Ana ❤️ Niyū Yūrk : A Conversation with Hiba Abid and Asad Dandia

bidoun.org · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Mahka Eslami, Untitled, 2023-2024. From Bodega Boys (Revers editions, 2025). Courtesy the artist She was to stand, robed and gigantic, her torch at once a succor for incoming ships and a beacon to the world. Her sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was drawn to monumental forms. As a young man he had travelled up the Nile and photographed the stone colossi built to guard a pharaoh’s tomb. When he returned to Egypt a decade later, another project of epic ambition was nearing completion, the fulfilment of an ancient dream: carving a waterway through the desert to join the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, collapsing the scale of the world. Bartholdi tried to persuade the Khedive that a new colossus should mark the entrance to this Suez Canal: a lighthouse in the guise of a fellaha, one of the humble countrywomen he had encountered on his travels. He called it Egypt Enlightening Asia. But the Khedive demurred; the canal had cost twice as much as planned. A few years later, as French liberals discussed how to commemorate the centenary of the American republic, Bartholdi reworked his design and named it Liberty Enlightening the World… The story of Lady Liberty’s early life as an Egyptian fellaha is one I learned only recently. In 2024, shortly after moving to New York, I joined a walking tour of Lower Manhattan led by Asad Dandia, an urban historian and community organizer who has spent years deciphering the city’s palimpsest. Focused on a couple blocks of the Financial District, the tour of what was once known as “Little Syria” offered a counter-history that placed a community usually banished to the margins at the heart of American life. Besides the crypto-Egyptian statue, we learned that the first peace treaty signed by the United States was written in Arabic; that both the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts descend from an infamous Muslim pirate; and that among the habitués of the Dunkin’ Donuts at 19 Rector Street are those who believe that its grounds remain blessed on account of the makeshift mosque, established by an Ottoman consul, that once stood at that address. Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, Project for a Monumental Statue at the Entrance of the Port of Suez, 1869. Announcement poster for 2010 group show at Galerie Bucholz Köln, Germany. Courtesy Galerie Bucholz A similar excavation of shadow histories is currently on view in Niyū Yūrk, a jewel box of an exhibition at the New York Public Library curated by Hiba Abid and devoted to Middle Eastern and North African presences in the city. The show gathers ship manifests, storefront photographs, club minutes, theater programs — paper traces of the people whom Dandia tracks in the streets. Of the many intriguing artifacts, my attention was drawn to the score for Amerika Ya Hilwa (America the Sweet, 1912), one of several patriotic ditties composed by a young Lebanese émigré, Alexander (Iskandar) Maloof, in response to a call for a new national anthem. Another Maloof piece, “For Thee, America,” was quickly adopted by schools and performed at graduations across the country. The refrain seems tender, almost bashful. While it is perhaps hard to imagine it soaring over a stadium, it is enough to know that this immigrant’s ode was sung for decades by children in some twenty states, including New York, where Maloof once led a choir of 500 students in rousing song. —Yasmine Seale Michael C. Vazquez: Can you talk a little about how you’ve chosen to frame the exhibition? Hiba Abid: Well, it’s titled Niyū Yūrk, which is how “New York” sounds in Arabic… Asad Dandia: The perfect name! MV: What’s great about it is how it estranges the familiar — evens out the sonic terrain between “migrant” and “native.” Non-Arabic speakers are forced to stop and think about how to pronounce the name of the city. Like, how many syllables is that? Three? Two? Two-point-five? [Laughs] I listened to your interview on WNYC and the very well-intentioned host kept getting hung up on it. Which is to say: yes, the perfect name. HA: Thank you! The exhibition is about Middle Eastern and North African lives in the city, as told through the materials that the library has collected — and failed to collect — about them. This is the first exhibition to draw from NYPL’s holdings on the subject, and I decided to work with the strengths and the gaps of the archive, which is really sprawling but uneven. There’s also a meta-story being told here about collecting practices: who decides what’s worth keeping, and what happens when the people making those decisions lack the linguistic or cultural knowledge to recognize what they’re seeing. MV: So much depends on who’s doing the work. HA: Exactly. The Oriental Division of the NYPL was founded in 1897 by scholars who were mostly interested in the past — Mesopotamia, Persia, Ancient Egypt — and subjects like Arabic poetry, lexicography… MV: What you might call classical orientalism. HA: With all that implies. But then at