Asad Dandia sued the NYPD after it spied on his household and group. Now he makes use of folks’s historical past to reclaim the streets from the programs that surveilled him.
Asad Dandia.
(Lara-Nour Walton)
In winter 2012, Asad Dandia, 19, found that his pal who crashed at his home in Brighton Seaside and dined at his household desk was a New York Police Division plant. The division’s Intelligence Division was dispatching spies and plainclothes officers to compile dossiers on Muslim “scorching spots.” They infiltrated native bookstores, eating places, and mosques, eavesdropping on informal conversations and befriending unwitting group members.
The revelation devastated Dandia, a wiry Pakistani American college pupil. Not lengthy after, the ACLU requested him to affix a lawsuit difficult the NYPD, and, alongside 5 different plaintiffs, he watched a choose declare the surveillance program unconstitutional.
“That’s the story of how I changed New York Metropolis coverage earlier than I received my first full-time job after school,” he informed a cluster of individuals one late-September afternoon, an vintage map of New Amsterdam tucked underneath one arm.
Now 32, Dandia runs New York Narratives, which leads strolling excursions across the identical metropolis that put him underneath watch. He begins each outing like this—enumerating the numerous methods New York’s institution failed him. Then, earlier than you possibly can soak up the gravity of the state violence he endured, he’s pivoted—gesturing towards East Harlem’s Islamic Cultural Middle, launching right into a spiel about how 46 Muslim international locations helped fund its development and the way its oxidized copper dome evokes one other New York icon: the Statue of Liberty.
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It’s exhausting to think about how the most powerful police department within the nation got here to see Dandia—light, with thin-rimmed glasses, a manbun, and a silken neckerchief—as a nationwide safety risk. More durable nonetheless to fathom how that paranoia ran so deep that the feds tried to deport one in all Dandia’s undocumented buddies for refusing to spy on him. Hardest of all to understand how his love for New York survived its institutional cruelty.
Dandia continues to be attempting to make sense of that betrayal himself. “However right here’s what I settled on,” he informed me. “If I enable my expertise with the NYPD to make me hate New York, I’m giving them what they need. That’s me saying, ‘It’s your metropolis and I’m only a visitor.’”
Refusing that logic of alienation has grow to be the essence of his walking-tour undertaking. Folding his personal accounts right into a wider folks’s historical past, Dandia takes New York again from the programs that surveilled him. In East Harlem, he chronicles the rise of Muslim Boricuas. In FiDi, he traces the forced displacement of Syrian émigrés. In higher Manhattan, he follows the specter of Malcolm X from Lenox Avenue to Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
“My aim is to counterpoint folks’s understanding of the town, to assist them see that they’ve a spot in it too,” he mentioned. “There’s a strong social ingredient to strolling excursions. We study from one another, construct significant bonds across the shared expertise of strolling, and generate new ideas and concepts about what it means to be a New Yorker. So it’s not simply the substance of the tour that’s radical, it’s additionally the tactic.”
To that finish, Dandia has mastered the difficult choreography of shepherding double-digit teams by way of busy streets—pausing earlier than murals, housing tasks, and taverns to ship meticulously researched monologues. Typically reggaeton beats emanating from passing automotive stereos or subway tremors overpower him. However Dandia takes these interruptions in stride—leaning into the town’s noise and letting it grow to be a part of his efficiency.
“The explanation why I put myself on the market on these excursions is as a result of I don’t suppose you possibly can separate the private from the political,” he mentioned. “I used to be spied on by the NYPD. It formed the remainder of my life eternally. However, I fought again, and I wish to use my story as a automobile to point out you that that is one thing that you are able to do too. You may reclaim the town for your self.”
For Dandia, this implies reframing New York Metropolis. The favored conception of his hometown, mirrored within the sitcoms of the late twentieth century and early aughts, has by no means felt fairly proper to him. Dandia was raised in Brighton Seaside, a working-class corner of Brooklyn the place road indicators are in Cyrilic and “English is commonly spoken as a 3rd language.” His excursions, accordingly, concentrate on the lives of these within the metropolis’s ethnic enclaves. He recovers the histories of Bangladeshi intermarriage into Harlem’s Puerto Rican and African American communities, Sephardic resettlement from previously Dutch Brazil to New Amsterdam, and Robert Moses’s displacement of Washington Avenue’s tamarind-juice peddlers.
Folks often discover his excursions novel for his or her ethnic scope, however what distinguishes Dandia’s walks is the best way they filter the town’s previous by way of the lens of labor, group, and collective wrestle.
“The New York that we all know right now, the rights that now we have, the advantages that we get pleasure from, the facilities that each single one in all us worth are a consequence of standard wrestle,” Dandia mentioned, readjusting his maroon suspenders, which he routinely wears on his excursions. “I would like folks to know that the town progressively unfolded by way of these struggles, and the easiest way to try this, I feel, is to stroll the streets and to see the websites of contestation,” he added. “The streets of New York bear witness to our labor.”
