The mayor who went down to the subway to rise to power. Zohran Mamdani turned his New Year’s Eve inauguration into a break from almost everything that had come before in New Yorkfrom the religion visible in the oath to the physical place where the transfer of command is staged.
You are Mamdani the first Muslim mayor of New York and the first to govern the city as the son of South Asian immigrants and born in Africa, something unprecedented in the history of the largest city in the United States.
He is also the first mayor of New York to swear about the Koran and not about a Bible or without any bookbreaking a symbolic tradition that came from the modern origins of the position. At 34 years old, he is also presented as one of the youngest mayors that the city has had in more than a century, which adds a generational break to the religious and origin change.
Two editions
At the midnight ceremony, Mamdani rested his hand on a Quran loaded with intimate memory: the copy that had belonged to his grandfatherwho emigrated, worked and prayed with that same book, held by his partner along with another historical Quran linked to the city. This gesture links the summit of New York’s municipal power with a family biography marked by displacement, diaspora and minority religiosity, turning a private object into a public symbol.
Along with that volume, the city lent a Koran from the Schomburg collection, about two centuries old, underlining that the Islamic tradition also has a long and deep-rooted history that deserves space in official rituals.
Background of the Quran
In the United States there was already a history of important officials swearing on the Koran, but none at the head of a megacity like New York. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, used Thomas Jefferson’s Koran in his symbolic oath, and later turned to the holy book again when he became Minnesota’s attorney general; later, figures like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib did the same when entering the House of Representatives.
In the United Kingdom and other Western countries, oaths by deputies, councilors or ministers on the Koran have been documented, but they remain exceptions to the norm of the Bible or the secular gesture of dispensing with any text.
Mamdani decided to take the oath of office first in a historic and closed subway station, the former City Halla vestige of the city’s first underground network that today is only visited on special occasions. He chose midnight on December 31, while on the surface New York celebrated the New Yearso that the event remained in an almost secret space, underground, while the party spread through the streets.
With that framing he turns the subway into a kind of secular temple: the place where the daily lives of millions of people take place becomes an altar of power, crossing faith, public infrastructure and political power in the same gesture.
Political liturgy
By taking the oath to the subway, Mamdani turns the commute into political liturgy: the scene normally associated with rush, low salaries and metallic noise is resignified as a solemn moment of inauguration. In front of the institutional staircase of City Hall or a classic setting, he chooses a platform, some rails and a ghost station, affirming that the true civic center of the city is the transportation system and not the marble of the municipal palaces.
The private oath, with barely twenty people present, seems designed to circulate on video and in photos, so that the country can see a mayor who symbolically kneels before the subway before before the building of power.
Progressive Zohran Mamdani takes over as mayor of New York.
Hours later, Mamdani experienced a second, more solemn and traditional inauguration: a public ceremony at one in the afternoon around City Hall, before a frozen crowd in the ‘Canyon of Heroes’. That second scene recomposed the classic liturgy – platform, music band, speeches and live broadcast – but it no longer erases the midnight gesture, but rather complements it, as if there were an intimate oath, underground, and then its official translation to the institutional surface.
During his inauguration speech at a ceremony before thousands of people, he promised a “new era” for the city and serve both the million people who voted for him and those who didn’t.
“I know that some view this administration with distrust or disdain, or see politics as permanently broken, and although only action changes ideas, I promise you this: if you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor,” said the councilor after the swearing-in, in which he was guided by leftist Senator Bernie Sanders.
Overall, the day inaugurates a double record: a mayor who enters through the front door of national politics, but who insists that his story is born in the underground of the subway and in the light of a familiar Koran.
The cost of the mayor’s office
In the middle of this double ritual, there is another minimal gesture that reinforces the idea of a power anchored in the everyday: the moment in which Mamdani pay exactly nine dollars to formally become mayor.
The law requires any elected official to submit his or her written oath to the City Clerk and pay a nine-dollar administrative fee, an amount that translates into what it costs three hot dogs in town, to underline the humility of the procedure compared to the enormity of the position.
Mamdani handed over just enough cash, signed a leather-bound book, and listened as the official confirmed that “now it’s official,” a reminder that even New York City Hall starts with something as prosaic as paying notary fees.