In a small gallery at the New York Public Library, Hiba Abid stops in front of a series of black-and-white photographs taken at Ellis Island. Abid points to an image of a man in a white turban and flowing robes, his expression solemn. "This man was never admitted to the island," she explains.
Abid, who is the library's curator for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, is guiding me through "Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City," an exhibition she put together that runs through March 8. "He was sent back to French Algeria." The individual was later identified by a librarian from another institution as Mohamed Juda, an Algerian who had come to work for a merchant in what was then known as Little Syria, the Lower Manhattan enclave formed in the 1880s that was largely demolished in the 1940s to make way for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
Immigration officials described Juda as a "believer in the practice of polygamy," a racialized charge often used to bar Muslim immigrants from entry. "Christian Syrians could leverage their ties to Christianity and the Holy Land to claim whiteness, whereas Muslims struggled," Abid tells me.