,” the largest city in the neighboring Tanzania and the site of the birth of his grandfather.

Mahmoud Mamdani said that when he was a child, he was feeling his birth in India, unlike Uganda, as all his ethnic Indian friends came. It may be a modest coincidence, but it seems that this warns of his son’s insistence to include Africa in his university application. The Indian birth was the birth of an Indian biography, due to his temporary father’s transfer to India to marry before following up university education. He was born in 1946, and describes himself as “one of the midnight children in India”-in a reference to the Booker Booker Rushdie’s novel, in which the protagonist was born in the middle of the night on August 15, 1947, at the moment of India’s independence and his violent division, which also led to the creation of Pakistan Muslim. As Muslims of Gujarati, he left this effectively the Mamdani family without a home in India. After witnessing his attachment to Uganda and Africa, Mahmoud Mamdani wrote that he had not visited Googists for his predecessors for the first time until 2008.

It is striking that the Mamdani family will witness another abstraction in Africa. After Mamdani completed his work at Harvard University, he returned to Uganda in July 1972. In the same month, Ayda Amin’s dictator and one of the main topics in Slow poisonHe announced that all people of Asian origin will be expelled from the country, causing the family to move to Tanzania.

It’s the details about However, the period of the Mamdani family in the United States, which provides the deepest ideas about the type of formative effects that are likely to receive the young young candidate, Zahran Mamdani. Mahmoud Mamdami was one of the 23 Ugandans who received a scholarship to study in the United States based on Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962. He left for America with the intent to become an engineer, but at the University of Pittsburgh, like most American colleges, he was asked to take choices and discover his love for political science – and human science in general.

He is eager for a deeper experience of the United States, Mamdani wrote that during the summer of 1964, he bought a seasonal ticket on the Continental Trail Road and launched a bus to California, and visited a variety of cities along the road. Las Vegas left Liu Mexico, he asked the driver if he could stop praying – one of the rituals of his religion. “People, we have a Muslim with us. He wants us to stop for ten minutes so that he can pray.” The driver submitted the request to vote, and the passengers agreed unanimously. They got out of the bus, formed a circle around him, and monitored silently a recitation of the verses from the Qur’an. One can only wonder how such a request will be in America today during the Trump era.

In 1965, during his third year in Beit, Mamdani narrated that the sign of announcing the conversation about the civil rights presented by the non -violent coordination committee, one of the most important active groups that called for the rights of African Americans. At the end of this event, he wrote that he “left the hall and the direction of the bus” heading to Montgomery, Alabama, in the heart of the separate south.

“The experience in Alabama was a turning point in my political development. On that night, we slept in a black church, and we sing one protest song after the other. The next day we went to open land where large names of civil rights, including Martin Luther King spoke about the importance of this struggle, and transcended it by virtue,” then wrote the words of James Foreman, who speaks important. “If you do not let us sit at the table of democracy, we will explode them.”

This reflects his overwhelming identity with Uganda and East Africa, there is no hint in Mamdani’s account that he knows that even after the terrible violence that India lived during the division, it immediately granted voting rights to its citizens, regardless of religion or race from the moment of independence. In contrast, despite its status as the oldest democracy in the world, the United States was still struggling towards this goal in the 1960s.

Later, when the demonstrators walked on Montgomery, they were almost nominated by the police and were transferred to prison. Mahmoud Mamdani used his single phone call to reach the Ugandan ambassador to the United States, who benefited from him because of “intervention in the internal affairs of a foreign country.” He replied, “This is not a strange issue.” “Did you forget that we got our independence only a few years ago[?] This is the same as the struggle for freedom. “

Once again in a house after a month, Mahmoud Mamdani said that the FBI was knocking on his door to interrogating him. They wanted to know what Karl Marx thought. He answered that he never met him, and the interpretation that Marx believes that “the wealthy money should be taken and distributed to the poor.”

“It looked like a great idea,” he wrote in remembering this moment. He later went to the library to search for the topic and wrote about that time, “I would like to remember myself: The FBI introduced me to Karl Marx!”

After his involvement in the civil rights movement, it was a natural step for the global Mamdans to join the prosperous movement to combat war, which was protesting the supply of American weapons and deepening combat participation in the Vietnamese Civil War. This was followed by his education and colleagues at the Fletcher College of law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and at Harvard University, but Mamdani was never for the sake of the Sounta himself in Ivory Tower. “I learned the importance of political activity, and linked the learning of the classroom to general mobilization.”

In 1972, these instincts led him to Uganda, where he would have lived an unusual life, and he moved again and repeatedly between academic circles, regional policy and initial progressive policy. And as much as it is great, the details of re -interaction with Africa, which occupy most of the writers, go beyond the range of this column.

Children are not always cut from the same fabric as their parents, but the similarities in this case seem very clear to ignore them. He is his leg, of course, but Zahran Mamdani’s policy seems widely inspired by his father’s life, and why should they not be? This means more than easy and mysterious political posters, such as democratic socialism. It is not black, but its association with Africa looks quite real, as does his commitment to excluded, marginalized, and oppressed. Like his father, who is talking about his predecessors with elegance (along with Swahili and Arabic), Zahran appears natural and comfortable in wearing multiple caps.

In the city like New York, where the wealthy people are foolishly thrived alongside people who have been abandoned their own devices, this can seem increasing and even threaten. If it is like his father, though, the younger Mamdans are driven by more sense of society and the need to include more than it is for class revenge or confiscation, which exceeds the ability of the mayor of New York.

What seems is that if Zahran Mamdani is elected, the greatest city in the United States will go beyond politics as usual and enter into a season of clean experiences that will get the world’s attention.