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By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani made a campaign ad in quite passable colloquial Arabic for the some 180,000 Arab residents of New York, who live primarily along Steinway Street in Queens and in Brooklyn. Mamdani’s wife, artist Rama Duwaji, is a Houstonian whose family hails from Syria. Some observers are suggesting that it is a defiant gesture in response to the openly Islamophobic and quite shameful comments of his rival Andrew Cuomo.
Because so many Arabic speakers have immigrated to the United States since the end of the old Nazi-like immigration quotas in 1965, many Americans may think of Arabic as recent language in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Because he thought he was going to land in Muslim-ruled Asia, Columbus brought along interpreters on his voyage, including Luis de Torres, who knew some Arabic. De Torres was of Jewish heritage, but by then all Jews and Muslims in Spain during the reconquista had been forced to at least pretend to convert to Catholicism. It is likely that the first words a European said to a Native American chieftain in Cuba were “as-Salamu `alaykum,” Arabic for “peace be upon you.”
Hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims fled Spain rather than convert. While most went to North Africa, it is clear from the genetic record that many covertly went to the New World:
The territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California thus had Arabic-speakers, many of them crypto-Muslims, for generations — throughout the 1500s and 1600s. One Arab woman from a crypto-Muslim community in Spain who married a Spaniard gentleman and was taken to Mexico City, Maria Ruiz, ended up being tried by the Inquisition in the late 1500s for having retained her Muslim beliefs.
Then from 1619 the British colonies began kidnapping West Africans and forcing them to North America, whipping them and shooting them and making them work for free for the next 244 years. It is not clear what percentage of these enslaved people from Senegal, Mali, Nigeria and other coastal regions in Africa were Muslim, but I think 20% would be a good bet. Of course, they could not retain their religion in North America. They could practice only covertly and they could hardly proselytize. Instead, many were forced to adopt Christianity by brute force. Likewise, as Silvia Diouf showed, they could not easily pass it on to their children, both because they couldn’t openly teach their religion to the next generation and because cruel white slaveholders often broke up families, selling children or wives or husbands “down the river” to other estates, as though they were livestock. Still, in each generation until the slave trade was abolished in 1808, new Muslims were compelled to come to North America. Although the native languages of these peoples were Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa and other African tongues, the educated among them often knew Arabic, and used it to communicate to other African Muslims.
One of them, Omar Said, wrote a brief autobiography in Arabic in North Carolina, about which Mbaye Lo and Carl Ernst have written.
Still, some families passed on Islam through generations. Interviews with former slaves conducted in the early 1930s revealed that some remembered their mothers rising in the morning and praying toward the east. A handful of African-American families in New York City likely retained their Islam all the way through, helped by contact with visiting Muslim sailors.
From the 1880s, a big wave of what we would now call Lebanese and Syrians immigrated to the United States. They settled especially in the Midwest. The third most spoken language in Michigan, Ohio, Iowa and Tennessee after English and Spanish is Arabic, according to the “Mental Floss” site
Most Arab American immigrants before 1965 were Christians, whom the courts recognized as white (some lawsuits had to be filed), but about 10% were Muslim. I once met an elderly Shiite Muslim in Dearborn whose grandfather came from Lebanon in the late 19th century and made his way out to Kansas as a cowboy. If you think about it, Lebanese shepherds would have made great cowboys at that time. Somehow you never hear much about the Shiite cowboys.
Among the prominent Arab Americans was Kahlil Gibran (d. 1931), author of the perennial bestseller, The Prophet. three of whose books I translated. He published short stories and prose poems in Arabic newspapers published in New York City in the early 20th century.
Arab Americans have been integral to the fabric of America. Michael DeBakey, who invented the heart transplant, was an Arab American. Salma Hayek is of Lebanese extraction. Arab American Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1999; Moncef Slaoui, Moroccan-American, was asked by President Trump to oversee the development of the Covid vaccine; William Peter Blatty, author and screenwriter of The Exorcist, based it on folk stories his Lebanese mother told him; actress Teri Hatcher is Lebanese/ Syrian on her mother’s side; Tony Shalhoub of Monk fame; Rami Malek; Rami Youssef; singer Paul Anka; Frank Zappa; D.J. Khaled; models Gigi and Bella Hadid; Moustafa Akkad who directed the Friday the 13th movies. Political commntator Dean Obeidallah. The list of prominent Arab Americans is very long.
In speaking Arabic in public and campaigning in it, Zohran Mamdani exemplifies the vast multi-cultural heritage of the United States, to which Arabic-speakers have made enormous contributions.
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Juan Cole
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).