America’s Cultural Treasures: This text is a part of a sequence sponsored by the Ford Basis highlighting the work of museums and organizations which have made a big influence on the cultural panorama of the USA.
I believe what [the Arab American National Museum] does greatest is to create this secure area for artists, students, group members to return collectively to debate, share, talk and create collectively a story that we can all really feel related to.
Haitham Eid, Advisory board member, the Arab American Nationwide Museum
One model of the story of the world is that the East and West are intrinsically opposite, even opposed. Dissimilarities between the 2 hemispheres gasoline the notion that individuals born within the land bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa, whose major language is Arabic, are someway basically completely different from different immigrants to the USA. However only a look at our historical past reveals that elementary options of Western Christendom originated within the Arab world. The primary hospital was based in 872 CE in Cairo, Egypt; Fatima Al-Fihri (800–880 CE) constructed the world’s first college, the College of al-Qarawiyyin (or Karueein) in 859 CE in Fez (now Morocco); maybe the West’s hottest drink, espresso, was first brewed in Yemen across the ninth century. Christianity, the West’s most populous faith, which some students use to distinction it with the East, emerged within the Levant within the 1st century CE, whereas Islam emerged later in Arabia within the seventh century CE. That is to say that parts of Arab tradition have lengthy been a part of the buildings and establishments of the US, and Arab Individuals have lengthy been key figures in America’s tales.
Take, for instance, the narrative instructed by Ron Amen, one of many oral histories supplied within the Arab Individuals and the Vehicle — Voices from the Manufacturing unit Assortment, accessible by way of the Arab American Nationwide Museum’s (AANM) on-line collections web site. Amen describes his father: “My father was born in a little town in Indiana, Michigan City, and then returned to Lebanon when he was about ten years old with his family, and didn’t come back to the United States until he was in his early twenties.”
Amen goes on to say that like many different immigrants to the USA, what motivated him was higher financial alternatives. “He moved here to the Detroit area, where some other relatives from the village had settled here, right here in Dearborn. They were working at the Ford Motor, the Rouge plant,” he continues. “So he got into contact with them. They told him to come here, his chances would be better.”
Amen remembers that his father, just like the next-door neighbors who had been Russian, Serbian, and Spanish, was capable of learn or write little or no English. Nonetheless, he procured a job on the Rouge as a laborer and retired after 42 years. He says that amongst Arab Individuals, most had been working within the factories. “The majority of them were working at the Rouge. That was the draw. That’s why Arabs settled in the south end of Dearborn: the Rouge complex.”
The Arab American Nationwide Museum (picture by John S. and James L. Knight Basis by way of Flickr)
Amen’s story is one in all many tales collected by the museum, and in whole, all of them reveal a number of essential themes that the museum goals to protect and share. One is that Arab Individuals have collectively poured their life power into this tradition, in Amen’s instance, to develop one of the enduring symbols of the nation: the auto. One other key revelation is that Arab-American id is an advanced mixture of influences from fairly completely different elements of the Arab world, the historical past of American business, schooling, and labor, and methods of assimilation. What has, in some instances, stymied the acceptance of Arab Individuals as a part of the bigger American narrative is a sort of vestigial perspective of colonialism.
The pioneering Palestinian-American thinker, tutorial, and political activist Edward Mentioned, one of many founders of the self-discipline of postcolonial research, posited “Orientalism” as an idea propagated within the 18th century to justify European colonial growth. In his influential e book Orientalism (1978), he argued that the thought of the “Orient,” initially conceived by the French and English, was adopted within the Twentieth century by the USA. On the root of Mentioned’s concept is the conviction that Orientalists regard those that inhabit Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), or what’s extra generally known as the “Middle East,” as fanatic, violent, and tired of rational discourse. This notion has served as an implicit justification for endeavors such because the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
Traces of Orientalism have persevered within the US within the erasure or exclusion of Arab Individuals from the American story. In his 2002 essay “Thoughts About America,” Mentioned plainly states how discriminatory attitudes towards Arabs after 9/11 have had damaging results on their lives:
“I don’t know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or sh belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. For despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. And of course, the media have run far too many “experts” and “commentators” on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our historical past, society and tradition that the media itself has develop into little greater than an arm of the struggle on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
What makes the state of affairs that Mentioned describes much more galling is that historic information point out that the primary Arabic speaker to reach in North America was introduced right here in 1528 — lengthy earlier than the English pilgrims arrived.
