Venezuelan procession for La Divina Pastora takes on new weight in tense political moment

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Venezuelans in the diaspora and homeland are navigating uncertainty, big emotions and fervent prayers in the aftermath of the US military's seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Washington-area Venezuelans pose for photos with a statue of La Divina Pastora, rear, after a Mass celebrated in her honor at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
January 16, 2026
RNS

WASHINGTON (RNS) — It’s been 30 years since Jorge Garcia last joined the millions of people who have crowded the streets of Barquisimeto in northwest Venezuela for a procession with La Divina Pastora or “the Divine Shepherdess.”

But three decades and thousands of miles have not dimmed his devotion to the Marian image and statue credited with several miracles, including interceding to end a 19th-century cholera epidemic. This year, after months of work by the four members of the Washington-area Society of La Divina Pastora, she was honored for the first time with a Mass on Wednesday (Jan. 14) in Washington’s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and with a new statue shipped from Venezuela where it was created by a famous teenage artist.

The statue of La Divina Pastora arrived on Jan. 2, just hours before the U.S. military seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“It’s not us. It’s God who moves everything,” Garcia said.

La Divina Pastora’s celebration came at a moment when Venezuelans in the diaspora and homeland are navigating uncertainty, big emotions and fervent prayers. Many Catholics agree the church will play a significant role in guiding Venezuela’s future — though they are not all in agreement of what’s needed. Many Venezuelan Catholics in the diaspora are hopeful Maduro’s capture and U.S. intervention signals an end to government corruption and an opportunity for economic growth. Catholics in the country are less convinced and more divided on who should lead the country — and where Venezuela’s Catholic leadership should lend its support.

Garcia, who immigrated to the U.S. from Venezuela in 1996, hopes that he can someday soon take his children to Barquisimeto for the procession and return to Venezuela, which he has not returned to because of opposition to the socialist government.

A statue of La Divina Pastora is carried through the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle at a Mass celebrated in her honor, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

The society for La Divina Pastora worked to keep the celebration free from politics, with no specific political mentions in the Prayers of the Faithful or the homily about listening to God. But politics still bled through in the crowd’s shouts for a free Venezuela after “Long Live the Divina Pastora” and in the posters calling for the freedom of political prisoners, held up while participants took photos next to the statue.

In Barquisimeto, where Venezuelan media said almost 4 million people turned out to walk with La Divina Pastora on Wednesday, Archbishop Polito Rodríguez Méndez also prayed publicly for rights to free expression and for political prisoners, saying, “We pray for all those deprived of liberty. We applaud that some have already been released, but there are many others whose cries and those of their families cannot continue to be ignored.”

He also prayed for migrants, those experiencing hunger and those killed in “the events of Jan. 3.”

Venezuela’s Catholic bishops have often taken a critical stance toward Maduro and President Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor. Archbishop Ramón Ovidio Pérez Morales, the 93-year-old retired archbishop of Los Teques, has long accused the Maduro government of violating human rights and of corruption.

In a Spanish-language interview with RNS on Wednesday, Pérez Morales commented on the ongoing international discussions about the fate of Venezuela and its sovereignty, debates he said that can distance the conversation from human rights.

The statue of La Divina Pastora is processed through the streets of Barquisimeto, Venezuela, Jan. 14, 2026. (Video screen grab)

“Sovereignty is made for the people, not people for the sovereignty,” he said, echoing Jesus’ teaching that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Pérez Morales said he believes there is a path opening “that will lead to the reshaping of the country along democratic and constitutional lines.”

“The constitution isn’t ideal or perfect, but it is a fairly acceptable constitution,” he added.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, a Catholic, met with President Trump on Thursday, presenting him with her Nobel Peace Prize. Her party’s candidate was recognized by international observers as winning the 2024 election, even as Maduro’s government claimed it won. Despite the meeting with Machado, the White House press secretary said she expected “cooperation” to continue between Trump and Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rogriguez, who is now acting president.

