Stereotypes & Smile Power

More than 160 smiling Jordanian, Moroccan and Saudi dancers and musicians visited the U.S. this month and, as we watched delighted Americans clapping in unison with the performers, some questions began to answer themselves.

Upon returning from the Middle East, many Americans become almost compulsive interpreters of the Arabs and their concerns. Ask these Americans why and they may cite a religion misunderstood ever since the Crusades, people who are outrageously stereotyped in the U.S. media, or an increasingly obvious and urgent mutuality of interests.

What they generally can't explain are the strong emotions the Arabs arouse in Americans who spend any time among them. Culture shock is a normal American's first reaction to people who turn even the most casual encounter—in an office, on a country road, at the beach—into a spontaneous, time-consuming ritual of hospitality. Ultimately, however, what binds Americans most firmly to these smiling people is the warmth and intimacy of friendships that develop where extending hospitality is an obligation, a measure of personal integrity and, it sometimes seems, a fulltime occupation.

Perhaps it is the frustration of trying to describe the friendly, well-meaning and almost maddeningly patient people they have met in the real-life Middle East to countrymen raised on a totally opposite Arab media stereotype that makes returned Americans into restless crusaders. Their efforts might be dismissed as "localitis," akin to the quirks of Americans who return from Europe picky about wines or from India craving spicy food. A more valid comparison, however, is with foreign students who have studied in the U.S. and then returned to climates of anti-Americanism in their own countries. Sometimes at great personal cost they have defended and explained Americans until such efforts eventually produced an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding.

Why does it happen? What makes U.S.-educated students persist in explaining us sympathetically abroad? Why did "old China hands," also at personal cost, persist in asking Americans to reexamine hasty conclusions and real national interests until we changed tack in the Far East? Why do "old Middle East hands" write their newspapers and harangue their Congressmen to make Americans look past misconceptions of the Arabs and U.S. relationships with them?

We think it goes a bit beyond national interest or abstract truth and justice and directly to friends people have made and ways of life they have come to appreciate. We know that for Americans who have lived in the Middle East, it goes right back to the smiling Arabs they have known.

This month a lot of Americans were exposed for the first time to real flesh-and-blood Arab members of folk dance troupes from Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia who were participating in the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The three troupes then converged on Washington for a combined presentation entitled "Dances From Arab Lands," sponsored by the U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce and the Arab Women's Council.

It was a dazzling demonstration of unity from diversity, as men and women of the Alia Royal Jordanian folklore troupe alternated with the all-male Saudi national troupe throughout the first half of the program. They delighted and astonished Americans with the intricate handclapping rhythms of the Gulf, and the flashing footwork and sword brandishing of Jordan, as they created the festive ambiance of an Arab wedding, the joyous spontaneity of itinerant musicians at holiday time, and the insistent drumming rhythms that accompany traditional life and work in the Arabian Peninsula. For the second half of the program 96 Moroccan musicians and dancers, in the garb of every region of that diverse land, presented an overwhelming spectacle of the color, sound and movement so characteristic of Arab life.

For Arabs, and for Americans familiar with the Middle East, it was an ecstatic exercise in pure nostalgia. But what about Americans who had never before in their lives encountered smiling, clapping, singing and dancing Arabs? For those Americans, steeped in the stereotypes, the reaction was enthusiastic amazement, to judge from both the applause and the response of the press.

Under the headline "Thrilling Arab Dance," Washington Post critic Alan M. Kriegsman called it 'Tone of the most extraordinarily interesting, beautiful and stirring folkloric presentations ever shown in Washington." He noted that although many of "the world's finest and best-known folkloric troupes have appeared in Washington ... few ... have preserved as much of the spontaneous vibrancy and spirit of folk culture as these Arabians... The pity is only that more people couldn't have attended and that more performances weren't possible. "

Much credit is due the three Arab countries providing the groups, and the local sponsors. There is also a lesson to be learned from the reaction of ordinary Americans to an encounter with the real, smiling Arabs. It's time to become better acquainted. America has been sending its singers and musicians to Middle Eastern audiences for decades. Now it's time for the Arabs to export some of their culture to us, to toot their own horns and beat their own drums.

There are 22 members of the Arab League, every one of which could easily send such a troupe every year to the U.S., relying on Arab American organizations in major cities and Arab student groups on major campuses for local sponsorship. If Americans could meet—just once in their lives—smiling Arabs like these Saudis, Moroccans and Jordanians, the Arab stereotype in the U.S. might never again be the same.