In accordance with the Arab American Nationwide Museum’s (AANM) publication Arab Individuals: Historical past, Tradition and Contributors, this man was named Zammouri. In accordance with different sources, “Mustafa Zemmouri,” “Esteban the Moor,” or “Estevanico” was introduced right here as a member of the Panfilo de Narvaez Spanish expedition, which arrived close to present-day Tampa Bay, Florida, searching for fruitful land and riches. So Arab persons are not new to the USA of America. In reality, they’ve lived in North America for hundreds of years.
A Palestinian dabke efficiency for Listening for Land – Al Juthoor of the Arab Diaspora / Huda Asfour & Farah Barqawi in December 2024 (picture by Houssam Mchaimech)
“Almost all the Arab communities in the US are quite old,” says Matthew Stiffler, the AANM’s former analysis and content material supervisor. “My community in Western Pennsylvania had been there since the 1890s. My great-grandparents came from Lebanon in 1900, and there [are] people from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine that’ve been in the US for over a century, and not just a handful of people, large numbers.”
The Migration Coverage Institute signifies that the “first significant modern immigration” occurred from 1800 to 1924 when about 50,000 to 200,000 Christians from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria (which then had been a part of the Ottoman Empire) immigrated to the USA searching for non secular freedom and financial alternatives.
There have been subsequent immigration waves as effectively. Within the mid-Twentieth century, a primarily Muslim inhabitants arrived from nations together with Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine to “pursue higher education, find valuable work that fit their expertise, and escape political turmoil,” as described by Arab America, a Washington, DC, basis that promotes the Arab heritage and seeks to empower Arab Individuals. AANM signifies on its web site {that a} fourth wave befell within the Nineties as a result of “Economic difficulties, unemployment and population pressures,” main “Egyptians, Moroccans and Jordanians to immigrate at the turn of the century and specifically following the Arab Spring revolutions that began in 2010.”
Immigration flows from Arab nations have risen and ebbed over time according to laws enacted by the US authorities. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act, signed into legislation in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, abolished the quota system that had been in place and prioritized household reunification by permitting immigrants who had naturalized to sponsor kinfolk in a migratory course of termed “chain migration.” The Arab Group Heart for Financial and Social Companies (ACCESS), the group that will delivery the Arab American Nationwide Museum, was created inside six years of that laws turning into legislation, when a bunch of volunteers began ACCESS out of a storefront in Dearborn’s South Finish neighborhood.
The opening of Epicenter X: Saudi Modern Artwork in Dearborn, Michgan, in July 2017
Maha Freij, now the president and chief govt officer of ACCESS, was in 2002 the group’s chief monetary officer. She describes the mission of ACCESS this fashion: “We are here to provide solutions to problem areas that face Arab Americans. And at the same time, it was also for our own community and our kids to have a taste of that heritage their parents [brought] with them and appreciate it and learn it.”
The workers and management at ACCESS understood that tradition was a method to serve the entire individual and hook up with adjoining communities, so within the Nineteen Eighties they created a Cultural Arts Program. “The cultural arts allowed us to interact with other communities of color through the arts, which was very important to us, because we saw that it will work better if we find like-minded people who deal with the same problems,” Freij says. For her, a museum was the logical subsequent step after this system’s preliminary success: “We wanted to upgrade the cultural arts, institutionalize it into something more solid than just a program at ACCESS.”
With Freij directing the undertaking, the Arab American Heritage Marketing campaign, ACCESS set about elevating cash for a museum. However the important thing query dealing with them was what its focus could be. “There was a push that this museum should be about Arabs, about the Arab world and Muslims, because of the intersectionality between the two,” she explains. “Then, 2001 September 11 happened while we were in the middle of that, and the whole goal became much bigger.” Freij additional explains, “September 11 had a profound impact on our community and the role we need to play by making sure we build an institution capable of telling our story the way we want to tell it, not the way everybody else was talking about us, as terrorists.”
Left: Diana Abouali, director of AANM; proper: Maha Freij, former chief monetary officer of AANM (pictures by Shadia Amen)
After two years spent consulting with nationwide focus teams, the management determined that the museum wanted to focus on, in Freij’s phrases, “telling the story of Arab Americans.” The museum opened its doorways in 2005. AANM Director Diana Abouali underscores Freij’s sentiments, saying, “We really need this museum to represent Arab Americans in their own voices and their own words and counter a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes floating around.”
The purpose of representing Arab Individuals is certain to be advanced as a result of Arab id is itself advanced.
