Last Friday, June 20, after 104 days of unlawful incarceration, former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was released from an ICE prison in Jena, Louisiana. Mahmoud returned to New York City, where he was reunited with his wife, Noor, and where he got to hold his infant son for the very first time. Noor had been pregnant when Mahmoud was kidnapped; his illegal detention robbed him of witnessing the birth of his child.
Meanwhile, at the top tip of Manhattan, New York State Assemblyman Zohran Kwame Mamdani began a 13-mile walk for the ages, traversing the length of the island on foot. It was an act of political theater not without risk, exposing the candidate to the kind of prolonged interrogation from the public most politicians avoid like the plague.
But the dangers inherent in Mamdani’s long walk were not merely political. His life had been threatened just days before. As the New York Post reported, “A vile bigot left state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s office an expletive-filled, anti-Muslim voicemail Wednesday threatening to bomb his car—one of several recent death threats the mayoral contender has received, his campaign and police said.” Yet instead of retreating from the public sphere, there he was, walking with no visible security, letting all comers shake his hand and hug him, as if channeling God’s Biblical commandment in the Book of Micah to “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
Throughout his odyssey, which took him from Inwood Hill to Battery Park, Mamdani was smiling. If you followed along on social media, it was hard to find a moment when his face was not lit up. Mile after mile, the man was beaming.
Similarly, when Mahmoud Khalil was released from one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, he, too, was wearing an irrepressible smile.
Both men have repeatedly sacrificed their personal safety for their political beliefs, which are rooted in coalition building and collective action.
Their emancipatory walks happened on the same date, and there are numerous parallels in the lives of Khalil and Mamdani. Both of these young Muslim men are immigrants. Both have captured the imagination of the city, the country, the world over the last few months. Both are deeply connected to Columbia University—Mahmoud (30) as the most famous face of the 2024 student protests, and Zohran (33) as the son Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at the embattled Ivy.
They have both spoken out forcefully against the genocide in Gaza, and for this they have made some of the same enemies (including Bill Ackman, the billionaire who went to war against Columbia’s student protesters and who is, incidentally, also funding Andrew Cuomo’s campaign.)
But perhaps their most striking similarity is the way in which Khalili and Mamdani both inhabit the politics of vulnerability. Both men have repeatedly sacrificed their personal safety for their political beliefs, which are rooted in coalition building and collective action. This politics of vulnerability stands in stark contrast to the cynical, inhibited politicking of men like Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. The current president and former governor once, decades ago, called New York City their home, but they’d never have the courage to walk its streets now. Both because they would never risk their own personal safety, and because their politics of domination—starving Gaza, bombing Iran, sexually harassing women with impunity—are wildly unpopular in Gotham.
Like Black, Latino, and other “ethnic” males, Muslim and Arab men are often portrayed (in mainstream American politics, as well as in the press) as inherently violent savages. Brutes who are unable to control their animalistic passions and who must be brought to heel by cops, soldiers, and the righteous might of the liberal order. (Turn on cable news this week and you’ll hear plenty of talk about how Arab women are in so much danger from Arab men that their country must be bombed in order to liberate them.)
Yet here come Mahmoud Khalil and Zohran Kwame Mamdani. They are cheerful and vulnerable. They are unarmed. Their only protection from a world that wants to harm them, to erase them, is their conscience, their courage, and their good cheer. They seem to possess the same self-assuredness as Martin Luther King, another human rights activist who so profoundly embodied a politics of vulnerability that he was willing to sacrifice his life.
I got to witness Mahmoud in action when I reported from Columbia’s Gaza solidarity encampment in 2024. He was a student negotiator. He put his body, his name, and his reputation on the line to such a degree that he was targeted by the state. And even then he did not stop speaking. 104 days after his kidnapping, he walked out of prison wearing a keffiyeh, beaming, and with his head held high. When the Guardian asked him what he had to say to the Trump administration, he cheekily remarked, “Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this.”
Within 48-hours of his release, Khalil was back on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, addressing supporters and even protesting outside of Columbia University’s gates, not far from where he had been abducted in March. The whole point of kidnapping him was to scare other international students and migrants into believing that they, too, could be kidnapped if their political beliefs were found to be at odds with the foreign policy goals of the United States. Yet fresh out of detention, there was smiling Mahmoud—waving the Palestinian flag and exercising his constitutional right and moral duty, even though it made him vulnerable to further targeting by the United States government.
We trust their values, not because they try to dominate us but because they are vulnerable with us.
And then you’ve got Zohran, smiling through Manhattan. He’s smiling with Brad Lander, who he cross-endorsed in New York’s rank-choice primary, as they ride bikes together. He’s smiling with The Kid Mero in Washington Heights. He’s smiling with a food worker. He’s smiling with a young Black man outside a bodega. He’s smiling with a lady in a wheelchair. He’s smiling outside Koronet Pizza, where he asks the one question which, in New York, may be more controversial than asking someone about their position on Palestine (“Best slice in NYC?”). He’s smiling with a white bicyclist. He’s smiling with a group of hot, shirtless Black bodybuilders in Times Square. He’s beaming with the statue of former Mayor Fiorella La Guardia on Lafayette.
After walking for hours, he’s even smiling outside the Staten Island Ferry. And a few hours after that, he’s smiling with Spike Lee at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
So many of us are drawn to Khalil and Mamdani because of their ideas, of course, and because they both seem like genuinely lovely people, but also because they are men whose power lies in their vulnerability. We trust their values, not because they try to dominate us but because they are vulnerable with us. They put themselves in a position where they might be hurt. They walk humbly with their God.
And like King walking with Memphis Sanitation workers in his final days, as the cops unleashed dogs and fire hoses on them, there is great power in the strength of one’s vulnerability.
Compare this to the feckless impotence of Donald Trump or Andrew Cuomo. These men seem defensive and terrorized at all times. No matter how much money or security they have, they are bottomless pits of need and insecurity. Trump will send troops to Los Angeles, send bombs to Iran, and try to deport activists like Mahmoud because he is weak. Trump could never let himself be vulnerable, physically or emotionally, for one second; he is too frightened of the world.
The same is true of Andrew Cuomo. He couldn’t walk a block unescorted in New York City, let alone the length of an entire borough. He does public relations because he is scared of the public. If he walked the streets of the city he aims to steward, he’d be afraid of being confronted. Confronted for sexually harassing more than a dozen women. For disbanding the Moreland ethics commission. For defunding New York’s subways and public schools. Cuomo campaigns like far too many Democrats: by addressing a handful of mega-rich donors behind closed doors.
Trump and Cuomo will never feel safe because hoarding power and money will never make them human.
What makes us human is walking together, whether that’s linking arms at a college encampment or escorting someone to immigration court or rounding a street corner with a friend in a wheelchair.
The world is a dark place right now; the most powerful in our midst are using the politics of violence and fear to try to set the Middle East aflame.
But on the longest day of the year, two beautiful Muslim men showed us a better way: the power of walking in faith, trusting your neighbors, and believing in your ideas.
With strength and courage, they showed us how patriarchal violence might fall, and how the world might blossom, with a politics of vulnerability.
