Western Governments Are Surrendering The Public Square To Islamists, Literally
Yuan Goh
The evidence from New York to London reveals a single truth: the state is in retreat. The public square has become contested territory.
In cities across the West, the pavement has become a stage for a specific, assertive religious claim.
On Feb. 20, Times Square was filled with men kneeling shoulder to shoulder on prayer rugs for Ramadan’s nightly Taraweeh prayers. New York City’s most famous intersection, a place meant for commerce and tourism, had become a place for religious ritual, as it has since 2022.
When hundreds of men block the center of Times Square they aren’t just practicing a faith. They represent a community that has surged to an estimated 1 million people in New York City, roughly 10 percent of the population. They are marking a conquest of the public square. They are turning the literal crossroads of the Western world into an outdoor mosque for radical Islam.
Public officials treat a massive religious obstruction as a vibrant community event, a beautiful sign of a pluralistic society, and surrender their duty to the individual citizen. The street has been turned into a site of government-sanctioned disruption. This signals that the right to seize a thoroughfare belongs to those who practice their radical religion the loudest. This is how the West fractures.
State Assists the Conquest
The city gave the permits and allowed Times Square to become a restricted zone for Taraweeh prayers.
The mayor personally joined and praised the occasion. Standing before the cameras, Zohran Mamdani framed the disruption of the city as a moment of triumph. He called Ramadan his “favorite month of the year.” He dismissed the physical blockage of Broadway as a mere byproduct of a “month of reflection” and a “month of solidarity.” When asked how he felt on that first day of Ramadan, Mamdani joked to reporters, “Right now, I feel parched.”
While the mayor was “parched,” the city was being partitioned. He looked forward to “connecting with Muslims across the city” through state-supported projects. As Sheikh Imam Chernor Sa’ad Jalloh of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York explained when discussing Ramadan, “For Muslims, opportunity is not only to make money, it’s not only to win elections … Opportunity is when your relationship with God is excellent.”