Source: Substack, by Banafsheh Zand & Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour, October 31, 2025
Every generation of moral malaise and identity crisis produces its own Elmer Gantry. Elmer Gantry wasn’t merely a preacher thundering from the pulpit—he was a born salesman hawking salvation like a miracle tonic, peddling God the way a grifter sells cure-alls to the desperate, promising redemption to the guilty [1].
In 1970s Iran, that preacher was Ruhollah Khomeini, a cleric who knew nothing of governance yet convinced millions that sanctity could replace statesmanship. In our time, his heir in spirit is New York City’s Democratic candidate for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the son of a Ugandan Muslim scholar whose fluent doctrine on “decolonization” and “context” sells absolution to a Western academy weary of its own existence. Both speak in the register of salvation, relying on their listeners’ feelings of culpability. Both are men who have never had to build what they so confidently dismantle. Both men have relied on socio-political entrenchment, which does people’s thinking for them.
The Unqualified Prophet
Khomeini was no administrator, jurist, or economist. His only qualification for rule was his capacity for moral fury. That was precisely what made him attractive to Western intellectuals bored with policy and hungry for purity. His movement was not conservative but reactionary and revolutionary at the same time, and heavily influenced by leftist values—resulting in a mass immolation of Iran’s economy and a crusade against modernity and progress. In compensation, he offered state-enforced virtue.
The Islamic Regime he created nationalized industries, outlawed private enterprise, and fused religious absolutism with the radical Left’s hostility toward markets and individual rights. Its goal was not national preservation but permanent revolution, a quest for spiritual transcendence through worldly chaos.
Khomeini’s complete lack of administrative experience was repackaged by his admirers as moral authenticity. Ignorance became innocence; fanaticism became faith.
Zohran Mamdani’s career operates on the same principle. He has never managed a policy portfolio or governed an institution beyond the classroom, yet he pontificates on the moral architecture of entire civilizations. His lack of practical experience is what makes him appealing to a Western intelligentsia that prefers rhetoric over results.
From Saïd to Mamdani
To better understand from where Zohran Mamdani’s ideas originate, it is worthwhile to briefly examine his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The elder Mamdani’s s academic language descends from Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978) [4] and Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993) [4]. Saïd’s book reshaped Western academia, not because of its balanced scholarship but by elevating grievance to theory. His attack on Western imperialism was less an act of brilliance than an act of resentment—written from the self-victim posture that treated every Western idea as an instrument of domination. What he never addressed from his safe space in the same part of the world that he so vociferously chastised, was the imperialism, conquest, and cruelty within the Middle East itself: the Ottoman legacy, Arab expansionism, sectarian suppression, and modern despotisms that enslaved their own populations. Asad, following him, replaced politics with anthropology, portraying Islam as an insulated moral universe beyond external judgment. Both thinkers replaced analysis with justification, creating the moral asymmetry that scholars like Mahmood Mamdani later hardened into dogma.
Where Saïd warned against domination, Mamdani warns against judgment itself. He recasts every form of Islamist or authoritarian violence as an echo of colonial trauma. In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004) [5], he declares that “modern political violence is the child of colonial modernity.” The phrase sounds diagnostic; it is, in fact, theological.
Khomeini used religion to sanctify power; Mamdani uses theory to sanitize it. Each turns individual moral responsibility into collective ritual—a ceremony of guilt in which suffering is worshipped.
Foucault’s Fantasy and Mamdani’s Mirror
To understand Mamdani’s appeal, one must return to the late-1970s European Left, when Michel Foucault wrote from Tehran of a “political spirituality” that would transcend both capitalism and socialism. His dispatches in Corriere della Sera treated the Iranian revolution as metaphysical theater rather than a political event in the life of an entire nation [6].
Foucault in Tehran, 1979.
Foucault’s enchantment with Khomeini foreshadowed Mamdani’s enchantment with Islamist movements. Both men have mistaken spite for dignity and chaos for authenticity. Both imagine(d) that self-proclaimed purity of motive could replace the competence of institutions.
And both share one crucial trait: neither ever governed anything.
The American Pilgrimage: Kate Millett and the Left’s Delusion
Across the Atlantic, the American Left staged its own pilgrimage of disillusionment. Feminist icon Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, flew to Tehran in 1979 to celebrate what she believed was a revolution of gender and social emancipation. Invited by Iranian leftist women’s groups and the foolhardy Trotskyist poet Reza Baraheni, who still imagined Khomeini’s uprising could coexist with freedom, she arrived to find those same women already protesting compulsory veiling and the closing of schools to female students. Within days, she was denounced in the Iranian press, harassed by mobs, and forced to flee the country. Yet upon her return to New York, many on the American Left still insisted the revolution had been “misunderstood” by Western feminists. It was an early glimpse of a moral pattern that endures: the Western progressive’s need to project purity onto foreign revolutions—to imagine that zeal is justice and that piety cannot be tyranny.
