A Reflection on Sacred Narrative and Civic Responsibility: To Mayor Mamdani’s Speech on 2/6/2026
Dear Mayor,
I write in response to your recent remarks invoking sacred history in defense of hospitality toward migrants. The impulse toward compassion is not in question. What is at issue is the way sacred narratives were employed, selectively, and therefore misleadingly, in a civic setting that demands moral clarity rather than rhetorical uplift.
You appealed to the Hijrah, the migration of Muhammad and his followers to Medina, presenting it as a paradigmatic story of welcome, refuge, and moral obligation toward the stranger. That moment deserves acknowledgment. Muhammad arrived in Medina as a persecuted outsider. He was received by a fractured city seeking peace, protected by its inhabitants, and entrusted with mediation. Jewish tribes and Arab clans extended hospitality. A covenant was formed. In this initial chapter, the ethical weight of welcome is undeniable.
But sacred history does not derive its authority from its openings alone. Over time, mediation became sovereignty. Covenant gave way to command. The guest became ruler, and the city that had welcomed him became the seat of authority from which loyalty was enforced. Political and theological conflict followed, culminating in the expulsion of Jewish communities who had once shared the civic life of Medina. These actions are justified within Islamic tradition as responses to betrayal, but regardless of justification, they mark a decisive moral transition: the refugee became the one who determined belonging.
To invoke the story of arrival while omitting the story of consolidation is not education; it is curation. It borrows the moral authority of vulnerability while avoiding the moral burden of power.
You then quoted Exodus 23:9: “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This verse, however, is inseparable from judgment. In the Torah, Israel’s memory of suffering does not confer moral immunity, it intensifies accountability. When Israel mistreats the stranger, God condemns it without qualification. The prophets preserve Israel’s failures without softening them. Chosenness sharpens scrutiny. Power invites reckoning.
That context is essential.
The Jewish scriptures do not shield their own community from moral exposure; they enshrine it. Sacred history becomes a mirror rather than a banner.
By contrast, in the Qur’an and later Islamic tradition, there is no parallel moment in which God turns toward the Muslim community and judges it for having transformed refuge into rule, or for having expelled those who once offered protection. Expansion is affirmed, authority consolidated, conflict justified, but divine self-critique is absent. This is not a minor theological difference, but a structural one.
By pairing a Jewish text that includes its own indictment with an Islamic narrative stripped of internal judgment, your speech borrows the moral gravity of Exodus while bypassing the cost that gravity demands. Scripture becomes ornament rather than ordeal.
To speak history truthfully requires restraint and reverence. It demands resisting the impulse to simplify, glorify, or condemn the past to serve contemporary narratives. History is always interpreted, but how we name it determines whether it educates or manipulates the moral imagination.
This matters not only theologically, but civically. Many Americans carry an unease, often inarticulate, sometimes distorted, about what follows welcome once power, numbers, and cultural confidence grow. That concern is not answered by freezing sacred history at its most luminous moment. It is answered by naming limits, accountability, and the supremacy of a shared civic order.
America, unlike Medina, is not founded on sacred authority. It is founded on restraint, on the deliberate fragmentation of power, on the refusal to allow any revelation, ideology, or myth to govern the whole. Its hospitality is sustained not by shared theology, but by law. The Constitution functions as a civic covenant precisely because it stands above every faith while protecting each one. It asks newcomers not to abandon belief, but to relativize it politically, to accept that no sacred story, however revered, outranks the shared grammar of the republic.
When this is said clearly, welcome becomes possible without fear.
When it is avoided, history rushes in to fill the silence.
The danger, then, is not immigration. It is mythologized innocence. It is the belief that arrival alone confers moral authority, and that suffering once endured guarantees righteousness forever. Sacred history denies this at every turn. Its deepest warning is not directed at strangers, but at those who are no longer strangers and forget what restrained them when they were.
A society that wishes to remain humane must therefore resist the temptation to tell only the first half of its stories. Compassion without memory is sentiment. Welcome without judgment is naïveté. And sacred language, when severed from its own capacity to accuse, ceases to form conscience and begins instead to shape compliance.
The stranger must be welcomed.
But power must be judged.
This is not cynicism. It is fidelity, to history, to language, and to the moral wisdom that knows the most dangerous moment is not when we are weak, but when we are finally strong and no longer remember why we once needed mercy at all.
When civic leaders speak only in the language of compassion and refuse the language of boundary, fear does not disappear; it hardens. Moral leadership does not simplify history to reassure the anxious. It tells the truth whole, even when that truth unsettles.
Sacred history, when handled honestly, does not flatter its hearers.
It warns them.
Respectfully,
Ibrahim Atallah
Dearborn Blog 