Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration was built around a simple, pointed image: New York’s first Muslim mayor taking the oath of office on a Quran, and not just any copy but a pair of books that tie his story to the city’s. The 34‑year‑old democratic socialist, a Ugandan‑born South Asian who ran on affordability, used a historic Quran from the New York Public Library alongside his grandfather’s and promised to govern “expansively and audaciously” without backing away from the platform that got him elected.
Just after midnight, in the old City Hall subway station beneath City Hall Park, he took the official oath with New York Attorney General Letitia James reading the words as he rested his hand on the two Qurans. The station itself — tiled arches, skylights and chandeliers closed to regular riders since 1945 — was picked to underline how central public transit is to his idea of the city, a museum piece for a system he says needs to work better for the people who still ride it every day.
The NYPL volume once belonged to Afro‑Latino historian Arturo Schomburg and now sits in the Schomburg Center collection, a choice the library called “a significant moment in our city’s history” for hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have never seen their faith centered in a mayoral inauguration. An Associated Press feature, Zohran Mamdani chose a Quran full of symbolism for his mayoral oath, lays out those basics in straight news language — the midnight subway‑station ceremony, the Schomburg Center Quran and the fact that it is the first time a New York mayor has taken the oath on Islam’s holy book.
The legal and legislative fights over rent freezes, free buses and new taxes will come. What lingers is the sight of a mayor taking his oath on a Quran in a subway station most riders only glimpse through a train window, treating visibility itself as part of the job.