Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities

Edited by Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1983. 208 pp. $5.95 (paperback)

Reviewed by Gregory Orfalea

While ransacking an uncle's old files recently I chanced upon an acid-deteriorated copy of a biography of Dr. Joseph Awad Arbeely, generally agreed to have been the first Arab to settle his family in the United States (1878). The book—written in Arabic by hand and published on the first Arab press in the New World (Kowkab America, New York City, 1904)—was a find. The Library of Congress had not heard of it and preparations are being made to translate it into English.

Dr. Arbeely (a great-great-great uncle I am told) came from the Christian village of Arbeen, Syria, a yawning lentil and almond farming town six miles north of Damascus, He was not ragged or illiterate, as the current tour guides on Ellis Island insist all immigrants were then, but the president of a Syrian college. A picture of his family adorns the cover of Arabs in the New World, an informative collection of essays.

Updating Scholarship

The book is a welcome arrival, tastefully printed, researched and edited. It substantially updates scholarship in a field that has had halting, infinitesimal progress over the years.

Although it contains some of the jargon and dry statistics that one can expect from social scientists, and even though some of the nine contributing editors appear to be mono-voiced, the fact is that the book is the only one of its kind in print and is of real value both for initiates and Middle East aficionados. The work also concludes with an excellent, up-to-date select bibliography on the subject of Arab-Americans by Mohammed Sawaie, professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia.

The book is divided into two major parts. Part One contains four essays that provide an overview of the Arab American community, its history (Alixa Naff), reasons for emigration from Syria (Najib Saliba), Christian life (Philip Kayal) and Muslim life (Yvonne Haddad). Part Two is devoted entirely to the Detroit community (five essays), which contains the largest concentration of Arab Americans (200,000) in the U.S. Here we discover that half the population of the south end of Dearborn, Michigan, is Arab; as was half the work force at Ford's River Rouge plant before the current recession.

Arabs in the New World contains plenty of curiosities. Naff, an expert on the early Syrian peddlers, relates that with the exception of the German Jew, no immigrant group so completely identified with peddling as the Syrians. The first Arab Muslim community was established in Ross, North Dakota, at the turn of the century. Like many immigrant groups, names were changed on Ellis Island. Ya'oub became Jacobs; Milhern became Williams.

Why did Arabs come to the New World? Naff argues economic opportunity. But with the blockade of Beirut harbor and the Syrian coast during World War I by the Allies, life in Lebanon and Syria became hell. Saliba notes: "Survivors of that calamity still relate horrible stories of the years of war, stories of people who starved to death in the streets while others frantically went through garbage looking for something to eat."

Other factors prior to the famine that emptied the Lebanon of 100,000 (or one quarter) of its population by World War I were the opening of the Suez canal in 1869 (in which traders bypassed Syria overland for the Red Sea trade route), the rise of Egyptian and American cotton, and the attraction of word that there was "gold in the streets" of the New World.

Coffeehouses and Domes

The final essay in the book on the south end of Dearborn contains some attractive detail. The Arabs have their own coffehouse strip—Dix Avenue—and its buildings have been recently renovated to include the architectural motif of the mosque dome. The call of the muezzin is louder than the call to work at Ford's River Rouge plant, at least these days. On a recent trip I was told that the Dearborn south end community tried to bring suit against the call of the muezzin for disturbing the peace at early hours! The Muslim community defeated the suit.

There is a general lack of individual anecdote in the book (the social scientist tends towards divisions, typologies, statistical brackets). The unusual lives of Anthony Bishallany (the first Lebanese immigrant in 1854, who died two years after arrival in the States of tuberculosis) and Haj Ali (who became known in the southwest as "Hi Jolly," a nineteenth-century trainer of the U.S. Army's Camel Corps in Arizona) are not even mentioned.

Arab-American life—a rich and robust one—is just beginning to seep into imaginative writing. A full-blown celebration of the community has yet to be done on the scale of the National Book Award-winning treatment of the Armenians, Passage to Ararat, by Michael Arlen, or Irving Howe's epic salute to the Jews, The World of Our Fathers. Until it is, we must be grateful to the Abrahams for keeping the candle lit in this collection.

Gregory Orfalea is currently writing a book on Arab American history.