The time period “Arab” traditionally designates the 22 member states that compose the League of Arab Nations, which was fashioned in Cairo in March of 1945. They’re situated in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), extra generally identified within the US because the “Middle East.” This time period originated as a Eurocentric and Orientalist identify, coined by the British, and thus is basically an imperialist invention. Due to this fact some choose the phrases SWANA or Center Jap and North African (MENA).
Andrea Assaf, the manager and inventive director of Art2Action, primarily based in Tampa, Florida, and a longtime collaborator with AANM, describes the state of affairs, “It’s a big conversation in our community. On one hand, a lot are moving to SWANA. SWANA is also problematic because it means Southwest Asia and North Africa but leaves out Central Asia. It leaves out diasporic communities all over the world.” She provides, “We spent two years serving the field getting people to give input and vote on the name for the alliance, and that’s what came out: MENA Theater Makers Alliance. And then a year later everybody’s like we don’t want to use MENA anymore. We want to use SWANA. It’s like … none of the words are right.”
What’s crucially essential is that Arab Individuals identify themselves, and have these appellations acknowledged by these exterior the group. For many years ACCESS had been working to customise the official classification of individuals from the area changing “White” with MENA on the USA census, in order that the Arab group is extra seen to authorities businesses. The Nationwide Community for Arab American Communities (NNAAC), an arm of ACCESS, partnered with over 100 civil rights and civic organizations — together with the American Civil Liberties Union, Asian Individuals Advancing Justice, Black Alliance for Simply Immigration, and Mi Familia Vota — to ask the Workplace of Administration and Finances (OMB) to revise requirements for federal knowledge on race and ethnicity and add MENA as an ethnic class. When the OMB revealed a Federal Register discover calling for public feedback in 2023, the NNAAC marshaled Arab Individuals throughout the nation to take part, accumulating greater than 13,000 feedback in help of a MENA classification. The League of Ladies Voters experiences that in March of this yr the OMB introduced that new federal requirements would now embody MENA, and within the 2030 Census, Arab Individuals will lastly be capable of choose a class that represents their heritage.
Having a class definitely doesn’t diminish the complexity of Arab-American id. Outdoors of the MENA, within the diaspora, id turns into much more intricate. Elizabeth Barrett Sullivan, the museum’s curator of displays, says, “We’re constantly debating who Arab Americans are.” She provides, “Some people want to be identified with their nation-state or religion, and we, as a museum, have to be adaptable to that and let the person tell their own story and have their voice heard in the way that they want it to be.”
Left: Elizabeth Barrett Sullivan, AANM’s curator of displays; proper: Matthew Stiffler, AANM’s former analysis and content material supervisor (pictures by Jacob Ermete)
The oral histories collected by the museum give some sense of the breadth and depth of this selection. Among the many collections accessible for public use by way of their Particular Collections portal are the aforementioned Arab Individuals and the Vehicle assortment, the Household Historical past Archive of Syrian and Lebanese Households within the American South, which was launched in 2014 in Houston, Texas, and the Oral Histories of the the Faris and Yamna Naff Arab American Assortment, which focuses on early Arab immigrant expertise in the USA from about 1880 by way of World Conflict II. Throughout the archive of Syrian households who reside within the American South is the story of Amanda Ekery, a jazz musician from El Paso, Texas, whose father got here to the US from Syria and whose mom is Mexican. She describes her cultural expertise, being a baby of intermarriage, as each curious and bizarre: “We were who we were. We eat tamales at Thanksgiving and then we go and eat Kibbe … at the other half of Thanksgiving.”
As she obtained older she discovered to understand her intertwined heritages. “There’s so many different types of Mexicans and there’s different types of Arabs,” she says. “I am both, and researching a lot of it and knowing that there is such a strong history of Hispanic Arabs [and] the commonalities between them that it’s also like, ‘Oh, there are more people like me.’”
“What does it mean to be an Arab American? That’s a big question we try to answer all the time with the programs that we offer. What does it look like? Is it one thing? Are we ticking boxes or is it a multitude of things, and what are those things and those intersections?” asks Rewa Zeinati, a curator of public programming at AANM and the founder and editor of the net literary journal Sukoon. In recent times, Zeinati attests, the museum has turned extra towards the local people, utilizing many forms of inventive expression to supply solutions.
A kids’s tour on the Arab American Nationwide Museum
To domesticate native writers, AANM yearly holds a five-month Writing Fellows program that accepts as much as 10 Dearborn and Detroit-area highschool college students interested by writing poetry, fictions, scripts, and graphic novels. As well as, the museum additionally publicly acknowledges literary achievements — it has hosted the annual Arab American E-book Awards yearly since 2007.
