First We Take Tehran, Then We Take New York - Are Mamdani and Khomeini Reading From the Same Script?

There are books you read once and never fully put down. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is one of mine. It belongs to that rare category of literature I think of as Kafkaesque: writing that seems absurd on the surface but cuts so precisely into the truth of how human beings actually function that it leaves you unsettled long after the last page. Kosinski understood something about us that most of us prefer not to examine — that we do not really listen to the people we elevate. We listen to ourselves, reflected back.

It’s a story about a gardener named Chance. When his employer dies, he is cast out onto the streets of Washington, D.C. for the first time in his life. He is nearly hit by a limousine belonging to the wife of one of the most powerful businessmen in America. She takes him in to recover. In the businessman’s living room, surrounded by power and wealth he cannot comprehend, Chance is subjected to small talk and asked about the economy. He says the only thing he knows: “In a garden, things grow — but first they must wither. Trees lose their leaves before they grow back stronger.” The businessman leans forward. A metaphor, he thinks. Brilliant. He repeats it to his colleagues.

Word spreads. Chance — now called Chauncey Gardiner, because someone misheard his introduction — is invited to meet the President. He is asked about the state of the nation. He says: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well.” The President quotes him on television that evening. Every person who met him heard what they needed to hear and filled the silence with their own hopes. By the end of the novel, he is being seriously considered for the presidency. He still only knows about the garden.

This story is telling us something we would rather not hear: that it is far too easy to make people believe. I am going to show you that through two men — Khomeini, who rode a revolution into Tehran in 1979 and turned one of the most sophisticated countries in the Middle East into a theocratic dictatorship, and Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, who is dismantling the city's unique fabric one executive order at a time. Two men, same playbook. Follow them with me and watch how free cities become dictatorships while everyone is busy celebrating the “free buses”.

Every garden begins with a question: who chose this soil, and what was buried in it? What turns a man into a destroyer? What is the wound that never closes, the moment that reorders everything that comes after it?

For Khomeini, the seed was death; his father was murdered before he could walk, his mother gone before he was a teenager. But personal grief alone does not build a revolution — it needs a theology. And the seminary in Qom gave him exactly that. At the heart of Shia Islam sits a wound that never healed: In Karbala. Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, rode out with 72 followers to meet a massive Sunni army, was surrounded, killed, and decapitated, his head sent to Damascus as a trophy.

For Shia Islam, this became the founding trauma — the proof that suffering has an address, that it has an enemy, and that the enemy is always the powerful force that crushes truth and justice in favor of worldly dominance. Khomeini absorbed both wounds — the personal and the civilizational — and spent decades fusing them into a single doctrine with a very clear enemies list: the Shah, who sold Iran's soul to Western money and dismantled clerical authority. America, the Great Satan, whose fingerprints were on every corrupt regime in the region. And Israel — the Little Satan — the outpost of Western imperialism planted in the heart of the Islamic world. The Sunni caliph who murdered Hussein at Karbala had a new face, wore a Western suit and spoke English.

Mamdani’s seed was indoctrination, and he tells the story himself, proudly. On the set of Mississippi Masala, a funder asked his mother about the film’s white characters. Her answer was immediate: don’t worry, they’ll be the waiters. Mamdani has cited this moment as formative — and it shows. What he learned from his mother’s arrogant statement was -not equality, but marginalization of whiteness as an act of justice. Whites in the background, holding the trays, decorative and subordinate. This is the founding myth he absorbed, and it is the exact hierarchy he has been building ever since — in his politics, in his appointments, in the way he governs a city that is supposed to belong to everyone.

His father provided the intellectual foundation. Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most cited post-colonial scholars in the world, a Columbia University professor whose books argue that suicide bombers are rational political actors responding to legitimate grievances, that the West is the structural architect of global suffering, and that violence against it is not terrorism but resistance. This is his work, and his son grew up inside it, breathing it like air.

Two men were handed a complete map of the world; on that map, the righteous and the enemy each had a name. Khomeini’s map was written in grief and scripture. Mamdani’s was written in postcolonial theory and served at the dinner table. But a map is a map — and both of them followed it to the same destination, two different soils, the same crop.

