After New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani clarified that the 9/11 anecdote was not about his Masuma Mamdani, his father’s sister, but someone called Zehra Fui who was his father’s cousin and is not alive any more, a new debate started on social media delving into who all brown people address as aunts. “Your ‘father’s cousin’ is not your aunt,” New York Post’s Miranda Devine wrote, only to receive a strong pushback from many Asian-origin commentators that a father’s cousin is indeed an aunt.
Why Zohran Mamdani’s aunt is a topic of discussion
In a recent speech where Mamdani spoke about Islamophobia, Mamdani said his aunt felt unsafe in her hijab in the US after 9/11. The comment became a laughing stock for MAGA as they derided how Mamdani made 9/11 about his family, projecting his aunt as the real victim of 9/11. MAGA supporters delved deep and then found out that Mamdani’s aunt Masuma Mamdani did not even live in the US during 9/11 and does not wear hijab in any of the publicly available photos. Mamdani was called a liar for cooking up a false story about his aunt.“I was speaking about my aunt, Zehra Fuhi, my father’s cousin who sadly passed away a few years ago, and for the takeaway from my more-than-10-minute address about Islamophobia in this city to be the question of my aunt tells you everything about Andrew Cuomo and his inability to recon his crisis,” Mamdani clarified.A major social media debate erupted over whether a father’s cousin can be called an aunt, with Mehdi Hasan pitching in and speaking for all the brown people that a parent’s cousin is indeed an aunt. Sana Ebrahimi, a social media user who first called out Mamdani for lying about his aunt, slammed Mehdi Hasn and claimed that Iranians do not call their parents cousins, uncles or aunts — there are separate terms, but that claim too came under attack.