While the Venezuelan diaspora has overwhelmingly approved of Maduro’s capture, according to an AtlasIntel poll conducted shortly afterward, less than half of Venezuelans inside Venezuela approved of his capture — about a quarter of Venezuelans disapproved and another 28% said they were unsure how they felt. Venezuelans remain polarized between those who opposed Chávez’s socialist policies and those who felt Chávez saved Venezuela from western oil companies and saw his programs as giving that wealth back to Venezuelans.

A government supporter holds a banner with a photo of President Nicolás Maduro during a protest demanding his release from U.S. custody in Caracas, Venezuela, Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

People celebrate in Doral, Fla., after President Donald Trump announced Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of Venezuela, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Jen Golbeck)

Sister Maria Eugenia Russian, president of Fundalatin, an ecumenical Christian organization founded in Venezuela and inspired by liberation theology, called Trump “the Herod of this time” and said U.S. leaders should denounce his intervention in Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people according to the Venezuelan government, and instead tell him to focus on the poor people of the U.S.

“The Catholic people continue denouncing in the streets the imprisonment of the constitutional president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela by the United States,” said Russian, who is also director of the religious community named for Fundalatin’s founder, the Rev. Juan Vives Suriá.

Russian accused the Venezuelan bishops of having “no closeness with the poor” and said there are two churches in the country — that of the hierarchy and that of the people.

“Over 26 years they have allied themselves with the power of money,” she said of the bishops.

In Spanish WhatsApp messages to RNS on the day of the Divina Pastora celebration, she wrote, “The bishops continue with their lies to use the space of processions to spread lies and defame the reality of a government whose priority is the poor.”

Macky Arenas, a television presenter based in Caracas and the editor of Venezuelan publication “Reporte Católico Laico,” or the “Lay Catholic Report,” believes “the duty of the church is to be brave.”

She cited Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara’s 2006 homily for the celebration of the Divina Pastora, where he warned that the democratically elected Chávez government was showing signs of becoming a dictatorship by restricting freedom of expression and abusing human rights. She also called Pérez Morales, the retired archbishop, a “leading voice” for the country.

Arenas said the government’s corruption had led to a humanitarian disaster in Venezuela and that Venezuelan families are facing “intolerable” conditions.

“The people are having less and less access to basic necessities,” she said, and they are facing barriers to access for education and health care.

In a webinar for the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Lisa Sullivan, who served as a Maryknoll lay missioner and lived in Venezuela for more than 30 years until she came back to the U.S. in 2022, instead blamed U.S. sanctions during Trump’s first term for Venezuela’s massive inflation and “hunger years,” saying that sanctioning the oil industry was “like putting a boot on the throat of the Venezuelan people.”

“There was an average weight loss of 20 pounds,” she said. “It was the thinnest I’d ever been. We were all hungry.”

Back in Barquisimeto on Wednesday, Angel González said that, while he was unable to attend the procession, he heard the prayers of many are focused on peace and that the social media videos of the race held in La Divina Pastora’s honor showed large crowds showing up despite the rain.


FILE – The statue of La Divina Pastora is processed through Barquisimeto, Venezuela, Jan. 14, 2017. (Photo by Rodolfo Pimentel/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

González, who works to empower children through the Regional Coordination for Boys, Girls and Youth Workers called CORENATS, said in Spanish that, after the “criminal” bombing of Caracas, local children in Barquisimeto are feeling “fear for what could happen in the future if the situation gets worse, fear of losing a family member or losing their own lives.”

Historically, he said, the people have asked La Divina Pastora “for peace in our country, for us to have a country of justice and equity, for healing of illnesses.”

“I think it’s important, as I understand it, that the call that the church is taking up is the call for peace and reconciliation and for the self-determination of the Venezuelan people,” González said.

In southern Venezuela, an indigenous Baniwa Catholic human rights worker told RNS that he still did not feel it was safe for him to speak openly about his opposition to the government and about the “complex emergency humanitarian situation in the country.” He said in Spanish, “there’s a perception that apparently things are changing, going to change, but in terms of reality that hasn’t happened.”

He said that, despite his convictions, he has family members who are committed to the government’s socialist party and that the country faces political fragmentation. In that environment, he said the church must work toward helping Venezuelans understand each other and not see each other as enemies.

