By Mustafa Akyol
Sunday, January 04, 2026
“The first Muslim mayor of New York City.” That is how
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, an unexpected star in American politics, is often defined
in news stories these days. And just like every other remarkable “first” in
politics, this excites some people, while stoking fears in others.
So it was with John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic to
become president of the United States. Some Protestants
worried that he would be more loyal to the pope than the U.S. Constitution,
and would use his presidential powers to pursue a sectarian agenda: He would,
they warned, criminalize birth control, funnel tax money to Catholic parochial
schools, and even persecute evangelicals.
Some recent fears raised about Mamdani—such as that he is
a dangerous “jihadist” or oppressive “Islamist” who will put New York women in
burqas—sound similarly cartoonish. Indeed, if anything, Mamdani has more in
common with secular progressives than traditional Muslims, let alone the
hardline Islamists, as noted by some of his more reasonable critics. “He wants
to make New York an ‘LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city,’” as Sadanand Dhume of AEI noted
in the Wall Street Journal, adding, “it’s hard to think of an idea less
likely to resonate with the Muslim Brotherhood or the mullahs in Iran.” A New
York Post editorial
also advised its readers, “Don’t go down the ‘Islamist’ rabbit hole,”
explaining that “Mamdani shows no sign of interest in anything like that.”
The real issue to discuss about Mamdani’s political
vision may be what he does show interest in, which is “democratic socialism.”
This, to be fair, is not “communism,” as some right-wing
commentators sometimes label all too quickly. Communism, which produced some of
the worst dictatorships in modern history, targets all political, economic, and
civil liberties in the pursuit of a totalitarian utopia. Democratic socialism,
as seen in Europe, is much softer, where a highly redistributive welfare state
co-exists with private property and free enterprise.
As explained
by my Cato Institute colleague Michael Chapman, however, even in the
“democratic” version of socialism, government interference in the economy
“distorts market processes, producing inefficiencies and crises,” and
ultimately erodes prosperity. A better future for New York lies not in “further
centralization or state control,” Chapman writes, but what has built the Big
Apple in the first place: “individual freedom, entrepreneurial energy, and the
rule of law.”
If Mamdani were to embrace these values, where might he
go for inspiration? As surprising as it may sound, his Muslim faith, informed
by the message of the Quran, would be a good start. Indeed, for all the
hyperventilating about Mamdani’s supposed jihadi brand of socialism, there is
just one glaring issue: Islam and socialism actually don’t go well together.
Instead, as a religion with a strong free market tradition, Islam is much more
compatible with capitalism.
To see why, one should go back to the very founding
moment of Islam in early seventh century Arabia.
Its prophet, Muhammad, began preaching monotheism to his
polytheist society at the late age of 40. Before that, for about two decades,
he had another job as one of the successful merchants of Mecca, the Arabian
city which itself was the hub of regional trade. That is also true for some of
his earliest followers—such as Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman—who became pillars of
the new religion and the immediate successors, or caliphs, of the prophet.
It is no wonder both the Quran and hadiths (sayings) of
Muhammad are filled with an abundance of commercial terms and an appreciation
of free trade. “Do not wrongfully consume each other’s wealth,” the Quran commands, “but trade by mutual
consent.” Muhammad acclaims
the “honest merchants,” and praises commerce as the key vehicle by which God
distributes His blessings among people.
These teachings in Mecca soon found an application in
Medina, where Muslims established a new order after their historic migration in
622 C.E. The very first institution Muhammad founded in this city was,
unsurprisingly, the mosque. The second one was more worldly. As the 15th
century Muslim historian al-Samhudi reports,
based on earlier narrations,
Muhammad went to an open space, stamped its ground with his foot, and said to
his followers: “This is your market … do not let any tax be levied on it.”
A few years later, when prices went up in this tax-free
Medina market and some of his followers asked him to lower them, Muhammad
refused, saying, “Allah is the One Who fixes prices.” It was a theological
precursor to Adam
Smith’s “invisible hand.”
In other words, “Muhammad was not a socialist,” as the
French historian Maxime Rodinson (who himself was a socialist) put it in his
seminal 1966 book, Islam
and Capitalism. “There are religions whose sacred texts discourage
economic activity,” Rodinson also observed, adding, “this is certainly not the
case with the Koran, which looks with favour upon commercial activity” and has
“nothing against private property.”
