Mahmood and Zohran Mamdani: Like Father, Like Son

As New York debates the sudden ascent of Zohran Mamdani—the democratic socialist assemblyman now aiming for City Hall—few have stopped to ask where his gospel comes from. His politics carry a familiar scent: Marxist suspicion toward capital joined to a prophetic fury at Israel and the United States. He speaks with the cadence of conviction, as if oppression itself were a sacrament through which history must pass to reach redemption. Admirers call it moral clarity. Critics hear resentment dressed as righteousness. But anyone who has read his father will recognize the pattern.

Mahmood Mamdani, one of Africa’s most decorated intellectuals, has spent a career turning violence into sociology. In his telling, terror is never sin but symptom, the rational expression of historical suffering. Zohran’s moral vocabulary—his reverence for resistance, his disdain for liberal scruples—flows straight from that inheritance.

In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), the elder Mamdani asks us to view political violence, even Islamist terror, as the unintended child of modernity. It’s a clever inversion: the bomber as victim, the West as midwife. The argument is humane, even seductive. But beneath its compassion lies a deep refusal—to name evil as evil. Mamdani’s sociology, eager to explain, ends up excusing. History becomes the confessional; repentance is replaced by causation. In his world, no one sins—structures do. The sociologist becomes the high priest of inevitability.

Mamdani’s claim that the suicide bomber is merely a “category of soldier” (2004, p. 222) shows the moral slide in miniature. He wants to reveal the shared logic of violence in empires and insurgencies alike. But in collapsing distinctions, he also collapses responsibility. To call the bomber a soldier is not neutrality—it is absolution. The murderer becomes modernity’s malfunction, not a moral agent. Evil is bureaucratized, as if history itself pulled the trigger.

This is not sophistication. It is anthropology gone astray—the illusion that humans are only products of circumstance. Christian Smith exposed this fallacy two decades ago. In Moral, Believing Animals (2003), he argued that every human act, however depraved, expresses a moral narrative: a vision of the good sought, however twisted. To explain an act without its moral drama is to misunderstand what it means to act at all. Mamdani seeks to see the bomber’s reason but not his ruin. Smith would call that a failure of realism—the blindness of those who confuse context with conscience.

The temptation is ancient. Mamdani’s sociology continues the Enlightenment project of replacing theology with history—sin recast as design flaw, not rebellion. Augustine saw the danger long ago: to deny evil as a corruption of will is to deny what makes us human. In The City of God, he warned that evil is not substance but disorder—the soul’s decision to prefer self over truth. Mamdani’s structuralism leaves no space for such decision. In his universe, systems sin, not souls. Evil migrates from the heart to the geopolitical spreadsheet—a soothing move for the academic conscience, but a hollowing one.

Reinhold Niebuhr diagnosed this maneuver with precision. Modern thinkers, he warned in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), humanize sin until they erase it. In explaining evil as circumstance, they drain it of judgment—and thus of redemption. Mamdani falls squarely into that trap. His compassion is sincere, but it is compassion without repentance: empathy that stops just short of truth. Niebuhr’s realism offered the harder mercy—to see evil as both understandable and damnable. Mamdani’s sociology offers the soft counterfeit: understanding without condemnation, love without holiness.

The political fruit of such thinking is poisonous. Once sociology forgets sin, politics forgets accountability. Mamdani teaches us to read every act of violence as the shadow of oppression. Once that logic hardens, evil becomes a privilege of the powerful, and justice becomes vengeance sanctified by theory. Hannah Arendt saw this coming. Nowhere is this moral inversion more visible than in the new respectability of antisemitism disguised as anti-imperialism. Under the banner of “decolonization,” the oldest hatred has found new idioms—Jewish existence recast as domination, Jewish survival as oppression. What once spoke in the accents of theology now speaks in the grammar of theory. Mamdani’s framework, which reads every conflict through the lens of structural power, cannot comprehend a people whose very return to history defies victimhood. The Jew, to such a system, must either remain the oppressed or become the oppressor; there is no room for covenant, only category. Thus compassion curdles into contempt, and moral clarity into moral cruelty. Antisemitism, reborn as critique, becomes the final proof of a worldview that has forgotten evil’s oldest mask: the conviction that some evils do not count because they come from the wrong victims.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil—not its triviality, but its depersonalization. Mamdani’s heirs are not nihilists; they are historicists. They believe that by fixing the structure, they will redeem the soul. But the last century taught the opposite: evil outlives every revolution because it is not structural—it is spiritual.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue (1981), described what happens when a culture loses the grammar of the good. We are left with the fragments of morality—slogans about justice detached from any vision of virtue. Mamdani’s sociology lives in that rubble. “Structural injustice” becomes the only vocabulary left, a phrase that explains everything and redeems nothing. It tells us why men kill but not why they must not. A science that cannot speak of conscience or sin can describe the world endlessly, but it will never save it.

Christian Smith’s later work offers the way out. In To Flourish or Destruct (2015), he restores sociology as a spiritual science—a study of creatures made for meaning, capable of glory and depravity alike. To understand violence rightly is not to dissolve its moral weight but to bear it. The sociologist, like the theologian, must look for the sacred within the social—the eternal drama of good and evil playing out in human time. True compassion begins not where judgment ends, but where redemption becomes possible.

Mamdani’s project sought to humanize the demonized. That much is noble. But to humanize without judging is to misunderstand humanity itself. The very capacity for moral judgment—the knowledge of good and evil—is what defines us. A world that only explains will end by excusing; a politics that only empathizes will one day justify the unjustifiable. If we are to recover moral sanity, we must relearn what Mamdani’s generation unlearned: that the heart, not history, is the first battlefield.

The saga of the Mamdanis is more than a family story; it’s a parable of modern intellect. It captures the civilizational impulse to trade the drama of good and evil for the anesthesia of systems and structures. Mahmood Mamdani built a sociology of violence that explains everything yet redeems nothing. His son turns that inheritance into politics, draping theory in the moral fervor of activism. Both are animated by compassion—but compassion severed from truth is only cruelty with good manners. Our task, as thinkers and citizens, is to recover a moral realism that sees both sinner and sufferer as human, neither demonized nor deified. Understanding is necessary, but without judgment it curdles into blindness. The Mamdanis remind us that our real crisis is not how to explain evil, but how to face it—especially when it comes wearing the face of the oppressed.

Only when we see evil clearly can we begin to resist it.

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References

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.

Augustine. (1998). The City of God against the Pagans (R. W. Dyson, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published ca. 426 C.E.)

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.

Mamdani, M. (2004). Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the roots of terror. Pantheon Books.

Niebuhr, R. (1932). Moral man and immoral society: A study in ethics and politics. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Smith, C. (2003). Moral, believing animals: Human personhood and culture. Oxford University Press.

Smith, C. (2015). To flourish or destruct: A personalist theory of human goods, motivations, failure, and evil. University of Chicago Press.