While the preponderance of the afore-mentioned rhetorical studies have revolved around immigrants from the Latina/o community, there has been some, albeit more limited, interest in discourses specifically surrounding Arab-Muslim-Middle Eastern subjects as racialized Others. Indeed, for many years, scholars “ignored or were ignorant” of Arabs in North America (Suleiman, 1999), with Gualtieri (2009) mentioning the “near-erasure of Arabs from narratives of immigration and assimilation in the United States” (p. 8). Scholarship on Arabs in America has not found its way into the preeminent body of scholarship and as such, has had a limited audience (Suleiman, 1999).
However, one of the problematic aspects the existing scholarship has identified is the quasi-monolithic manner in which Arab-Muslim-Middle Eastern immigrants are characterized in public discourses as a generic Other. Arabs, people from the Middle-East, and Muslims are repeatedly rhetorically conflated in popular representations (Naber, 2000). This could be partly due to the fact that Arabs are often “selectively racialized” (Tehranian, 2009). For example, though most racist ideologies associate racism with a particular phenotype (e.g. African Americans are inferior because they have darker skin), rhetoric of all Arabs as inferior (regardless of their actual religion or race) has been perceived by some as an indication of the “racialization of religion” (Naber, 2000). This is through the construction of a visible archetype of “Muslim” (i.e. “Muslim-looking people” who are racialized according to their assumed Muslimness) relying on markers such as language, dress, or name (Naber, 2008). This is reflected in the fact that various communities are folded into these categories who may not necessarily identify with these labels, i.e. Arabs who are not Muslim, Muslims who are not Arabs, South-East Asians who appear Arab, etc. Such ideologies are said to have their roots in a neo-colonial history of Western bias against Islam (Said, 1978).
Moreover, the term “Middle Eastern” itself is riddled with ambiguity, arising out of geo-political and oil-related considerations of colonizing countries, and not any natural geography (Tehrananian, 2009). Therefore, it is worth noting that even with common usage of the term, the construction of the category “Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern” is questionable, considering it fuses together various religious, national, and ethnic labels into a stereotype analogous to race (Naber, 2000; Semati, 2010). In what follows, I explore the history of discourses surrounding these so-called “Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern” immigrants in the United States, and their transition from Orientalist depictions (as sensual, backward, and primitive) to that of the securitized discourse of the Arab terrorist.
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Orientalist Traditions: Arabs as Sensual, Backward and Primitive
Americans were at first captivated with the ‘Occult,’ a phenomenon evident during the economic depression of the 1890s. The earliest depiction of the Syrian colony in New York City, the largest agglomeration of Syrian immigrants in North America in the second half of the 19th century, is found in the 1892 New York Daily Tribune. The article, “Picturesque Colony,” underlines themes of Otherness and exoticism, mentioning a young community with “queer customs” which the author relates to both phenotypical and behavioral traits (Gualtieri, 2009). The article comments on the status of the first Arab-speaking enclave in the country, a colony which was “growing in numbers and wealth constantly; that its members are anxious to learn American ways and manners…they are as a rule, quiet, orderly, sober and industrious people” (in Jacobs, 2015).
While Halaby (1980) comments on the precarious social position (‘invisibility’) Syrians of this time had, they did not initially suffer from the extent of discrimination observed in other immigrant communities. Jacobs (2015) interprets this ‘invisibility’ in a positive light: Though the “Syrian colony did not exist for New Yorkers…this paucity of attention is a testimony…to the success and speed with which the Colonies assimilated into American society” (p.4). Overall, there was “almost universal testimony” that Syrians were law-abiding citizens (Hougton, 1911, p. 796). A reporter for the New York Herald wrote that no Syrian who has come to America “has ever been found guilty or any grave crime. On the contrary, history…proves that no men are more peace-loving than they are” (Miller, 1902, p.41). Naff (1985) concludes that Syrian-Arabs were one of the best accultured ethnic groups in America.
Eventually, an American genre of Orientalism started to develop, associating the Arab world with sensual pleasures and the luxurious, be it in Turkish harem scenes, Persian rugs, the genie of the lamp, colorful dresses at New York fashion shows, desert oases landscapes, or novels (e.g. Hichen’s 1904 The Garden of Allah) (McAlister, 2005). The spectacle of the foreign land of the Orient became the cultural logic through which Americans could, through domestic consumerism, break from rigid Protestant piety into modernity, sensual pleasure, and desire (McAlister, 2005).
Orientalist stereotypes of the depravity of Arabs and Arab-Americans soon became evident in feature Hollywood movies, novels, political cartoons, as well as historical characterizations of Arabs in travelogues (Little, 2008). In early 1855, Harper’s Magazine announced, “we know far more about the land of the Jews than the degraded Arabs who hold it” (Little, 2008). Even ostensibly neutral historical accounts, such as Bernard Lewis’s “Clash of Civilizations” and well-respected magazines such as National Geographic, had a hand in producing and reinvigorating these narratives (Little, 2008). Little (2008) claims that no one did more to influence 19th century views of the Arab world that Mark Twain, whose post-civil war travelogue The Innocents Abroad detailing his trip to the Holy Land provided a derisive account of the locals he encountered on his travels. In his travelogue, Twain describes Arabs as “filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, [and] superstitious”. These characterizations were the foundations of American Orientalism, in what historian Michael Hunt dubbed a “hierarchy of race” where the “civilized” American is pitted against the “primitive” Arab (Little, 2008).