That progressive sensibility was born of Dandia’s early confrontations with the town’s establishments, and it developed into political engagement. Since August 2024, he has been lending support to his pal Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who’s engaged in what was as soon as thought of a long-shot mayoral marketing campaign.
When Mamdani determined to run, he referred to as up Dandia, whom he believed understood Muslim New York in methods few others might. Dandia has a bachelor’s diploma in social work with a concentrate on group organizing from NYU and a grasp’s in Islamic research from Columbia. However what actually makes Dandia an knowledgeable is his relationship to the streets. In 2022, he earned an NYC tour-guide license and commenced main walks all over the place from Arab Atlantic Avenue to the corridors of the Met’s Islamic artwork wing.
In summer season 2024, the 2 males met at Greenwich Village’s Caffe Reggio, searching for uninterrupted dialog and near-anonymity in a vacationer locale. Two weeks after strategizing over espresso, Mamdani requested that Dandia be a part of what he referred to as his “kitchen cupboard,” the place he started providing unofficial recommendation to the mayoral hopeful. “Zohran is rather like me,” Dandia mentioned. “He’s South Asian, Muslim, American, millennial, democratic socialist, product of the town.” However most significantly, he’s “somebody who very deeply loves and appreciates New York.”
Mamdani’s love for New York Metropolis is why, Dandia says, he’s price championing. “There are lots of people with coverage proposals, however you possibly can inform they don’t love the town—they view it as a job alternative,” he informed me. “Whether or not you’re a Palestinian in Gaza holding onto your land or a New Yorker combating to maintain your condo, you do it as a result of it’s your house and you may’t see your self anyplace else. That’s why Zohran resonates with me a lot. It’s as a result of I can inform he’s actually in love with New York Metropolis.”
For Dandia, that love is each politics and pedagogy—it powers each phrase he speaks on his excursions. He’s so ebullient and encyclopedic that passersby get drawn into his orbit, fastening themselves to tour teams till the very finish. Throughout his newest “Little Syria” tour, he picked up—and held onto—six principally unaffiliated strangers. One among them approached him on the terminus, the last-standing tenement on Washington Avenue, and requested him if he had ever carried out theater. “Simply on the streets of New York, brother,” Dandia replied.
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Certainly, outfitted with solely a lime-green binder crammed with land deeds and sepia-toned photographs, Dandia builds scenes round a misplaced previous. On his Little Syria tour, he stops at unremarkable junctures, like the place a bridge over Interstate 478 meets the sidewalk, and begins orating: “Tenement life was not simple.” Abruptly, the freeway behind him dissolves, supplanted by a worn brick constructing with bedsheets clinging to its balconies. Flipping open his binder, Dandia pulls us inside, exhibiting us footage of a dinky hallway sink, black mildew scaling decayed partitions, and Syrian ladies bundled in winter garments.
Then turning the binder towards himself and studying aloud from The Book of Khalid—a semi-autobiographical novel about Ottoman immigration to Manhattan—Dandia guides us into the minds of those that as soon as occupied outdated Battery Park. One beleaguered man wonders if he made a grave mistake leaving residence. Siphoning water from his flooded New York basement, he wonders if “rolling our roofs in Baalbek,” was simpler.
By drawing on main sources and firsthand accounts of New York’s bygone days, Dandia turns into a vessel for the town’s layered historical past, resuscitating the reminiscence of its forgotten generations. “I don’t need New York to be seen as only a assortment of monuments and constructions,” Dandia informed me. “I would like it to be understood as a collective of tales and folks.” And since the folks’s historical past of New York is inexhaustible, Dandia’s work is aware of no finish. Underway are excursions on James Baldwin in Greenwich Village, Bay Ridge’s Little Palestine, the Bengali Decrease East Facet, and the legacy of the Jewish labor bund in New York.
On his Muslim Harlem expertise, Dandia stops the place the epicenter of Latino-Muslim life, the group Alianza Islámica, as soon as stood. It’s now a barbershop wedged between a Guatemalan grocer and waxing spa. Right here, he recalled the words of Colson Whitehead: “You’re a New Yorker when what was there earlier than is extra actual and stable than what’s right here now.”
The road captures the town’s curious situation, the place the previous appears to push up towards the current, generally extra vivid and alive than its successor.
To essentially know New York is to recollect what has been effaced. His excursions oblige us to look previous the high-rises and company Sweetgreen slop stations, to glimpse the individuals who as soon as animated the areas the place they now stand. In that sense, Dandia makes New Yorkers of all who stroll with him. By increasing our sense of what the town was, he invitations us to put declare to it—to see its historical past as our inheritance and to combat for what it’d but grow to be.
