Asad Dandia, a community organizer, Muslim New Yorker, and urban history tour guide is a rising star with friends in high places.
Asad Dandia, founder of New York Narratives, on St. Nicholas Avenue near West 113th Street during a walking tour on Aug. 23, 2025. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)
Asad Dandia is busy, but never in a rush.
“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: New York’s first mosque, the headquarters of one of the nation’s first Latino-Islamic organizations, Malcolm X’s place of worship.
The tour required walking—two and a half miles in all—but Dandia glided over the pavement, beckoning listeners forward, answering questions without breaking stride.
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.
(Adi Talwar/City Limits)
In 2013, Dandia joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to end NYPD’s undercover surveillance operations targeting people by race, religion, or ethnicity.
“This sent us reeling. Our sacred spaces had been violated. We didn’t know who to trust, or where we could turn for help,” Dandia wrote in 2020.
Dandia’s palimpsest is layered with the scars of that first political awakening.
Through his tour company New York Narratives, he tells the untold histories of Muslims and other New Yorkers. “I want people to know not just the stories of success and survival but also the stories of struggle,” he said.
His tours cover Harlem, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, and Little Syria in Lower Manhattan, which was demolished in the 1940s to make space for the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel to Brooklyn.
“I even had some naysayers suggest that my area of focus is too specialized and too niche, and therefore there’s not going to be a mainstream demand for it,” said Dandia. “It turned out that they were wrong.”
His message seems to be catching on. A few weeks ago he gave Comptroller Brad Lander and his family a private tour of Brooklyn. He teaches a class at CUNY Guttman Community College. His tour company has more business than ever.
(Adi Talwar/City Limits)
His social media accounts (@AsadFromNYC) have grown in popularity, particularly on X, generating interest in local politics, history, and nerdy urban fun.
Undeniably warm but a self-described introvert, Asad weighs in on the story of the day online, participates in discourse on what it means to be a New Yorker, and increasingly, signals his rising influence in local politics. He’s in a group chat with X-semi-famous New York City political nerds Michael Lange and Adam Carlson.
Lange, a political analyst, told City Limits that Asad is endlessly curious and wise beyond his years.
“He’s someone who’s just really naturally curious, likes to read, likes to walk, likes to meet new people,” he said. “And I think that’s the best skill you can have, if you’re curious and you work hard, you can go really far in a place like New York.”
“Asad is someone who understands a real wide spectrum of New Yorkers,” added Lange.
Dandia’s rise has coincided with the rise of another prominent Muslim New Yorker: Democratic nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani.
(Adi Talwar/City Limits)
“12 years ago, I was standing in front of the police headquarters to launch this lawsuit, and 12 years later, I’m friends with a guy that’s gonna be the boss of the police department,” said Dandia, who is confident Mamdani will win in November. “So sometimes life can be a cinema.”
Dandia counts himself as a “good friend” of Mamdani, and, when called, has offered advice to the campaign that catapulted the three-term assemblyman into pole position in the mayoral race.
Mamdani won in parts of the city that surprised many in the establishment, but not Dandia.
“Brighton Beach went for Zohran, where I grew up. It wasn’t Russians, it was Pakistanis who came out for him,” he said.
As for the doubters, pundits, and media who cast cold water on a Muslim’s chances to be mayor, “They’re all late,” said Dandia. “I’m not surprised that they’re late because they didn’t think our communities were worth learning about.”
Dandia says he’s fighting for a more optimistic vision of New York, that’s inclusive and full of opportunity for people from every background.
(Adi Talwar/City Limits)
On tour, he told the story of Bengali Muslims immigrating from South Asia, some of whom jumped ship into New York Harbor, settled in Harlem, and built families with Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers in the mid-20th century. It’s a lesser told history that, to Asad, shows the persistence of immigrants that helped build New York.
“Belonging is something that is often fought for, not something that is granted,” he said.“I’m very optimistic, thanks to Zohran’s victory, and thanks to the fact that all of these communities have come out and finally, believe in [a] New York that they can be part of.”
To know the city, you have to walk it. It helps Asad see the hidden layers of history. Walking, “you can see worlds change kind of in front of you, and there’s a lot of power in that, and a lot of storytelling,” added Lange.
If people stop and look closely at New York, they might just see themselves in it.
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