Mayor Adams appeared on the steps of City Hall on Thursday for an event billed by his campaign as a rally where Muslim leaders would endorse him for reelection.
But several of the Muslim clerics in attendance told the Daily News afterward they had no idea the event would be focused on endorsing the mayor. Rather, they said they thought it would be a nonpolitical occasion to commemorate the 1,500th birthday of Muhammad, the prophet Muslims see as the father of their religion.
Some of the clerics even said they don’t, in fact, support Adams’ reelection.
The flyer advertising the Eric Adams rally with Muslim leaders. (Obtained by Daily News)
“We didn’t come here because we support him,” said Mouhamed Mountakha Sakha, a community leader affiliated with the Islamic Cultural Foundation of America mosque on Staten Island who brought along several members of his congregation. “We were invited here because it’s Prophet Muhammad’s 1,500th birthday, so thinking that we came here to support the mayor — it’s not doing justice to Muslims … Politicians are politicians. Wherever they go, they will show their color.”
Even Adam Azam, a former state Senate candidate who helped organize the event and is supporting Adams’ reelection, said it wasn’t supposed to be a political endorsement event.
“We only celebrated that,” Azam told reporters of the prophet’s birthday. “This is not an event for any political campaign here.”
Sakha shared a poster for the event with The News that said it would be hosted by the mayor, but didn’t mention anything about politics.
Rather, the poster said it would be a “historic gathering honoring the birth of Prophet Muhammad.” The poster had a logo on it for the American Muslim Advocacy Network, a local group that didn’t immediately return a request for comment afterward.
By contrast, an Adams campaign advisory for the event disseminated beforehand characterized it as a rally where “leaders of New York City’s Muslim community and religious leaders will endorse Mayor Eric Adams for reelection during the annual Mawlid-un-Nabi festival at City Hall.”
Even though the advisory suggested otherwise, Adams campaign spokesman Todd Shapiro insisted after the rally that it was a “community-organized religious event, not a campaign rally” and that the focus was Muhammad’s birthday.
Adams, who’s facing long odds in November’s mayoral election running as an independent amid continued fallout from his corruption indictment, claimed reporters were trying to “divide” the Muslim leaders by asking them about the event afterward.
“They have one agenda, one agenda: to divide us — that’s their only agenda,” Adams told the community leaders as some of them were being interviewed by reporters, “So, no matter what you say to them they will distort it, so ignore all of that.”
In speaking to reporters afterward, Sakha took particular issue with Adams declining to say, when asked by a reporter during the event, whether he would consider holding a flag-raising event for Palestine amid Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I don’t think it’s right,” he said. “There is no bigger concern for any free human for what is happening now in Gaza.”
The snafu for Adams comes on the heels of revelations that President Trump’s administration is trying to offer him a job in order to get him to drop out of the mayoral race. The Trump team’s effort, sources say, is aimed at maximizing ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s chances of beating Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim and currently the front-runner to win November’s election.
With Josephine Stratman
