Zohran Mamdani is going to ‘introduce Arabic numerals’ in New York City schools according to claims online, or is he?
Mamdani won the New York mayoralty after running a campaign focused on making New York City affordable to live in.
Shortly after the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Mamdani took to the city’s streets specifically to ask people why they voted for Trump, and said that the cost of living was one of the biggest issues that he encountered.
Unfortunately during the campaign, Mamdani, who has unapologetically affirmed his status as the first South Asian and the first Muslim to become mayor of New York City, was subjected to repeated attacks targeting his religion.
Since his victory, claims began circulating online that the mayor elect would introduce ‘Arabic numerals’ in public schools in New York City.
But what does this actually mean?
Arabic numerals explained
Well, the ‘claim’ circulated partially as a joke by his supporters, because the system of writing numbers that is used in mathematics universally today is derived from Arabic numerals.
It was Arab scholars who first shared this way of writing numbers with Europeans, hence the name ‘Arabic numerals’ for the digits from 0-9.
So, ‘Arabic numerals’ are already used in schools not only in New York, but across the whole US.
There is some difference, as in Arabic different symbols are used, so ‘1 2 3 4 5’ would be ‘٥ ٤ ٣ ٢ ١’.
However, the system of having digits from 0 to 9 and using those to assemble numbers is derived from Arabic, it’s just the symbols themselves that have changed over time.
This is opposed to the previous system in Europe of Roman numerals, in which letters are assigned a particular value and the positioning of them in relation to each other determines their relationship, so V (5) and I (1) can be either IV, 4 or ‘5-1’, or VI, 6 or ‘5+1’, which is far more complicated to use.
Is Mamdani really introducing ‘Arabic numerals’ in NY schools?
Obviously as explained, this is not true. So, while it started as a joke on social media mocking the ridiculousness of some of the claims Mamdani’s opponents made about him, it seems that some people didn’t get the reference and actually took it seriously.
This included West Virginia House of Delegates Derrick Evans, who was part of January 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol.
Mr Evans wrote: “BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani is expected to require ALL New York Elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals.”
For his part, Mamdani put a lot more than just Arabic numerals into his campaign, releasing one campaign video in highly proficient Arabic, including switching between the formal fus’ha, or Modern Standard Arabic, and dialects.
Not only that, he also released campaign videos in Spanish, Hindi, and Urdu.