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Introduction A portrait of Ameen Farah (1888–1975), who immigrated from Nazareth to the United States in 1913, is displayed occasionally at the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan. The attractive displays in this museum, which opened in 2005 across from Dearborn’s city hall, introduce students and the general public to facets of Arab immigrant life in the United States during different periods. Museum visitors could see Farah’s portrait in a white coat standing in his grocery store; it was displayed just a few feet from the Columbia University graduation gown of an immigrant named Khalil Totah. The motion-activated recording above Farah’s portrait explained the centrality of peddling in the immigrant experience and the wide ownership of grocery retail businesses by immigrants to Flint, Michigan. Between the portrait and the gown, a placard on the wall read: “The 1967 [Arab-Israeli] War led to the formation of the first major Arab American national political organization.” Referring to the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), a crucial political organization founded, indeed, in 1967, the inscription stated it was established because “Arabs in America were dismayed at the ways in which U.S. media portrayed the war and at the U.S. government’s hostility to the Arabs and Arab American causes.” This narrative presented by the museum—of a quaint, apolitical immigration that parallels the American success teleology yet was followed by a much later political explosion—matches the dominant narrative of political development in Arab American studies and in popular understanding. Nothing in the only national museum dedicated to Arab American history and life or in the aggregate scholarship, for that matter, indicates that Farah and Totah knew each other well or narrates how they respectively operated the first and last major Arab American political organizations spanning four decades, from 1915 to 1950. This episode highlights the central void in Arab American studies and broader historical output, the lack of organizational histories of the mass political groups that established the contours of Arab American identity and of Arab Americans’ collective social obligation. 2 The Making of Arab Americans Aside from the practical reality that there has not been significant attention to or archival work on this topic, core conceptual failings have blocked proper investigation into early Arab American political history. The unproblematized acceptance of a narrative of contested identities and sectarian and geographic divisions has obscured the central influence of Syrian nationalism and later pan-Arabism on the political orientations of early intellectuals and journalists and the many avid consumers of their writings. Developing crises—from the Ottoman decline to World War I to postwar colonialism and uprisings to the Palestinian question in the face of Zionist advances—created an environment for urgent and ecumenical collective action . Each organization chronicled in this book helped shape Arab American identity by attempting to embrace a broad nationalism that did not stress identity divisions and that engaged all immigrant cohorts and potential partners. Any reasonable reading of the actual activities of these organizations suggests that historical narratives of rampant sectarianism (alongside Lebanese separatism) in Arab American life have been significantly overstated for the first fifty years of mass immigration and completely misunderstood for the past half century. While it is difficult to assess the beliefs of a majority of the immigrants, analysis of their press output and political activity suggests that contemporary portrayals of the immigrants as apolitical , divided, or apathetic need immediate revision. Many of these notions of ubiquitous sectarianism and Lebanese separatism are based on dated studies or selective translations of particular newspaper articles. Presumptions of incurable sectarianism based on verbal attacks in the Syrian press, especially by particular persistent personalities, create the impression that political awareness and collective action did not exist, and this conclusion has inhibited serious studies on the political activities of the first decades of Arab immigration to the United States. The project of developing Arab American identity within the framework of organized political advocacy encounters an urgent need for more scholarship and archival collection regarding the generation to which members of these organizations belonged, including their writings, social networks and clubs, and charitable and religious civil-society organizations. Taking advantage of the archives that exist, in this study I build the historical context for four key early political organizations in the United States by connecting the immigrants to Arab cultural and political awareness through their writings and documented attempts at political organization. Doing so establishes that Arab national awareness...

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