NYC's Muslim and Sikh communities mark 25 years since 9/11; Mayor Mamdani's South Asian story in focus

Two stories this week illuminate the place South Asians occupy in New York City — and the distance the community has traveled in a generation. Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, New York's Muslim and Sikh communities are reflecting publicly on the discrimination and stigma they faced in the aftermath, a conversation that is both a reckoning and a measure of how much has shifted. And in the mayor's office, Zohran Mamdani — whose South Asian, African, Muslim, and Hindu heritage is the subject of a major profile in City and State New York — represents the most vivid demonstration of that shift yet.

NYC's Muslim and Sikh communities reflect on 25 years of post-9/11 stigma

CBS News New York published a feature on the Muslim and Sikh communities of New York City and their experience in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks — a story timed to the 25th anniversary of those attacks in 2026. Twenty-five years is a long arc, and CBS News chose to mark it not only with images of memorials but with accounts from community members who lived through the years when wearing a kufi or a dastar made a person a target for suspicion, harassment, and in some cases violence.

The Sikh community was among the most immediately and visibly affected. Because Sikh men's turbans were visually associated by some, in the immediate panic after the attacks, with a generic image of Muslim or Middle Eastern identity, Sikh Americans faced a wave of discrimination and violent incidents that had nothing to do with their faith. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Mesa, Arizona, was murdered four days after the attacks in what became the first hate crime killing formally linked to post-9/11 backlash. In New York City, the Sikh community — concentrated in Richmond Hill, Queens, and in communities across the borough — found itself fielding questions and hostility from neighbours who confused turban with threat.

For Muslim New Yorkers, the years after 9/11 brought a different but pervasive experience: surveillance, social suspicion, and the quiet humiliation of being treated as inherently suspect in a city many had chosen precisely because it had historically felt like a place that did not demand constant explanation of one's identity. South Asian Muslim communities — Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian Muslims concentrated in Jackson Heights, Jamaica, and Ozone Park — were among those most affected, facing both official scrutiny and neighbourhood hostility that lasted years.

Twenty-five years on, the landscape has changed substantially. Both communities have built advocacy organisations, elected representatives, and claimed visible places in New York's civic life. The Sikh Coalition, founded in the days following September 11 specifically to document and respond to discrimination, has grown into a significant legal and advocacy organization. Muslim New Yorkers have seen members of their community rise to elected office, hold cabinet positions, and shape public policy. CBS News's choice to bring these communities' voices forward in 2026 reflects recognition that their experience is a central thread in New York's September 11 story — one that deserves to be told alongside the stories of first responders and families at Ground Zero. [2]

Mayor Zohran Mamdani — South Asian, Muslim, Hindu, New Yorker — steps into the national conversation

City and State New York published a profile of Zohran Mamdani framed precisely by the complexity of his identity: Muslim, Hindu, African, South Asian, New Yorker. That headline alone is a document of how different the city's politics look in 2026 from what was imaginable in 2001. Mamdani won the 2025 mayoral race and became New York City's mayor, carrying a heritage that is itself the product of South Asia's complex global diaspora: his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Ugandan-born intellectual of South Asian descent who became one of the most prominent political theorists of his generation; his mother is Mira Nair, the acclaimed Indian filmmaker whose work spans continents and cultures.

Zohran Mamdani grew up between worlds — Uganda, India, the United States — and his political identity has absorbed that complexity. He represents a Queens district with one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the United States, and he ran for mayor on a platform that drew from the economic concerns of working-class immigrant communities, including South Asian New Yorkers in Richmond Hill, Jackson Heights, and the Bronx.

For New York's Desi community, Mamdani's presence in the mayor's office is a landmark. To have a mayor whose South Asian heritage is not a biographical footnote but a central frame for how he is publicly understood — and how he understands himself — marks a shift in what is possible in American city politics. The City and State profile's framing of Mamdani as 'Muslim, Hindu, African, South Asian, New Yorker' is not a list of boxes checked; it is an argument about how New York has come to hold multiple, overlapping belongings simultaneously.

Mamdani's mayoralty has not been without controversy. City and State's reporting in the period of the profile references his public relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a source of significant attention. But his standing as a South Asian-origin politician who holds the mayoralty of the country's largest city gives the Desi community a visibility in national civic life earned through decades of political organizing, community investment, and civic engagement. The profile in City and State is worth reading not just for what it reveals about one politician but for what it says about the community whose experience — in multiple senses — shaped him. [3]

Sources: [2] CBS News · [3] City & State New York