Moreover, these market-friendly teachings of Islam set
the tone for early Islamic civilization. In just a century after Muhammad’s
death, through rapid military conquests that stretched from Spain to India,
Muslims established not only a vast empire but also an extensive free-trade
zone where Islamic law safeguarded private property, protected markets, and
enforced contracts. This environment fostered the rise of a diverse
entrepreneurial class—mostly Muslims, but also Christians and Jews—who
pioneered “archetypal tools of capitalism,” as American economic historian Gene
W. Heck demonstrated in his 2006 book, Charlemagne,
Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism.
A more recent (and brilliantly readable) work on this
topic is Early
Islam and the Birth of Capitalism by Benedikt
Koehler, a scholar at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Here
Koehler demonstrates how medieval Muslim merchants advanced innovations such as
“the corporation, business management techniques, commercial arithmetic, and
monetary reform,” which were later adopted in Venice and Genoa, and then in
broader Europe.
Such Islamic contributions to Western capitalism are also
evident in daily language. The numerals you use every single day are called
“Arabic numerals” for the simple reason that they were introduced to Europeans
by the Arabs—with origins in
India. The check you cash at a bank is derivative
of the Arabic word sakk, which means a written document. And
“tariffs”—the big term of the past year—come from ta‘rif, a word “from
bygone days of Arab trade,” as one Wall Street Journal writer put
it.
The medieval Islamic civilization also produced a genius
who wrote the theory of its economic practices: the North African polymath Ibn
Khaldun (who died in 1406), who, in
the words of European economist Dániel Oláh, shared “very similar ideas as
Adam Smith,” hundreds of years before the Scottish philosopher. One of his
insights—that low taxation leads to higher tax revenue—was picked
up more recently by American economist Arthur Laffer and President Ronald
Reagan, as I
have previously written in The Dispatch.
All this means that capitalism—the best wealth-generating
system in human history—is not alien to Islam. Muslims can in fact take pride
in their own civilization’s role in its development.
In contrast, socialism has a much more recent history in
the Muslim world. It gained prominence only in the early 20th century, largely
by capitalizing on anti-colonial sentiments that arose as an inevitable
response to European imperialism. In the 1920s, communist parties emerged in
Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Iran. By mid-century, a few
Islamist thinkers, such as Mustafa al-Siba’i—the leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria—began advocating “Islamic
socialism.” They emphasized the Quran’s deep concern for the poor and
needy, but unlike classical Islamic practice, which relied primarily on private
charitable endowments (awqaf), they called for a powerful centralized
state to enforce top-down “social justice.”
Yet aside from certain Islamist variants, which also influenced
Khomeinism, socialism in the Muslim world—peaking in the 1960s and
1970s—was predominantly a secular ideology, at times fiercely anti-religious.
Its final major stronghold was the Ba’athist regime in Syria, a brutal
dictatorship that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of its own people,
which was finally toppled in late 2024 by Islamist-led rebels. It was no
coincidence that, having endured decades under a socialist system, the new
authorities quickly signaled a major shift, announcing
plans to “adopt a free-market model and integrate Syria into the global
economy.”
With this direction, Syria’s new leadership was only
affirming a pattern well noted by The
Economist: “The Middle East’s most religious politicians are often its
most capitalist as well.” This is because they have long suffered enough under
socialist dictatorships, and there is a much more authentic model, Islamic
capitalism, that they evoke and revive.
It is unfortunate that the very socialism that failed
terribly in the Muslim world— as it did elsewhere—found new life on American
campuses, where young minds were charmed by its alluring advocacy for the poor
and the downtrodden. This may also help explain Mayor Mamdani’s attraction to
it. But let’s hope that his “very
rational” personality, to borrow President Donald Trump’s words for the
mayor, prefers facts over ideology, and actually lifts up New York City, which
we should all wish to see. In the meantime, let’s hope more Americans grow
comfortable with a Muslim mayor. This would in itself mark a positive step
toward the fuller integration of Muslims—a small
minority of about 1 percent of the population—into this great nation of
diverse faiths and backgrounds. Let Americans also recognize that Muslims—just
like Christians, Jews, and others—are not a monolith and hold a wide spectrum
of views. While some embrace socialism, many others definitely do not, and for
very good reasons.
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