Cuomo Tries to Tie Mamdani to Muslim Leader's Anti-Gay Stance [View all]

In the closing week before early voting begins in the New York City mayoral election, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is doubling down on a line of attack trying to tie the race’s front-runner, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, to figures who said they opposed homosexuality.

The latest attempt came on Saturday, with Mr. Cuomo convening a news conference in the Bronx to criticize Mr. Mamdani after he posted a picture of a meeting he recently held with a well-known imam in Brooklyn.

The imam, Siraj Wahhaj, who leads Masjid at-Taqwa in Bedford-Stuyvesant, endorsed Mr. Mamdani in the Democratic primary,. Mr. Mamdani, after their meeting, said the imam was “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century.”

The meeting was the subject of a New York Post article on Saturday that highlighted the imam’s opposition to homosexuality and his characterization as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.



https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/nyregion/cuomo-mamdani-imam.html