Take a Walk With Asad From NYC

""As New Yorkers, we always want to go. We want to go from point A to point B and I get that the city is constantly on the move, but I invite you to stop and to just look," said Dandia. Dandia was leading 12 of us on a walking tour of Harlem, pointing out important spots for Muslim history:"

"He said the city is like a palimpsest: a tablet etched with ancient writing that's been effaced and rewritten, over and over again. "Think of New York not as an undifferentiated mass of buildings, but as a collective of people who add layers of depth to the story," he said. A tour guide, urban historian, professor, storyteller, organizer, and native New Yorker, Dandia is like a palimpsest too."

"He touched the current of history in the early 2000s, when he was a victim of an NYPD effort to surveil Muslim communities in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in the wake of 9/11. While in college in 2011, Dandia founded a volunteer community organization. A year later, one of the members-who had come to events, distributed food, and ate at his family's dinner table-confessed that he was an NYPD plant reporting on Dandia's community."

Asad Dandia is a community organizer, Muslim New Yorker, urban history tour guide, professor, and storyteller who leads immersive walking tours of Harlem. He encourages people to slow down and observe the city's layered history. He highlights sites of Muslim and Latino-Islamic heritage, including New York's first mosque and Malcolm X's place of worship. Dandia experienced post-9/11 NYPD surveillance in Brighton Beach and discovered an undercover informant in his community. He joined an ACLU lawsuit in 2013 to challenge targeted undercover surveillance. He describes New York as a palimpsest and frames his life and activism as layered with historical and political scars.

Read at City Limits