In late September 2017, Palestinian American pastor Khader El-Yateem shared a photo of his campaign team from his bid to be elected to New York's City Council from Brooklyn's District 43. Palestinian American political organizer Linda Sarsour (far left, front row) took a knee with Zohran Mamdani (fourth from right, white shirt). El-Yattem lost the race. (@Khader El-Yateem/Facebook)
That photo would mark the start of a carefully constructed political project that, in less than a decade, would propel a now-34-year-old socialist newcomer to the precipice of running America’s largest city – even while campaigning with radical imams, some of whom have supported terrorists and terrorist financiers.
A Fox Digital investigation reveals that Mamdani’s rise was no accident. It was engineered.
"#MyMuslimVote Organizing Summit" with Zohran Mamdani, then the Democratic nominee for the 36th District to New York's General Assembly, Women's March cofounder Tamika Mallory and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed. ( MPower Change/email)
"We fund a range of civil society organizations that work to deepen civic engagement through peaceful democratic participation, counter discrimination including against Muslim Americans and advance human rights," a spokesperson for Open Society Foundations told Fox News Digital. "The grants that you cite all occurred years before the mayoral race, and we are a nonpartisan organization that does not fund political candidates and their campaigns."
Mamdani, Sarsour and the groups supporting Mamdani's campaign didn't return requests for comment.
MPower and Emgage have been part of a tight inner circle of 30 ethnic and religious groups, that also includes CAIR Action, the 501(c)(4) political wing of the 501(c)(3) Council on American-Islamic Relations nonprofit, the Islamic Circle of North America," "Muslim Action Coalition," Yemeni American Merchants Associations Inc., the "Bangladeshi American Advocacy Group" and "Desis Rising Up and Moving." They have pumped up Mamdani’s campaign with social media campaigns, canvassing, voters and buzz.
Altogether, they have annual revenues of about $24 million, and they have worked to promote Mamdani’s campaign with endorsements, fund-raising, social media campaigns and canvassing.
The result: a carefully constructed political career that mainstreams the socialist goals long embraced by Sarsour and fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
It’s a machine that is expressing itself in races from New York to Virginia, Minnesota, Texas and California with MPower and Emgage aligning with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Party to propel candidates who may share their views. In a campaign called "Defend and Advance," Emgage SuperPac is pushing Mamdani and Democratic Virginia Lt. Governor candidate Ghazala Hashmi as its "star candidates."
Emgage’s "Defend and Advance" roster of supported candidates and office holders includes Dearborn, Mich., Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.
"I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here," Hammoud recently told a Christian pastor who objected to a proposal to name a street in honor of a local man who had allegedly praised terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. "And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city because you are not somebody who believes in coexistence."
Emgage’s donations include $175,000 from a group little-noticed by political observers but important in Islamist circles: Sterling Charitable Gift Fund, based in Herndon, Va. It is part of a network of groups that FBI agents raided in 2002 as part of wider investigations into the funding of Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas. Federal prosecutors ultimately didn’t file criminal charges against any officials at Sterling Charitable Gift Fund.
MEET MAMDANI'S RADICAL ADVISORY CIRCLE THAT INCLUDES COMMUNIST ACTIVIST, ANTI-ISRAEL ADVOCATES
Activist Linda Sarsour, shown here at a demonstration in Manhattan's Foley Square, was an early backer of Mamdani's political aspirations. (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In 2018, Mamdani formally entered Sarsour’s orbit through the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, an organization she co-founded in 2013 to mobilize Muslim voters and elect progressive Democrats to local office. The Muslim Democratic Club of New York served as both incubator and amplifier for Sarsour’s political brand, one that fused progressive politics with an explicitly Islamist social identity. By December 2018, Mamdani joined the board, in an announcement in which the group said, "Help build Muslim power across the city with us!"
New York City Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, spoke to supporters at a canvass launch event in Prospect Park on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (Deirdre Heavey/Fox News Digital)
To push Mamdani toward the helm of the nation’s biggest city, the network extended far beyond activist circles. Central to Mamdani’s political ascent was a series of carefully cultivated relationships with clerics with some troubling views.
In January, Mamdani courted Imam Muhammad Al-Barr of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, visiting his mosque just months after Al-Barr had publicly prayed to "annihilate" Israel.
In May, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, the longtime imam of Brooklyn’s Masjid At-Taqwa, personally donated $1,000 to the Unity and Justice Fund. More recently, Mamdani met with Wahhaj and called him "one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community."
Wahhaj, who served as a character witness in the trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" later convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has a long history of calling for the exploitation of America’s democracy to further a conquest for Islam.
"You don't get in politics because it's the American thing to do," he said in a videotaped 1991 sermon. "You get involved in politics because politics can be a weapon to use in the cause of Islam."
Wahhaj has also denounced the U.S. government as "controlled by Shaitan," the Arabic word for the devil, urged Muslims not to befriend "non-believers," condemned homosexuality as "a disease of this society," and supported Islamic laws that punish sex outside of marriage with 100 lashes and stoning. In 2011, Wahhaj urged Muslims to donate to the legal defense of the since-convicted Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist dubbed "Lady Al Qaeda" for attempting to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Over the years, Wahhaj’s sermons have praised "jihad" without "a gun," called for an Islamic America governed by sharia law and urged the creation of an "army of 10,000 men in New York City."
Other imams now backing Mamdani’s mayoral run have also been controversial. Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a cleric leading the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, co-founded the Muslim Alliance in North America, alongside Wahhaj. In 2005, Abdur-Rashid publicly defended Rafiq Sabir, an American doctor who joined al Qaeda and was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison.
DNC EMBRACES SOCIALIST MAMDANI AS RESURFACED ANTI-ISRAEL REMARKS RAISE ALARM: 'BIG TENT PARTY'
Zohran Mamdani meets Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Yusef Abdus Salaam on Oct. 17, 2025. (@ZohranKMamdani/X)
For many Muslim political organizations backing Mamdani, these clerics are not liabilities but assets, serving as trusted gatekeepers to the city’s growing community of Muslim voters.
After Mamdani visited Wahhaj’s mosque earlier this month, he tweeted out a photo of the two with the caption: "Pleasure to meet Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders." When a firestorm ensued, several allies rose to his defense: Sarsour, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the leaders at Emgage Action.
Sarsour shared a selfie with Mamdani, beaming, like they did back in 2017, and wrote, "May Allah continue to bless and protect you."
A defiant Wa'el Alzayat, the executive director of Emgage Action, sent out a dispatch to followers on Tuesday, amid criticism for their political work, promising, "We are in this for the long haul."
Back in Minnesota, Al-Aqidi closely watched the defense of Mamdani.
"For over a decade, Linda Sarsour and her network of allies have built the Mamdani machine piece by piece: the institutions, the donors, the narratives and now, the candidate. There was no way they were going to throw him under the bus for one photo with one imam whom they happen to love," said Al-Aqidi. "Mamdani is the fresh face of a radical coalition, and I hope New Yorkers will reject him. Win or lose, one fact remains undeniable. His rise was not spontaneous. It was engineered and the machinery behind it is only getting stronger."
Al-Aqidi said; "I hope New Yorkers will shut the Mamdani machine down."
Asra Q. Nomani is the author of "Woke Army: The Left-Green Alliance That Is Undermining America’s Freedom," and the founder of the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative. She is co-founder of the Clarity Coalition and Muslim Reform Movement, opposing Islamic extremism and advocating for Muslim reform. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani on X.
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