How Zohran Mamdani is busting the fake nostalgia of ‘Iran before the Islamic revolution’ memes

The image drifts through American feeds like a half-remembered dream: grainy, sepia-toned women in 1960s Tehran laugh in miniskirts, cocktails in hand, neon signs bleeding into the night. “Iran before the revolution,” the caption sighs – a digital epitaph for a modernity America imagines it birthed.

This meme, shared with performative grief, erases the Shah’s SAVAK death squads, the feudal poverty, the US-backed dictatorship that birthed the revolution. Isn’t history. It’s colonial fan fiction. Progress, to the American gaze, means miniskirts and muted faith – a modernity measured in proximity to whiteness.

Iran before the Islamic revolution. pic.twitter.com/lLsFegz9cv— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) June 17, 2025

Now, the flicker of a live feed: June 24, 2025. Queens pulses with 36.6-degree C heat and disbelief. Thirty-three-year-old Zohran Kwame Mamdani – socialist son of a Ugandan Marxist scholar and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker – has toppled disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.

Beside him stands Rama Duwaji, 27, a Syrian-born illustrator whose ink-stained hands have animated Palestinian solidarity art for The New Yorker and the Tate Modern. They are the meme incarnate: Mamdani in his East African khanzu or sharp suits, Duwaji in minimalist linen, her Instagram feed (@ramaduwaji) a gallery of Brooklyn murals and keffiyeh-clad protesters.

Cosmopolitan. Educated. Unapologetically Muslim. The...

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