On a Tuesday evening during Ramadan, as dates and water awaited attendees breaking their fast in the Jonsson building hallways, a different kind of gathering unfolded inside the Jonsson auditorium. It was the first public event held by MENARAH — the Middle Eastern and North African Research of Art and History lab — a research center founded by Ali Asgar Alibhai, assistant professor of art history at UTD.
The speaker was Katie Merriman, a religious studies scholar who traveled from New York to deliver a talk titled “New York Islamicate: Muslim Histories Built into the Architecture of the City.” For the roughly 30 attendees, the evening offered a scholarly argument that New York City — often cast as ground zero for post-9/11 Islamophobia — is in fact one of the great Islamic cities of the modern world, its Muslim history stretching back four centuries.
“I was in tears for nearly the whole presentation,” said Farzana Razzaque, a second-year Ph.D. student in visual and performing arts. “She talked about how Muslims — we’ve always felt like the outsiders a lot of the time in America. But when she brought up how the foundations of New York had Muslims that were there from the 1600s, 1700s, that’s a big deal. That means we’re not new to this nation.”
“Ideas are being attacked. Religious identities are being attacked. And in all of that, somehow New York City elected its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.”
— Assistant professor of art history Ali Asgar Alibhai
Alibhai, who created MENARAH last year with alum Nida Jaffer, opened the evening by situating the lecture in the present moment.
“We’re in a moment where all around us, people are telling us what we should say, what we should believe,” Alibhai said. “Ideas are being attacked. Religious identities are being attacked. And in all of that, somehow New York City elected its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.”
Mamdani, a 34-year-old South Asian Ugandan immigrant and Shia Muslim, took office in January. His election, Merriman argued, is a new branch on a centuries-old tree planted by enslaved Africans, Syrian peddlers, Bengali merchants and Black American seekers who found in Islam a path to dignity.
After the lecture, interdisciplinary studies senior Noora Hosseini said she left with a changed perspective.
“I didn’t know about the Statue of Liberty,” Hosseini said. “I gained a better perspective on what people are going through.”
“I gained a better perspective on what people are going through.”
— Interdisciplinary studies senior Noora Hosseini
One of Merriman’s most striking revelations concerned the U.S.’s most iconic symbol. The Statue of Liberty, she explained, was originally commissioned by France in the 1860s for the Khedive of Egypt to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. Artist Frederic Bartholdi designed a figure of a fellah — an Egyptian peasant woman — holding the “light of Africa.” When funding collapsed, Bartholdi resurrected the design for the U.S., removing the headscarf and transforming her face into a European woman’s.
“Knowing this origin story, the Statue of Liberty takes on a new valence,” Merriman said. “What does it mean to think about a figure named the Mother of Exiles having an origin as a rural African woman in a headscarf? In our time, when immigrants who look like her are criminalized, how can we reclaim this part of her journey?”
Merriman traced Muslim presence in New York back to 1625, when Anthony Jansen Van Salee — the son of a Dutch pirate who converted to Islam in Morocco — arrived in New Amsterdam and became one of the colony’s largest landowners. Simultaneously, the first enslaved Africans arrived, likely including Muslims kidnapped from North and West Africa. The African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, discovered in 1991, contains the remains of some 20,000 people. Some of the graves contained blue prayer beads, a common Islamic object.
In the 1880s, immigrants from Greater Syria established “Little Syria” on Washington Street, a neighborhood of thousands with Arabic newspapers, literary societies, and at least two mosques. But the price of belonging was often assimilation. Merriman invited an audience member to read the words of Joseph Hawa, a Syrian Muslim who arrived in 1903:
“My true name is Mohammad Asa Abdul Hawa, but people I met on the boat told me I’d better change my name. They said it labeled me as a Muslim, and no immigration officer would allow a Muslim to enter the United States.”
The second half of Merriman’s talk focused on Harlem, where African Americans migrating north during the Great Migration encountered Islam as a means of reconnecting with ancestral identity. Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple in the 1910s; later, missionaries worked among poor Muslim dockworkers and African American seekers alike.
“We’ve always been here. And to know that is a way to empower us.”
— Second-year Ph.D. student Farzana Razzaque
Louis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, opened in Harlem in 1932, grew to 200,000 volumes and became a gathering place for figures like Malcolm X, who studied there late into the night.
“Malcolm used to always reiterate: study history and learn about ourselves and others,” Merriman said, quoting Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American activist who became Malcolm X’s close friend. “Knowledge of history can be used as a weapon to divide us further or seek truth and learn from past errors. Our ultimate objective is to try to create and develop a more just society.”
Razzaque said Merriman’s insistence on Muslim presence as foundational was deeply personal.
“That’s the part that I want them to know, that we’re not others in America,” Razzaque said. “We’ve always been here. And to know that is a way to empower us.”
“All of our histories are connected, and you can’t be afraid to look and see it.”
— Religious studies scholar Katie Merriman
Merriman noted the present political climate in Texas, including Attorney General Ken Paxton designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a “foreign terrorist organization” and lawsuits against the East Plano Islamic Center, is at sharp odds with the U.S.’s storied Muslim history. She said the UT System Board of Regents approving restrictions on “controversial” topics hours before her talk made her wonder whether such lectures would be possible in the future.
“I’m not entirely sure what ‘controversial’ means,” Merriman said. “This ambiguous language allows for a lack of honesty about what actually is being targeted. All of our histories are connected, and you can’t be afraid to look and see it.”
Merriman concluded with a new stance being embraced by the new generation of Muslim New Yorkers, who reject the requirement to prove their belonging and instead use art, culture, and political representation to create space for themselves in their society. She pointed to Mamdani’s recent remarks at an interfaith breakfast, where he cited an excerpt from Islamic oral tradition: “Islam started as something strange, so glad tidings to the strangers.”
“That strangeness is not a deficit,” Merriman said. “It is a source of strength.”
“It doesn’t matter what race, color, ideology. Especially to Muslim youth, we’re hearing it all around us that you don’t belong. Read a history book. We do belong.”
— Dr. Ali Asgar Alibhai
After the lecture, Alibhai addressed the audience directly.
“We’re in a moment where a lot of people are saying you don’t belong,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what race, color, ideology. Especially to Muslim youth, we’re hearing it all around us that you don’t belong. Read a history book. We do belong.”
Alibhai founded MENARAH as a digital research center because he felt UTD lacked a physical space for such work but possessed the digital infrastructure to build one. The center is pursuing ambitious projects, including a video game simulation of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia and a documentary on Fez, Morocco, currently titled “Beyond the Blue Gate.”
“This is the first of many lecture series that are going to come,” he said. “Everything we do is always available digitally for people.”
“It means a lot to be seen.”
— Farzana Razzaque
The next MENARAH lecture, tentatively scheduled for March 23, will feature historian Sam Dalrymple speaking on the partition of India.
After the lecture, as attendees filed out into the cool February night, Razzaque lingered near the stage.
“It meant a lot,” she said again. “To be seen.”