The Moral Imagination of Mamdani

Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So we now have, in the twenty-first century, a Muslim religious leader delivering the invocation for a Muslim political leader, repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century. That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no? If you stayed […]