By its Artists + Residents program, the museum helps rising artists, with housing, a stipend, and analysis alternatives and amenities. “Since 2020,” Abouali states, “we’ve hosted roughly eight artist residencies per year. …This program is not exclusively for Arab-American artists; it’s open to any artist whose work and practice aligns with the museum’s mission, which is to be a ‘touchstone that connects communities to Arab American culture and experiences.’”
Your entire group is welcome to their Al-Hadiqa (the Backyard) undertaking, a shared group backyard housed within the constructing that incorporates the museum, cocreated with an area backyard collective. Throughout a day designated for a seed trade program, museum workers have requested group members to carry their very own seeds in order that they may commerce them with one another, discover new varieties, after which workers may collect some to develop within the backyard as effectively. The area facilitates the trade of data on vegetation and the seeds that can be utilized to generate extra inexperienced life in Dearborn and extra conduits for preserving residents’ cultural recollections. Fatima Al-Rasool, the general public programming coordinator, acknowledges how a lot the backyard is a collective effort. She says “The community was there right at our sides painting the walls, painting the fences, planting the seeds.” She continues, “That project I’m really proud of because it speaks to how we work with the community to make a space for them.”
This effort to create a holistic story that connects the wealthy range of Arab American individuals and expertise could be seen within the museum’s format. A big courtyard area on the bottom ground is embellished with tile mosaics that recall Byzantine motifs of the Jap Mediterranean. The pointed arches of the doorways and home windows mirror Islamic structure. In the midst of the area is an architectural ingredient that was as soon as a fountain. Like many public areas within the MENA area, the fountain is a civic area, a spot to take refreshments and focus on the problems of the day. On the outskirts of the courtyard are vitrines with glass panels holding numerous objects. One incorporates musical devices such because the oud, ney, tablah, and ganun that may be heard in live performance on the push of a button.
The Arab American Nationwide Museum’s courtyard
On the flooring above are the everlasting shows, “Coming to America,” “Living in America,” and “Making an Impact.” AANM has a set of roughly 8,000 objects. As Kelly Bennett, a former public programming coordinator for AANM, says, “95% of the artifacts in this museum were donated by folks from the [local] Arab community.” Displays with nonetheless pictures and captions element a historical past of Arab migration to the US, breaking down the inhabitants into nationwide and non secular affiliations. Displays additionally embody suitcases, satchels and trunks, a pair of elaborately beaded sneakers from Syria, and a whole kitchen replete with a fridge that holds meals staples equivalent to eggs, butter, and rose water which might be typically present in Arab-American households. The “Making an Impact” part consists of images and prolonged biographies of illustrious and completed Arab Individuals, such because the trainer and astronaut Christa McAuliffe; the author and poet Kahlil Gibran; lawyer and political activist Ralph Nader; and novelist and poet Naomi Shihab Nye. What comes by way of on this show are the myriad ways in which Arab Individuals contribute to the nation’s tradition.
A former AANM artist-in-residence, Alia Ali, has made an set up within the museum, “al-Falaq,” that palpably carries ahead a mission to make a spot for many who don’t but have a spot to be. The multimedia piece spans 95 ft throughout two flooring and resembles an octopus with 81 digital screens positioned at irregular intervals alongside its metallic tentacles. Ali describes it as “a spaceship from the future that carries Yemeni artifacts of cultural significance via a constellation of video monitors.” It’s finally a hopeful piece, at the same time as individuals proceed to be displaced by struggle in Yemen. Within the phrases of the museum, “At a time where there is seemingly no space for Yemenis to move and settle on Earth, al-Falaq swims through space and radically imagines possibilities of the future through the lens of Yemeni Futurism.”
Leyya Mona Tawil, one other former AANM artist-in-residence, describes her expertise as an Arab American as, “the smell and sound of the swinging incense, while Father George leads the procession at St. Mary Orthodox Basilica; tracing the tatreez (embroidery) patterns on the pillows, imagining the work and dreams behind the stitches; the feel of picking squash and cucumbers from the garden, prickly but also soft.”
The museum has devoted itself to conveying these experiences and recollections in and thru inventive manufacturing. Its assortment and mission are rooted within the wealthy, various sights, sounds, sensations, and tales of Arab American tradition and heritage on this time and place. Amongst these tales and histories there are much more riches to be discovered.
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