The image drifts through American feeds like a half-remembered dream: grainy, sepia-toned women in 1960s Tehran laugh in miniskirts, cocktails in hand, neon signs bleeding into the night. “Iran before the revolution,” the caption sighs – a digital epitaph for a modernity America imagines it birthed.

This meme, shared with performative grief, erases the Shah’s SAVAK death squads, the feudal poverty, the US-backed dictatorship that birthed the revolution. Isn’t history. It’s colonial fan fiction. Progress, to the American gaze, means miniskirts and muted faith – a modernity measured in proximity to whiteness.

Now, the flicker of a live feed: June 24, 2025. Queens pulses with 36.6-degree C heat and disbelief. Thirty-three-year-old Zohran Kwame Mamdani – socialist son of a Ugandan Marxist scholar and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker – has toppled disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.

Beside him stands Rama Duwaji, 27, a Syrian-born illustrator whose ink-stained hands have animated Palestinian solidarity art for The New Yorker and the Tate Modern. They are the meme incarnate: Mamdani in his East African khanzu or sharp suits, Duwaji in minimalist linen, her Instagram feed (@ramaduwaji) a gallery of Brooklyn murals and keffiyeh-clad protesters.

Cosmopolitan. Educated. Unapologetically Muslim. The aesthetic is flawless.

Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji.

The backlash

*Cut.* The digital scream begins. Not nostalgia, but venom. Tabloids brand Mamdani a “radical fundamentalist”; Cuomo allies darken his beard in attack ads, splicing his image with 9/11 rubble. Groups funded by billionaires warn of disaster.

Why? Because though Mamdani has donned the costume of the memes, he is dismantling the script. He describes Gaza as a “genocide,” vows to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under International Criminal Court warrants, and promises free buses by 2027 funded by taxing millionaires.

Duwaji’s ceramics scream what the meme silences: plates glazed “Free Palestine”, animations of Israeli tanks crushing protesters . Her Nina Simone quote hangs like a grenade: “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.”

This cognitive whiplash isn’t accidental. It’s revelatory. The meme demands Muslims perform secularism only as aesthetics –assimilated in dress but silent on power. Mamdani and Duwaji shatter the fantasy. He advocates socialism, not sharia; her art weaponises beauty against empire.

Yet the moment Mamdani condemns Israeli policy, his Muslim identity – once rendered palatable by his pedigree and designer wardrobe – becomes the explanation. The label “fundamentalist” is activated, fashioned into a cudgel by decades of post-9/11 fear.

Split-screen America

Fade between two images:

Frame One: The 1967 Tehran nightclub. Frozen. Silent. Politically inert. Safe. A modernity America can pity and possess.

Frame Two: Mamdani’s victory speech: “I’ll be mayor for every New Yorker”. Duwaji’s Instagram: “Couldn’t possibly be prouder”. Alive. Unsilenced. Threatening.

The backlash exposes America’s acceptance as conditional. Duwaji’s client list that includes the Tate Modern? Ignored. Her pro-Palestinian art? Weaponised as “radicalism”.

Mamdani’s tenant advocacy in Queens? Erased. His policy platform – municipal grocery stores (funded by corporate taxes), a $30 minimum wage – in attack ads becomes “Soviet overreach”. Acceptance lasts only until sacred cows are gored: unwavering Zionism, capitalist dogma, American innocence.

Even their love story – meeting on Hinge, marrying at City Hall – is mined for suspicion. When trolls accused Mamdani of “hiding his wife”, he fired back: “You can critique my views, but not my family”.

The hollow idol

The meme endures because it is dead – a relic that allows Americans to mourn Muslims they never tolerated alive. But Mamdani and Duwaji are the ghost stepping from the frame. Their potential residency at Gracie Mansion isn’t just political; it’s a referendum on whether America can stomach the modernity it fetishises.

His coalition – 50,000 volunteers, young White voters flipping decades of political orthodoxy –embodies the complex, vocal Muslim presence the meme erases.

Where the meme offered miniskirts as symbols of liberation, Duwaji offers art as resistance. Where it promised silent assimilation, Mamdani demands redistributive justice.

Fade out

The meme was never about Iran. It was always about us. As Mamdani stands one election from Gracie Mansion, America’s reflection is clearer than ever: a nation clinging to its own fundamentalism – not of scripture, but of conditional belonging.

The real “fundamentalists” are those who demand modernity without justice, diversity without dissent, Muslims without voice. In the flicker between the grainy past and the vivid present, the illusion burns away.

What remains is a choice: confront the living – or keep mourning the dead.

Zakir Kibria is a writer in Dhaka. His email address is zk@krishikaaj.com.