“The Catholic church and the evangelical church and all of the organizations of social order in this country have to play an important role in encounter, in forgiveness, in national reconciliation,” the leader said.

MLK DAY IN U$A

It’s Time Again for Good Trouble

By Robert Reich

January 19, 2026

Image by National Park Service, Creative Commons 2.0

Today we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Trump has removed MLK Jr.’s birthday from the National Park Service’s fee-free days and substituted his own birthday of June 14 as a fee-free day.

I write this more in sorrow than in anger.

All told, I feel profound sorrow for America. Sorrow for the people of Minneapolis who are enduring this Trump-made hell. Sorrow for Renee Good’s three children and wife.

I also feel sorrow for Greenlanders and Venezuelans and others around the world fearing what the sociopath in the Oval Office may do next. Sorrow for everyone justifiably worried about the future of America and the planet because of him.

I’m old enough to remember when Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission seemed impossible. Just as the mission you and I must now engage in — defeating Trumpism and creating a new and better America out of the rubble and chaos he is wreaking — may seem impossible at this moment.

Martin Luther King Jr. accomplished more than anyone thought he could when he began. He did it with patience and perseverance, with the strength of conviction. He did it with calmness, reason, and quiet passion.

And he did it with civil disobedience — what one of his assistants, the late great congressman John Lewis, called “good trouble.”

Good trouble meant mobilizing the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone saw its horrors. Night after night on the news — watching peaceful civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists.

I remember watching Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, and his goons use firehoses and attack dogs against Black people — including children — who were peacefully standing up for their rights.

The scenes horrified America and much of the world. Yet were it not for our painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.

I’ve been thinking of those scenes as I’ve watched ICE thugs patrolling Minneapolis. Watched armed agents pulling people out of cars, using chokeholds, demanding proof of citizenship. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles grabbing neighbors off the streets, using tear gas and pepper spray, shooting innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest.

This time it isn’t Bull Connor and his racist goons. It’s Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and their fascist goons. It’s armed agents of the president of the United States who are bullying and brutalizing people. Committing a cold-blooded murder of a middle-class white woman in broad daylight who tried to get out of their way. Shooting and injuring others.

This time it’s Trump and the thugs around him making up stories to justify this brutality, lying about the protester’s motives, and threatening even more brutality.

Take a wider look and you see their lawless bullying on a different scale: a criminal investigation of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for failing to lower interest rates as fast as Trump wants. Criminal investigations of U.S. senators and representatives for telling America’s soldiers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders. Criminal investigations of the governor of Minnesota and mayor of Minneapolis for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s brown shirts.

The Justice Department searching the home of a Washington Post reporter and seizing her laptops and other devices.

Trump raising tariffs on our trusted allies — until and unless they support him in taking over Greenland. Greenland!

A crazy old man saying “fuck you, fuck you” and giving the finger to an American factory worker who criticizes him in public. The crazy old man is president of the United States, and the worker has been suspended from his job because he dared criticize that crazy old man.

I remember the good trouble that occurred 65 years ago. I believe it’s time for it again. Time for all of us — every one of us — to cause it.

What kind of good trouble?

A huge national demonstration, far larger than anything before. Everyone in the streets.

A giant general strike where we stop purchasing all products for two weeks (stocking up beforehand).

A massive boycott of all businesses sucking up to Trump.

A coordinated effort to get all our employers, our churches and synagogues, our unions, our universities to condemn this madness.

A loud demand that our members of Congress impeach and convict him of his high crimes.

There is no longer any neutral place to stand. Either you’re standing up for democracy, the rule of law, and social justice, or you’re complicit in the fascist mayhem Trump has unleashed.

That, for me, is the lesson of all this.

Trump and his thugs have brought us to this point. They are the Bull Connors of today.

We stand with the people of Minneapolis and with the people of every other town and city where Trump’s thugs are prowling or will prowl, and where people are resisting.

We stand with the citizens of Greenland and Venezuela. With Canadians and Europeans. With every nation now threatened by Trump’s lawless abuses of power.