The same craving for moral theater now animates the academic cult around Mamdani—an audience once again enraptured by eloquent promises of liberation from men who have never governed, never organized, and never borne the cost of their ideals [6][8].
Mamdani’s argument rests on a single assumption: that “understanding context” excuses wrongdoing. In his view, when a non-Western regime commits atrocities, those acts are not choices but reflexes — the lingering effects of empire. By framing violence this way, he removes accountability. Crimes become inherited conditions rather than deliberate policies.
Within this logic, the actions of dictatorships lose their perpetrators. When Iran tortures dissidents or censors journalists, Mamdani treats these as reactions to colonial trauma, not decisions made by a ruling class. The result is moral inversion: those in power are portrayed as victims of history, while the actual victims — prisoners, silenced writers, executed protesters — are reduced to theoretical symbols.
This is what the Iranian philosopher Dariush Shayegan called Orientalism in reverse【7】: replacing critical judgment with selective sympathy. In this mindset, any power exercised by the West is condemned as domination, while similar or worse power exercised against the West is treated as resistance.
The Empty Promises of Purity
Khomeini’s revolution and Mamdani’s scholarship share the same flaw. Both are built on promises that cannot be kept.
Khomeini promised “Islamic justice” and delivered a police state. Mamdani promises ‘decolonial understanding’ but creates an academic culture where disagreement isn’t allowed. Khomeini’s followers believed that moral virtue alone could govern; Mamdani’s followers believe that theoretical guilt can explain everything. Neither approach produces results — only paralysis.
Revolutionary Left in Religious Dress
The Islamic Regime was never conservative. It was, in effect, theocratic socialism. Early decrees dismantled Iran’s private economy and handed expropriated property to clerical and military foundations. The regime combined moral absolutism with economic collectivism, creating what could be called a religious Left — a system that sought renewal through destruction and purity through permanent upheaval.
Mamdani’s project mirrors that same pattern. He rejects liberal democracy and market economies as Western inventions, while defending authoritarian regimes that oppose them as “authentic.” His revolution exists only on paper, but its structure is the same: dismantle institutions first and worry about justice later.
Unqualified to Lead
Neither Khomeini nor Mamdani has ever managed anything practical—not a ministry, not a budget, not a city council. Yet both speak with the confidence of people who believe that ideas alone are enough to run societies.
Khomeini’s lack of experience produced a failed economy and an authoritarian bureaucracy. The socialistic impulses of the 1980s dissolved into a pseudo-privatized oligarchical economy that makes contemporary Iran one of the most inequitable societies in the world. Mamdani’s lack of experience would produce an academic culture that talks about oppression but never confronts it. In both cases, inexperience is treated as a virtue and detachment as proof of moral clarity.
From Revolution to Revivalism
By the 2020s, postcolonial theory in American universities had hardened into ideology. Departments routinely quote Mahmood Mamdani’s claim that “the modern state is colonial by design.” The result is predictable: professors treat rational inquiry as a Western problem, and students learn to repeat slogans about guilt instead of examining evidence.
Mamdani has become a preacher for this environment — the Elmer Gantry of postcolonial studies — selling moral comfort to people who mistake cynicism for depth.
Iran as the Cautionary Mirror
Iran’s modern history shows where this kind of thinking leads. A revolution that began with promises of justice has ended up in repression. Appeals to purity produced bureaucracy, corruption, and violence. Ironically, by the regime’s own standards, Iranians are much more “immoral” now than they were in 1979.
If Khomeini’s failure was moral, Mamdani’s is intellectual. Both mistook criticism for achievement and outrage for leadership
The Second Fall of the Intellectual Left
In the 1970s, much of the Western Left idealized Khomeini’s uprising as an alternative to liberal democracy. Today, many academics repeat that mistake by treating Mamdani’s rhetoric as an alternative to objective analysis.
The consequence is the same: those who genuinely fight for freedom—Iranian writers, students, and dissidents who challenge both imperialism and theocracy—are left out since they don’t fit the framework academics prefer.
Moral Evasion
The story of Mahmood Mamdani is not about one professor; it is about a broader tendency to seek moral redemption without responsibility.
Khomeini shifted the burden of justice to God; Mamdani shifts it to history — both place it anywhere but in human hands. Both demand faith instead of reasoning. Both replace action with performance.
In the end, they stand as two versions of the same figure: men who never governed but always preached, who offered meaning to disillusioned audiences and delivered only dysfunction.
Sources:
1. Elmer Gantry, the full film on YouTube
2. Dariush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (Syracuse University Press, 1997).
3. Edward Saïd, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
4. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
5. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004).
6. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7. Dariush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia, ibid.
8. Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of California Press, 1999).
