Breaking Fast With Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Knicks Star Mo Diawara

“I just want it to be Mo and I for a few,” says New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s just after 7 p.m. on Saturday evening, and the mayor is in the midst of another whirlwind day in office. He helped distribute food to hungry families at a pair of food banks in Queens early in the afternoon, stopped by a girls’ high school basketball championship game in Brooklyn, and then shuttled over to Harlem to meet up with New York Knicks forward Mo Diawara at a Senegalese spot called Saint Louis Restaurant Keur Yayou Dara. Mamdani and Diawara are here for their iftar, the fast-breaking meal taken after sundown during the month of Ramadan.

Despite his towering 6’9” frame, currently draped in an inky leather jacket and black jeans, Diawara is just a 20-year-old rookie, still wide-eyed and new to New York after growing up in France in a close-knit Senegalese family. The private moment the mayor requests really just amounts to Mamdani passing the mic clipped to his suit jacket to an aide while his staffers, security detail, the restaurant’s owners, and a small smattering of press look on from just out of earshot. But as Mamdani and Diawara begin digging into steaming plates of lamb jollof rice, fish jollof rice, chicken yassa, and mafe, a rich peanut butter stew, the rest of us in the room seem to fade away, and the two start chatting like old friends.

Kara McCurdy / Courtesy of Mayoral Photography Office

One of the coolest aspects of Mamdani’s campaign was his unabashed embrace of his Muslim identity, helping to broaden the public’s understanding of how a Muslim man can look and carry himself. Moments like this one are helping to carry that energy into his mayorality. “There’s been such a narrow caricature of what it means to be a Muslim,” Mamdani tells me, after he and Diawara have finished their meal. “As if you can even say what it looks like to be a Muslim. Muslims are from everywhere. Even the idea of Islam as something foreign to this country, that only comes from immigrants, erases Black Muslims, African-American Muslims. One of the most pivotal Muslim figures is Malcolm X. We are not that far from where he would preach, where he would live.”

Diawara has had plenty of standout moments on the court this season—“18 in 18!” Mamdani exclaims at one point, referring to Diawara’s 18 points in 18 minutes against the Pelicans in December—but the strength he’s shown in playing important games for the Knicks while fasting for Ramadan is perhaps most impressive of all. When I mention that to him, however, he shrugs. “I grew up in a Muslim family,” Diawara says, “so everyone around me [has been fasting] since I was young. I just enjoy it and keep doing it. I hope my kids will do it with me, my wife will do it with me.”