We stand proudly and sturdily everywhere the bright lights of freedom and truth still shine.

We will overcome the darkness of Trump’s fascism. We reject the hate, the bigotry, the fear, and the murderous lawlessness of his regime. We dedicate ourselves to causing good trouble — ending this mayhem, and building a new and better America.Email

Robert Reich

Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.

MLK’s Strugge Against Policing and Surveillance Is Still Alive in Memphis Today

By Earle J. Fisher

January 19, 2026

Photograph Source: Matt Brown – CC BY 2.0

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, elected officials quote King while standing safely at a distance from the risks he embraced. His name is invoked, his image sanitized, and his politics stripped of urgency. The U.S. celebrates a softened King who spoke about love but not power, unity but not confrontation, peace but not disruption. What we rarely confront is this truth: Martin Luther King Jr. was not merely misunderstood in his time. He was actively surveilled, criminalized, and treated as a threat to the hegemonic order in the U.S.

That history is not behind us. It is unfolding again.

In recent weeks, shootings involving federal agents connected to immigration enforcement and homeland security operations in Minneapolis and Portland have raised urgent questions about the expanding reach of federal policing, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dangers of unchecked surveillance powers. These incidents are not isolated. They exist within a long arc of state authority asserting itself most aggressively where dissent, migration, and racialized resistance converge.

To understand this moment, we must tell the truth about King’s.

Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted an extensive campaign of surveillance against Martin Luther King Jr.: King’s phones were tapped. His movements were tracked. His private life was scrutinized and weaponized. Hoover famously described King as “the most dangerous Negro in America,” not because King was violent, but because he was effective. Hoover feared what he called the rise of a “Black Messiah” — a leader capable of unifying Black people across class lines and mobilizing moral resistance to state violence, economic exploitation, and militarism.

King was not targeted because he preached hate. He was targeted because he preached liberation.

This repression intensified as King moved beyond civil rights rhetoric into structural critique. When he opposed the Vietnam War, organized the Poor People’s Campaign, and challenged economic inequality, King crossed an invisible line. He became not just a moral voice, but a political threat. Surveillance was the state’s response.

That logic did not end with Hoover. It evolved.

I know this not as distant history, but as lived reality. In Memphis, beginning around 2016 and intensifying through 2017 and 2018, people organizing for racial justice found ourselves under police surveillance because of our participation in collective efforts demanding accountability, transparency, and criminal justice reform. Faith leaders, grassroots organizers, and activists connected to the Movement for Black Lives-aligned efforts were engaged in lawful, nonviolent organizing when the Memphis Police Department tracked protests, monitored social media pages, and documented organizing strategies. What should have been protected civic engagement was treated as a threat.

Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.

I was later called to testify in federal court against Memphis Police Department’s unlawful surveillance practices, and it was revealed that even our church — Abyssinian Baptist Church — had been illegally surveilled. Spaces meant for worship, organizing, and sanctuary became zones of scrutiny. These experiences were later acknowledged by the Department of Justice’s pattern-and-practice investigation, which documented systemic constitutional violations, including improper surveillance and the targeting of Black activists and communities. The lesson was unmistakable: surveillance is not abstract. It is personal, local, and routinely deployed to suppress Black political dissent rather than protect public safety.

Today, we witness new forms of state surveillance justified under the language of “public safety,” “border security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement operate with extraordinary discretion, often in communities already intensely policed and under-protected. When federal agents are deployed to cities without transparency or accountability, and when violence follows, the public is told to trust the process rather than interrogate the power.

But history teaches us otherwise.

Nowhere is this more painful or more revealing than in Memphis.

Memphis is the city where King was assassinated. It is also a city where police were found to have violated a federal consent decree by spying on protesters and activists. It is a city currently living under the weight of an expanded, militarized policing apparatus that many residents would describe as occupation. The Memphis (un)Safe Task Force, with its broad authority and opaque metrics, reflects the same logic that once framed King himself as a threat to be monitored rather than a prophet to be heard.

