Niyū Yūrk: Tracing the history of MENA immigration to New York

Following the historic election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s first Muslim mayor earlier this month, the legacy and contributions of Muslim Americans to the city have been a key point of discussion.

While the mayor-elect is not himself from the Middle East or North Africa, the newfound platform extended to Muslims city-wide has been instrumental in addressing issues like Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment.

Amid these lingering false assumptions is the belief that the arrival and assimilation of Arabs in New York and the US is only a recent phenomenon, but as a new exhibit at the New York Public Library explores, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Titled Niyū Yūrk — spelt to match the phonetic pronunciation of the city’s name in Arabic — the exhibit sits in the main building of the historic NYPL, exploring the reality of thousands of MENA New Yorkers, which dates back to the 19th century, and their enduring connection to the city.

Sorted into four sections that take viewers through the evolution and development of MENA communities in the city, curator Hiba Abid explained she had initially hoped to avoid a chronological timeline, but eventually found it the best way to present the exhibit.

The exhibit opens with Roads to New York, showcasing the arrival of Arabs —mostly Syrian Christians — in the earliest days at Ellis Island.

Disrupting traditional notions of what Ellis Island arrivals often looked like, the exhibit notes: “Between 1880 and 1940, more than 100,000 people emigrated from the region to the United States, with many entering through Ellis Island and settling in the Syrian colony in Lower Manhattan, also known as Little Syria.”

The section aims to show that Arabs have been a part of mass migration efforts for centuries, and often endured the very same struggles that other migrant communities did as well.

They were faced with orientalizing stereotypes, struggled to assimilate and often anglicised their names in the process, worked tiresome and physically demanding jobs, and settled into crowded tenements.

“This section also asks the question of how we documented these earliest arrivals, and how we describe them? How did Americans perceive these people? And you'll see that they were perceived very erroneously,” Hiba pointed out.

Through carefully selected images and pieces like Syrian Arab at Ellis Island (1926), a Syrian Christian woman’s entry portrait, and Christopher Oscanyan’s The Sultan and His People, a book detailing Ottoman history and American prejudices, Roads to New York infuses the discussion on early MENA migration with an emphasis on women’s roles and ongoing political discourse.

The exhibit serves a dual purpose, too.

Hiba set out to highlight how the NYPL system itself engaged with MENA New Yorkers and historical materials.

In no image was that more apparent than one labelled by NYPL librarians in the 1930s as: A Group of Immigrants, Most Wearing Fezzes, Surrounding A Large Vessel Which Is Decorated With The Star And Crescent Symbol Of The Moslem Religion And The Ottoman Turks.

This characterisation, Hiba noted, was likely false, given that at least one individual was wearing a turban and a white galabiya — a traditionally Egyptian or North African garment.

“I started questioning how accurate these descriptions are, at least in the 1930s and 40s. So, that thread about collecting and describing is very present in the labels, along with some reflections about that,” Hiba told The New Arab.

That particular image was also key to highlighting the earliest forms of discrimination that Muslims faced upon entry to the US, especially as they made up less than 10% of Arabs arriving in the states.

Through orientalizing stereotypes and entry questions specifically designed to ban Muslims from entering the US, assimilation quickly solidified itself as not only advantageous but necessary to survive in the country.

Shaping a community

The exhibit also examines the way Arab Americans came to be identified as “White” on the US Census, a serious point of contention and advocacy within MENA communities today.

When the earliest Arabs arrived on New York’s shores, though, whiteness was still the only way to attain American citizenship, which would allow them to travel back to their home countries, return, vote, advocate for independence in Ottoman-controlled states, and feel a sense of belonging to their new home.

As viewers approach the exhibit’s second section, A Life in the City, the aim of belonging and the community’s roots in the city really begin to take hold.

Arab communities worked diligently to author citizenship guidebooks (not unlike ones still in use today), establish political and women’s advocacy groups, and pool resources to send their children to American universities.

As Arab-American communities became more settled in the city, the Arabic press was one of the first successful business models to emerge. 

In 1910, the first Arabic linotype machine was patented in New York City by Lebanese-born publisher Salloum Mokarzel, empowering the community to share their struggles, worries, political beliefs, and more — all while maintaining their heritage and newfound Americanness.

Arab-American music efforts also emerged during this period, as evidenced by records on display from Columbia Syrian Arabic Records (1920) and Victor Armenian Records (1919).

While maintaining their distinctive tones and musical flourishes, the influence of American sound was similarly evident in these productions.

