It’s the Knicks chant that has taken over New York City.
“My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” came when New York fans needed it most. The team had just lost their first playoff game following a 13-game winning streak and was only leading the Spurs 2-1 in the series.
One fan’s rallying cry became a viral chant recreated by over and over again by Knicks’ lovers across the five boroughs and beyond the city. MD Ahnaf Hossain, a 23-year-old, became a mascot for the team when a TikTok of his chant went viral last week.
Countless iterations popped up across the internet, mirroring the rhyming scheme — almost always starting with, “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish” — and then shifting ever so slightly when it was time for Game 5.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about the chant on MS NOW the morning after the Knicks clinched the NBA title.
“I haven’t met him, but he is a New Yorker whose words have really stayed with all of us,” Mamdani said.
“Thanks to him, there are a lot of people who have just been running up to me over the last few weeks just shouting, ‘My Mayor’s Muslim!’ I said, ‘It’s true. I am.'”
The New York Knicks captured their first NBA championship since 1973, defeating the San Antonio Spurs on the road in Game 5 to clinch the NBA Finals and bring the Larry O’Brien Trophy back to New York for the first time in 53 years.
The mayor, a well-documented longtime Knicks fan, was in attendance at The Garden for Game 3, the team’s only loss in the finals (President Donald Trump was there, too).
Within an hour of the victory late Saturday, Mamdani announced the date of a ticker-tape parade for the New York Knicks and a ceremony to gift the team the Keys to the City. Those celebrations will be held on Thursday.