This is not coincidence. It is continuity.

Let’s remember that King did not inherit a tradition of quiet faith; rather, he stood firmly within the Black Prophetic Tradition. This tradition insists that faith is inseparable from justice, that love without truth is hollow, and that peace without accountability is false. It is a tradition that confronts power, exposes hypocrisy, and names systems (not just individuals) as sites of sin.

The Black Prophetic Tradition refuses the lie that order is more sacred than justice. It rejects the idea that safety can be built on surveillance alone. It insists that democracy is not secured by force but by trust, participation, and dignity. And it understands that when the state treats Black resistance as criminal, it is often because that resistance is effective.

This is why King unsettled those in power. And it is why his legacy remains threatening when taken seriously.

Yet today, King’s name is often used to legitimize policies he would have opposed. MLK Day becomes a “day of service” rather than a day of confrontation. Leaders praise King’s dream while avoiding his demands. They quote his words while rejecting his method. They honor his memory while reproducing the conditions that made him vulnerable to state violence in the first place.

The recent shootings perpetrated by federal agents in Minneapolis and Portland should force us to ask difficult questions about the expanding role of federal policing and surveillance in U.S. life. But in Memphis, those questions carry added weight. What does it mean to invoke King while tolerating unchecked policing? What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?

The answers are uncomfortable, but necessary.

What does it mean to honor a man assassinated under state surveillance while refusing to protect civil liberties today?

If Memphis leaders truly wish to honor King, they must do more than quote him. They must develop the political consciousness and courage to protect the rights of those most vulnerable to state overreach. That means prioritizing transparency over theater, accountability over aggression, and justice over optics.

Given that neither federal nor state administrations can be relied upon, organizers in Memphis are calling for aggressive court challenges, civil rights litigation, injunctions, and independent investigations to force transparency, halt unlawful surveillance, and regulate joint task force operations. Justice, in concrete terms, looks like disaggregated public data, unmasked federal agents, an end to racial profiling and broken-windows policing, and sustained legal pressure that makes unconstitutional practices costly, visible, and ultimately untenable — demands that apply nationally because the mechanisms of aggressive policing are national.

King warned us that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He also warned that militarism and racism were twin threats to democracy. Those warnings were not abstract. They were rooted in lived experience, prophetic insight, and political clarity.

King was not assassinated because he was misunderstood. He was assassinated because he was clear.

If we are serious about honoring his legacy, clarity — not comfort — must guide us now.Email

Earle J. Fisher

Rev. Earle J. Fisher, Ph.D., is a scholar, pastor, organizer, and public intellectual committed to Black liberation, civic empowerment, and institutional transformation. He serves as Senior Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, where he has cultivated a vibrant model of Black faith, cultural expression, and prophetic social witness. Under his leadership, Abyssinian has become a nexus for community organizing, political education, and spiritual formation throughout South Memphis and Whitehaven. Dr. Fisher is the Founder of UPTheVote901, a nonpartisan, Black-led voter empowerment initiative designed to increase political power, information and representation across Memphis and Shelby County bridging the academy, church, and broader public square. Dr. Fisher serves as Associate Professor of Religious Communication and Africana Studies and the Inaugural Dean of Chapel at LeMoyne-Owen College, where he leads Chapel Soul Sessions and advances work at the intersection of Africana intellectual traditions, public theology, and liberative pedagogy. He also teaches at Rhodes College, Memphis Theological Seminary, Claflin University, and Brite Divinity School. The author of The Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Prophetic Tradition, Dr. Fisher is a sought-after speaker and commentator whose work amplifies marginalized voices and challenges systems that undermine Black political, spiritual, and cultural agency.