Khomeini spent decades in lecture halls and prayer rooms turning personal grief into political theology. The West was the new enemy, the Shah was its puppet, and he, the jurist, the scholar, the rightful heir of Hussein’s legacy, was the only man who could set things right. The establishment rejected him, and he was exiled to a small village in Paris

He did something no revolutionary had done before at that scale: he recorded his sermons on cassette tapes and smuggled them across the border. The tapes were duplicated in mosques, passed hand to hand in bazaars, played in living rooms across a country the Shah believed he controlled. The language was intoxicating — not dry theology but fire. “We will cut the hands of the foreigners from our country.” “The Shah is an agent of America, and America is the enemy of Islam.” “The oppressed will rise, and the oppressors will fall.” Simple. Binary. Total. Every grievance had a face, and the solution was revolution.

The world came to him; foreign journalists descended on that village outside Paris. Young Iranians flew in from across the diaspora to sit at his feet. He gave five or six interviews a day, and in every one he was the humble servant of the people, the reluctant revolutionary, the man of God who wanted only justice. The feminists saw a liberator. The Marxists saw an ally. The Western intelligentsia — including the philosopher Michel Foucault, who flew to Tehran and called the revolution a thrilling new form of political spirituality — saw whatever they needed to see.

When Mamdani arrived at Bowdoin College in 2010, the ideology his parents had built found its first institutional home — and he left a paper trail that nobody in New York bothered to read before handing him the keys to City Hall.

Over four years, he wrote 32 columns for the student newspaper, and the obsessions were consistent: Israel, which he called a colonial occupier engaged in "racist policies." Whiteness, which he argued held a "stranglehold" over American discourse and needed to be broken. He attacked fellow students who disagreed, accused them of racial blindness, and framed every editorial imbalance as evidence of systemic white domination. He was not a student exploring ideas; he was a student building a following — exactly as Khomeini had built his, one sermon at a time, among young people hungry for a simple map of who was guilty and who was righteous.

In 2013, while still a student at Bowdoin, he flew to Egypt — arriving just as the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, an event he witnessed as proof that Western-backed forces crush Islamic political power. He wrote his longest college piece about the experience, a romantic portrait of belonging. For the first time, he wrote, he fit. And that same year, his mother gave an interview to the Hindustan Times that said everything. "He is not an American at all," Mira Nair declared proudly. "We are not firangs" — a Hindi term for Westerners, used with open contempt. "He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian." This was a woman who had built her career in America, raised her son in New York, sent him to elite American universities, and was now governing the largest city in the country, proudly announcing that America meant nothing to their family. The contempt for America that had given them everything was not hidden but celebrated.

Mamdani co-founded Bowdoin’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and invited As’ad AbuKhalil — a man who argued that America had brought September 11 on itself — to lecture on campus. This was not a provocative booking by an idealistic student. This was Mamdani at twenty-two, curating his own intellectual circle — exactly as Khomeini had done.

After Bowdoin, Mamdani had the ideology but not yet the machine. Palestine had shaped him, the BDS movement had trained him. But hatred alone does not win elections in New York — it needs a vehicle, a language, and a crowd that can carry it into power without recognizing what it is carrying.

In 2016, watching Bernie Sanders — a Jewish senator from Vermont — declare himself a democratic socialist on a national stage, Mamdani understood something crucial: the revolution does not come from the outside. It comes from within. The beliefs his parents had handed him had not changed. What changed was the vehicle. The DSA was not just an organization — it was a movement systematically taking over the Democratic Party from the inside, reshaping it, pulling it toward an ideology that most Democratic voters had never voted for and never would.

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Being There was also from a time when Hollywood actually made great movies.

When we consider the books and movies from yesteryear and how those works of fiction have become today’s reality, it is scary.

A very excellent article. Thanks for posting

I would add that during the rise of Khomeini and Mamdani both were / are being used/permitted by present powers-that-be in their own political power games

Khomeini was protected by the West - first tacitly, then outright. The Shah kicked him out of Iran. He first went to Najaf in Southern Iraq. After a period, and realizing his danger, Iraq’s VP at the time, Saddam Hussein, wanted him out of Iraq. Iran, Iraq and with US present, attempted to send him to Kuwait or other Arab countries. He wound up in France. Khomeini meanwhile purposely deceived various US presidential administrations, especially Carter, telling all he was not anti-American and would protect US interests in Iran and the Gulf.

The same is occurring with Mamdani. The likes of Hochul, Schumer, the DNC circle around him, both wary of him, but supporting him, so as to both use his movement, and also not disrespect what they see as his wing of the Party.

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