Zohran Mamdani, Islam as Language, American Third-Worldism
As I see It – Part 2 by Zineb Riboua Oct 30, 2025
Zohran Mamdani and Strategic Islamophobia | Contending Modernities

“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

American Third-Worldism

There are many ways to chart the evolution of ideologies. Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement remains one of the sharpest accounts of how legal and political revolutions create new moral hierarchies. I do not contest his thesis, but I sense something deeper taking shape alongside it.

Perhaps this resonates more with me because I work in foreign policy, but I am always interested when domestic politics are refracted through international issues. Mamdani’s rhetoric on Israel, Islamophobia, 9/11, and minimizing Hamas’ atrocities does not emerge from the American civil-rights tradition, progressive politics, or constitutional thought. It stems from a decolonial vision of the world.

Three foundations sustain Third-Worldism and the political style it produces in the United States.

1. The first is the belief that imperialism is not an episode in Western history but its permanent feature. As Samir Amin argued in Unequal Development and Eurocentrism, capitalism depends on maintaining the periphery in a state of dependency. Anti-imperialism, therefore, becomes by definition anti-Americanism since the United States is cast as the final form of empire, the axis through which global exploitation flows.
2. The second is that the bourgeois persists. Third-Worldism inherits the Marxist critique of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class, but extends it to a civilizational and, often, geopolitical scale. The bourgeoisie becomes synonymous with the West, and capitalism becomes closely associated with Western modernity. Within that frame, the Jew is placed at the symbolic center of the system, identified with finance and cosmopolitan life. This produces a subtler form of antisemitism, and anti-Zionism becomes the ethical language through which anti-capitalism is expressed.
3. The third is the redefinition of the proletariat. For Marx, the proletariat consisted of industrial workers. For the Third-Worldists, there is a global hierarchy, global struggle, global cause, and therefore the proletariat becomes the collective of the world’s oppressed peoples.

I believe Mamdani draws, consciously or not, from this tradition.

The Future of Third-Worldism

Several forces explain why Third-Worldism is resurging today. I want to highlight three of them: Read More “American Third-Worldism”

Zohran Mamdani, Third-Worldism, and the Algerian Revolution
Third-World Resentment by Zineb Riboua Oct 28, 2025

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“We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.”
― Marcel Proust

Mamdani’s Third-Worldism

Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.

I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.

Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.

In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.

Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language

It is worth examining the language that shaped Zohran Mamdani’s worldview, a language that first crystallized in the late 1950s during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Jean-Paul Sartre transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself. Read More “Third-Worldism”