that very same moment, the city was seeing the first waves of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. Those immigrants were building communities, starting businesses, making names for themselves. Publishing books and newspapers. Members of those communities were using the libraries… and some of them were donating materials, which made their way into the collection. HA: So, the first part of the exhibition, “Roads to New York,” looks at that early period and the people who came here — and about how they were perceived, documented, and categorized. For example, we show some of the famous Ellis Island portraits taken by Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine, but we include the original descriptions that accompanied them, which ultimately migrated into the library catalog. It makes vividly clear how ethnographic those early perceptions of Middle Easterners were. Lewis Wickes Hine, A Syrian Arab at Ellis Island, 1926. Courtesy The New York Public Library MV: Orientalized, even. HA: Yes. Much of this perception had been shaped by the World Fairs in Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis in the 1870s, 1890s. MV: The Midway at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago was like a buffet of folkloric tropes — there was a Turkish village, an Algerian Theater, a Moorish Palace, and a “Cairo Street.” Huge pavilions. HA: Many people from the Middle East and North Africa worked those fairs. It’s important to remember that people self-orientalized. Entertainers capitalized on their supposed exoticness, playing to Western audiences’ tastes. MV: Can you talk about the study guide for aspiring immigrants? It looks like a sample test. HA: They’re the answers you are advised to give to the questions you’re likely to get at Ellis Island. Each entry appears in English, Arabic, and phonetic English. It was important because there were trick questions! They would ask: “Do you believe in polygamy? Do you intend to practice polygamy?” AD: Which was a question that was originally added in the 1890s, targeting Mormons. But it became like a trick question for Muslims. There are records of men being rejected because they didn’t know how to answer. HA: One of them is in the exhibition: Mohamed Juda. He is the “Algerian Man” in the Ellis Island portraits. Augustus F. Sherman, Algerian Man, from the series Ellis Island Portraits, 1910. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy The New York Public Library AD: He came over with a few friends, who made it through immigration fine. What’s interesting is that they were all on their way to meet a man named Martin Labé about finding work. And Labé, who was supposedly a Sephardic Jew from Algeria, was one of several Algerian men who lived in the tenement at 109 Washington Street in Lower Manhattan. MV: Which was called Little Syria at the time? AD: Exactly. And that building at 109 Washington is still there — it’s probably the last physical trace of that neighborhood, which was cleared out in the late 1940s to make way for the Battery Park Tunnel. HA: There’s one other trace: the façade of what used to be St. George’s Church. MV: At what point did people start calling that area Little Syria? And what did they mean by “Syria”? HA: Well, the community dates back to the 1880s, but it would probably have been called the Syrian Colony or the Syrian Quarter in the local press. Either way, the name refers to Greater Syria, which was an Ottoman territory that included what is now Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel and Jordan. MV: I feel like there’s a whole history of nomination tied into the crises in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire… HA: Absolutely. In the records at Ellis Island, people are constantly being misidentified. But they also self-identify in ways that no longer make sense to people. Someone like Khalil Gibran called himself Syrian, not Lebanese. It’s a historical term. AD: The authorities weren’t sure how to categorize this community. In the census records maintained by another church in the neighborhood, they ranked the local demographics. Number one was “German,” number two was “Irish,” and number three was “Asiatic Turkey (Syria).” MV: Obviously. [Laughter] AD: Little Syria is usually remembered as a Christian Arab enclave, but there were Jews, Druze, Armenians, and Muslims who lived there, too. HA: There’s a myth or legend about a mosque on Rector Street… AD: Yeah, that one article from 1912, which describes a “Turkish chapel” on the third floor of a building, led by a Turkish imam. It seems like it was more of a prayer space, inside someone’s apartment; it doesn’t show up in any official records. But I did find evidence of Eid celebrations in the neighborhood a little later — there’s a 1926 article about an Eid event at 65 Washington St. with Russians, Poles, Yemenis, and Syrians all together. So you had this kind of multi-ethnic community, though by that time the Syrians had started moving to Brooklyn. MV: Wait — Poles?! [Laughter] AD: Yes! Polish Tatars. In fact, the first official mosque in New York City was founded by a Polish Tatar in t