Mayor Mamdani and the Roots of Islamic Democratic Socialism

Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi

 January 7, 2026

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Photograph Source: NYC Mayor’s Office – CC BY 4.0

On a hot September day in 1976, Mohammad Nakhshab, an Iranian political figure, died of a heart attack on a New York subway car. He was 53. His death happened not far from the abandoned subway station under the City Hall in which Mayor Mamdani took the oath of office in the early hours of January 1, 2026. Nakhshab worked at the United Nations but was not just an ordinary employee. He was one of the founders of an influential movement in Iran in the 1940s known as the Movement of God-Worshiping Socialists. I write this to propose that one need not to view Mayor Mamdani’s Muslimhood incidental to his democratic socialist politics. Nakhshab and his companions belonged to a generation of Iranian intellectuals who believed that democratic socialism defines the social, political, and economic language of Shi‘ism in the contemporary world.

Iran was occupied by Allied forces in 1941. They ousted Reza Shah, who had Nazi inclinations, and installed his young son, Mohammad Reza, to the throne. By the end of the war, a period of civil liberties emerged. Members of the Iranian Communist Party, the first communist party in Asia, reemerged after more than a decade of persecution under Reza Shah and formed a new anti-Fascist coalition called the Tudeh Party (party of the people). Socialist ideas and movements had a presence in Iran since the 1890s. But with the triumph of the 1917 revolution in Russia, socialism became intrinsically associated with Bolshevism and communism. The Tudeh party was no exception. It became a communist party in-line with positions and demands of the Soviet Union.

Concerned about the growing identification of socialism with Soviet communism, a group of young students in the holy city of Mashad with anti-colonial aspirations who remained committed to socialist ideas laid the foundation of a movement called God-Worshipping Socialists. In choosing the name of their movement they emphasized that despite their Shi‘i convictions, they did not regard the undertaking an exclusively Muslim affair. Rather, they thought that belief in God needs to be translated in general terms into a spiritual force that propels modernity toward socialist ideals of justice and dignity.

Nakhshab and his movement understood the notion of Towhid (oneness of God, monotheism) as a spiritual directive for the promotion of oneness of all beings as the extension of God, against exploitation of all kinds of lifeforms. They stayed clear of the Sharia and the juridical debates on Islamic law. They saw their movement as an outlook, a weltanschauung, a worldview that finds its realization through collective decision-making in particular situations.

Those ideas became an engine that shaped the ideology of the 1979 revolution in Iran. Similar movements in Catholicism gave rise to the idea of Liberation Theology with lasting influences in Peru, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other Central and South American countries. Thinkers such as the Sorbonne educated theologian and social critic Ali Shariati rearticulated the basic principles of the Movement of God-Worshipping Socialists into a full-scale emancipatory ideology. Shariati warned that movements are always at risk of becoming bureaucratized and losing their spirit of creativity and novelty. He believed that once a movement realizes itself with access to the institutions of power, saving the institutions of power takes precedence over perpetuating the spirit of the movement.

We have seen this repeatedly in so many different places. I wonder how much Mayor Mamdani knows about Mohammad Nakhshab and his movement, or whether he has heard of Ali Shariati. But there is a lesson here to cherish and principles to live by. God-Worshipping Socialists believed in social justice not only in material terms but justice as a principle of full human dignity and spiritual fulfillment. Mamdani faces a herculean task, to sustain a movement while governing the city. Here, I believe, lies the core of the kind of socialism that Mamdani needs to remain committed to. A form of socialism that refuses to worship the instruments of power and sustains the spirit of a movement that has given rise to it.

Neither Nakhshab, nor Shariati lived to see the result of the revolution they helped to inspire. There are fundamental differences between what happened in Iran after the revolution and assuming the mayor’s office in New York City!  But the temptation to worship the institutions of power is not something that creeps up overnight. Bureaucracy dictates its own logic, the logic of self-preservation, upon its office holders. To remain in the office cannot be the objective. Nakhshab and the socialists of his generation found the solution in a kind of spiritual commitment that was informed by their Towhidi worldview, inspired by teachings of Islam but all-embracing of all creeds that negate exploitative relations between all forms of beings. Let’s hope that our new mayor will uphold those principles of hope. Nakhshap died almost half-a-century ago not far from the office of our new mayor. Let us hope that Mamdani continues to practice the kind of Shi‘ism that Nakhshab dreamed of, a religion that promotes human dignity through socialist ideals.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is an Iranian-born American historian, sociologist, and professor.