“Logon ke dil badal gaye hain.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke these words in Urdu — my grandparents’ native language — in his inaugural address on Jan. 1. It means, “People’s hearts have changed.” As I stood listening to him, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I felt my world shifting.
I am a 20-year-old Muslim and Seattle University senior who grew up on the Eastside. My mother’s parents immigrated here from Pakistan during the Partition in 1947. They embraced their new home by opening The Souk in Pike Place Market and a restaurant. Seattle is my home, where my roots are planted.
Yet I wasn’t always sure I belonged. My peers were confused and uncomfortable about why I chose to wear the hijab. In my social studies class, Islam was only brought up when we discussed 9/11. Politics didn’t have a place for me — it was hard, cold and disappointing.
Mamdani’s campaign has touched my heart in a way I didn’t know politics could. Over Thanksgiving weekend, when a family friend suggested attending his inauguration, I immediately wanted to be a part of it. Several weeks later, I was on a plane to the Big Apple, ecstatic but also nervous and uncertain.
On Inauguration Day, I waited for three hours in 20-degree weather — wearing four pairs of pants and my hands shoved deep into my jacket pockets — for the event to begin. City Hall loomed in front of me, and a crowd of tens of thousands had engulfed me. I was pleasantly surprised at how friendly the New York City police officers were.
Once the inauguration finally began, I felt a jolt of recognition when Imam Khalid Latif — director and co-founder of the Islamic Center of New York City, and a man I’ve prayed with — took the stage. He started with a call to Allah, echoing words of Islam that I hear every day, sharing that intimate spiritual space not just with my fellow Muslims and me but with the entire world.
After being sworn in as New York City’s Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams stunned me with a personal truth about his childhood that could have been about my own.
“Little Black boy, you were worth it, you were always worth it,” Williams said.
He wasn’t just speaking to his younger self; he was speaking to me and to others who were never explicitly told, but nonetheless believed, we have no place outside of our dreams.
It all came home for me when Mamdani took the podium. His message could be boiled down to three words: “I see you.” He described meeting a Pakistani woman, Samina, who spoke to him in Urdu, and he quoted her: “Logon ke dil badal gaye hain,” or, “People’s hearts have changed.”
It was only as I watched this first-ever Muslim mayor of New York on the jumbotron, and heard the language of my ancestors being broadcast around the globe, that I realized just how much hurt I had been holding inside, and how it was gone. For the first time that day, I was shivering all over.
Mamdani started his speech with “I stand alongside you,” and immediately I smiled, because at the end of the day, that’s all I and millions of others have yearned for, someone to stand beside us, fight with us, work with us, love with us, grieve with us and believe with us.
My mother called me the next day from home while I was still in New York. As I described my experience at the inauguration, my 9-year-old brother Hasan was screaming in the background, “Did you hear Zohran? Did you hear him talking in Urdu about Samina Aunty?!”
It was a seismic change in the political landscape. I spent my childhood feeling as if no one wanted to represent me. I no longer feel that way. And my brother won’t feel it, either. Mamdani’s inauguration showed us, along with millions of others, that we belong.