“Umm Kulthūm and Muḥhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb started circulating, but for music produced here, the musicians had to adapt the length," Hiba noted.

"Where Umm Kulthūm’s songs could last one hour sometimes, here they had to shorten the music because they couldn’t fit it on a 78 RPM. So they produced a lot of this music that was exotic, adjusted to the American ear,” she added. 

While Arab businesses began to thrive in NYC at this time, orientalist stereotypes echoed, and sometimes were even used as marketing tactics for the community.

The section includes mention of figures like Eddie 'The Sheikh' Kochak, a Syrian-American musician, writing “By exaggerating elements of Middle Eastern culture, his style was sometimes criticised by contemporaries as 'Arab kitsch,' misunderstanding his efforts to engage American audiences within the context of 49 rising fear and hostility toward the Middle East.”

By combining artistic and professional ventures with the political realities of the time, the audience gains access to a broader story within its context.

Mentions of artists like Ibrahim Farrah, who challenged gender norms around belly-dancing, and Elvira Helal, one of the most prolific opera singers of the early 20th century, despite no known recordings of her voice existing today.

The third section of the exhibit retreats a bit from the city, instead focusing heavily on the pre- and post-arrival impressions of MENA immigrants.

Through his 1895 poem The Stranger in the West, Mīkhā‘īl As’ad Rustum al-Shuwayrī details his departure from Lebanon and his deep yearning for his homeland — themes that migrants over 130 years later can draw on too.

“I feel like there is a common symbol that Middle Easterners talk about at the time, which is the Brooklyn Bridge. For some reason, it’s an element that is always very present, visually and in writing,” commented Hiba on some of the musings of al-Shuwayri and other poets.

The section highlights the establishment of literary societies, political review publications, magazines, and non-traditional reportage, enabling MENA New Yorkers to exchange ideas, criticisms, and more in open forums within the community.

Art pieces, like those by Rhea Karam, a Lebanese New Yorker, from her Come Together collection, are displayed, representing how political thought and the idea of belonging were infused across artistic and literary forums.

Preserving history, inspiring the future

As one begins to understand the nuanced realities of MENA New Yorkers over centuries of heritage maintenance, assimilation, inaccuracy in representation, and more, the final section, In Our Own Skin, welcomes the viewer to what being MENA in the city looks like today, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 and 9/11.

Musicians like Halim El-Dabh and playwrights like Reza Abdoh are housed in this section, demonstrating the emergence of more avant-garde work by MENA New Yorkers, whose bodies of work serve as bases of inspiration for artists across the city.

A zine by Malikah, a feminist self-defence collective in Queens, is laid out for viewers and includes a timeline of MENA immigration to the states and “documents the impact of gentrification in Astoria through the personal accounts of North African residents, businesses, and places of faith.”

A photo collection titled Bodega Boys Series is one of the final things viewers will see, emphasising the role of Yemenis across the city as operators of neighbourhood corner stores, a vital resource to communities citywide — and the reason why a play on the word "akhi", "ock" has become so deeply ingrained in the city’s vernacular.

The final part of the section and exhibit is a three-minute compilation from In My Own Skin: The Complexity of Living as an Arab in America, a 2001 documentary shot just weeks after 9/11.

As anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment were becoming more and more prevalent — and have remained so — it’s a sombre reminder of the complex realities MENA New Yorkers confront each day.

In such an expansive exhibit, it can feel not easy to have truly absorbed all it has to offer. But, if the exhibit leaves one wanting more – that’s precisely the goal.

Curator Hiba Abid built the exhibit with a dual purpose in mind — yes, to celebrate the contributions and history of MENA New Yorkers, but also to highlight the limited materials available on this community within the NYPL and city archives.

As New York prepares to welcome Zohran Mamdani as the city’s first Muslim mayor, the exhibit feels uniquely timely in highlighting the varied and longstanding contributions of Muslims and MENA communities to the city, knowing that those contributions are far from over.

Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City is on display through March 8, 2026, in the New York Public Library’s Main Branch in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

[Cover photo: Mahka Eslami (b. 1981, Iran), Bodega Boys series, 10 pigment prints, 2023–24
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
© Mahka Eslami]

Suha Musa is a freelance journalist and Masters student in NYU’s GLOJO programme. Suha is deeply passionate about the representation of Muslims, political relationships between the West and the Arab World, and media accessibility. She is also deeply interested in researching the current conflict in Sudan