Arab Diaspora Research Articles

‘Os Turcos’: The Syrian-Lebanese community of São Paulo, Brazil

This article aims to portray aspects of the contemporary cultural ethos of the Arab diaspora community of São Paulo, Brazil. Because the initial waves of immigration from the Middle East to Brazil began before the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, immigrants arrived in Brazil with Ottoman identity documents, earning them the appellation ‘Turk’. The broader Brazilian society continues to apply the title ‘turco’ to these individuals of immigrant origin, irrespective of whether they are Muslims, Jews or Christians, and despite the virtual absence of immigrants from Turkey in this region. People of Syrian and Lebanese descent comprise the bulk of the Arab population of São Paulo. However there are also small numbers of people from other parts of the Middle East and North Africa among their ranks. Nevertheless, members generally refer to the collectivity with which they identify themselves as the Syrian–Lebanese community. This article describes selected aspects of the daily lives of the members of this group, and in the process focuses on several specific settings. Scenes described in this paper include Al-Malik restaurant (a Lebanese variety and dry goods store), an Arabic music and dance performance, and a plebiscite for Bashar Al-Assad at a downtown social centre, Club Homs. In the process of collecting data for this interpretive collage, four research methods were employed: informal interview, micro-ethnography, participant observation, and analysis of locally produced texts.

The Shirazi in Swahili Traditions, Culture, and History

“Strange foreign jewels on a mournful silent shore”Historians have frequently viewed the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast as members of an Arab diaspora that spread around the Indian Ocean with trade over the last two thousand years. The interpretation flowed easily from the apparent “Arab” nature of Swahili culture--a written language using Arabic script, elaborate stone buildings and mosques constructed in urban settings, Islam, and genteel social behavior--especially when contrasted with the culture of mainland Africans, members of preliterate, uncentralized communities. Since the Swahili culture of the islands and coastal fringes bore little apparent resemblance to the cultures of the mainland, historians reasoned, its development could only have been the product of Persian and Arab merchants bringing to the “mournful silent shores” of East Africa the “jewels” of their own Muslim civilizations.The perspective was essentially diffusionist in assuming that cultural innovation and historical development in Africa could only have come from elsewhere, and racist in assuming that race and culture were so inextricably linked that a separate “race” of immigrants had to carry these new ideas. As a result, historians failed to investigate the possible African roots of Swahili culture in their Bantu language, their religious beliefs and values, their economy, or their social structure. But this charge applies not only to European historians; Swahili oral historians have long recounted the development of their societies in essentially the same terms in involved genealogies tracing the development of different Swahili families, communities, and institutions back to Persian or Arabian ancestors. When European historians came to study the oral traditions of the Swahili (usually in written, chronicle form), they thus found ready confirmation of their own assumptions and interpretations.

The United Nations and the Palestine Question: Efforts at Peacemaking

Of all the trouble-ridden regions of the world none has concerned the United Nations longer and more closely, and with fewer results in the form of satisfactory solutions, than the Middle East. Three times the armies of the Arab states and Israel have been locked in combat, and even the intervals between the major clashes have been continuously punctuated by guerrilla action, raids and counter-raids, hijackings, and an unending war of nerves and words. In addition, the wars of 1948 and 1967 have created an Arab diaspora totalling some million and a half people and representing a large part of the original population of Palestine. In spite of the intractability of this dispute between two nationalisms over the same territory, the contribution of the United Nations has been essential both in the field of humanitarian en-

Arab Diaspora Women

Portraying the lives of North African and Middle Eastern women and girls in places as diverse as Argentina, Canada, France, India, and the United States accentuates the artificiality of the concept "Arab diaspora." As many of the articles in this file point out, a constructed sense of group identity was initially externally imposed. It was based more on the defining power of host societies than on any common denominators easily recognized by the respective Arab immigrant communities themselves.

Arab Americans: Between Conflicting Definitions of Belonging

As a proud-to-be Arab American woman who has resided in Lebanon for the past few years, my interest was immediately peaked when I heard that an issue of Al-Raida was to be dedicated to “Arab diaspora women”. I could not help but wonder who exactly would be represented in the issue because, as I have learned, what the category "Arab Women" refers to and how exactly they are defined for many among Arab diasporic communities often differs with the more commonly accepted definitions in the Arab region. Of course, nothing is clear-cut when it comes to identity. Individuals of diverse ethnic, religious or cultural backgrounds often identify in numerous ways. There are, however, general patterns that can be discerned in how communities are defined or categorized amongst Arab American populations and those in the Arab Middle East; and it is the differences in these definitions that conflict with one another in rather fundamental ways.

Women, Activism, and the Arts

This special issue of al-Raida is devoted to women, activism, and the arts in the Arab world – a subject that was not chosen at random. Women and creativity has always been a topic of interest in the discipline of Women’s Studies, and this issue in particular has as its focus the ways in which women of the Arab diaspora channel their creativity in a positive way in order to develop tools of consciousness-raising and a means of actively participating in the history – past, present, and future – of their own communities and countries as well as of the world in general.