NYC Tour Focuses On City's Muslim History

On the border of East Harlem and the Upper East Side, the copper dome of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York glows green against the skyline. It’s where Asad Dandia begins one of his walking tours, pointing upward before turning to his group with a smile.

“The dome is copper; it rusted into green. Green’s an Islamic color,” he says. “But what other structure does that remind you of? Yeah, it’s an homage to the Statue of Liberty.”

Moments like that are what Dandia’s tours are built around: connections between histories, symbols, and the New Yorkers who live among them. Through his company, New York Narratives, the 32-year-old Brooklyn native guides residents through Muslim New York’s past and present, revealing the roots of communities that helped shape the city long before most New Yorkers realized they were here.

“I’m from Brooklyn originally, where I still live, and I still don’t have a driver’s license,” he joked. “So I’m kind of stuck here.”

Dandia, who has Pakistani heritage, is an urban historian, organizer, and professor. He began his career not with tour groups, but in grassroots aid.

“I co-founded a charity that delivered eggs, milk, and bread to poor families,” he said. “It was run by young Muslim volunteers like me.”

That project would unexpectedly transform his life. One volunteer who had joined the effort, someone who ate at his family’s table and spent time with his friends, later confessed to being an informant for the New York Police Department.

“He was sent by the NYPD to surveil me and my family and my community,” Dandia said.

The revelation shook his world and placed him at the center of a larger fight over Muslim civil rights in New York. During Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration, Dandia became a plaintiff in a 2013 ACLU lawsuit challenging the city’s post-9/11 surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods.

“Four years of my life were spent basically challenging the NYPD in the courtrooms, in the streets, and in classrooms and in the media everywhere I could really, so that we could bring an end to the surveillance of our communities,” he said.

After the case was settled in 2017, Dandia turned his focus to public history. By 2023, with help from a Brooklyn Public Library grant, he launched New York Narratives. The goal, he said, was to show a side of New York that rarely appears in travel guides.

“The tours I used to lead for other companies reflected an old New York — a New York that didn’t reflect the New York I knew,” he explained. “So I decided to launch New York Narratives to give people a vivid image of the other side of New York, the New York that’s been erased, marginalized, or forgotten.”

On this particular tour through Harlem, on a fall afternoon, Dandia's group passed through the city’s layers of Muslim life: the Puerto Rican Muslim community that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, the Bengali immigrants who built families here as early as the 1920s, and the West and East African New Yorkers who’ve made their own marks in the neighborhood. “We talked about race, labor, gender, class, and activism,” Dandia said. “This isn’t the New York of Hollywood. This is the New York of everyday life.”

For some participants, the experience is personal. “I’ve walked with Asad before,” said Anwaar Huk, one of his friends and frequent tour attendees. “[It's] kind of living the history as you’re walking. I think it’s really fascinating. Because I’m Muslim, any kind of Muslim history just helps me ground my own faith.”

That sense of visibility drives Dandia’s work. He says the city’s Muslim identity is more diverse than many realize.

“People think Muslim New Yorkers are just Muslims from the Middle East,” he said. “But you also have Muslims from South Asia, from Europe, Puerto Rican Muslims and Latino Muslims, and Black Muslims might be the largest Muslim community in New York City. You walk into a mosque and it’s like walking into the United Nations.”

He’s also seen how much the social landscape has changed for Muslims over the last 10 years.

“Muslim New Yorkers now have a lot more institutions, a lot more political representation, a lot more cultural cachet,” he said. “Their impact on the city is felt.”

Dandia himself sees that change reflected in the growing visibility of Muslim leaders, including his friend Zohran Mamdani, the Queens assemblyman and Democratic nominee for mayor. As the election approaches in November, it’s a moment for Dandia that feels both personal and historic, a sign that the city he once had to fight may now more fully include him and the Muslim community in its story.

“Becoming American doesn’t always have to be assimilating into upper-middle class norms,” he says, “It can also mean aligning yourself with the poor and the marginalized. That’s the lesson of New York.”

For Dandia, every tour is a way to make that lesson visible, to remind New Yorkers that Muslim history isn’t something added on to the city’s story. It’s been here all along.

A portion of this reporting aired on the What’s What Podcast on 10/21/2025. Listen to WFUV News's election coverage on Tuesday night, November 11, on 90.7FM, streaming at WFUV.org.