Arab American Midwestern Inter-Religious Unity and Palestinian Liberation, 1936-1954

This paper proposal is written for possible inclusion in the session on "Globalizing the Nakba: Transnational Solidarities" as part of the Theological, Pedagogical, and Ethical Approaches to Israel/Palestine Seminar and secondarily to the joint session, "Theologies of Liberation in the Middle East."

This research builds on the work of Hani J. Bawardi, whose book The Making of Arab Americans reveals how Arab American identity and activism from the 1920s until the 1940s centered the liberation of Palestine as a primary, unifying call for all Americans of Arab descent across lines of religion and national origin. Bawardi's work is the first to prove how in the 1930s and 1940s the concern for Palestinian liberation was a grassroots cause across small towns and cities--wherever mainly Syrian and Lebanese people had settled.

My research builds on that finding to show how Arab American Midwesterners, both Christians and Muslims, identified pan-Arab inter-religious unity as a foundation of Arab American solidarity with Palestinian self-determination from the time of the Palestinan revolt in 1936 until a more confessional politics overtook Arab Midwestern civil society in the 1950s.

My sources include general press accounts and archival documents from the Smithsonian's Naff Collection, the Arab American National Museum, and the Immigration History Research Center library at the University of Minnesota, focusing for the first time on writers who appeared in the Indianapolis-based Syrian Ark newspaper. The Ark was the official newspaper of the Midwest Federation of Syrian American Clubs, the largest ethnic organization among Arab Midwesterners in the middle twentieth century.

I will illustrate how the collective imaginary of the Syrian Ark constructed a cosmological home for Arab Americans that was multireligious. Celebrating the history of Arab Christianity and Islam while also recognizing the presence of Muslims and Christians in the Midwest, the Ark adopted an “ecumenical frame” (Ussama Makdisi) that sought to inculcate equality and respect among Muslims and Christians of various denominational backgrounds. Inter-religious unity was promoted as a way to support Arab American nationalism in general and Palestinian freedom in particular. Inter-religious unity, as it was seen in the Ark, did not mean muddying theological boundaries. It meant building a cosmological Arab American home in which there were mansions aplenty for people of different religious bents.

Palestine was presented as an inter-religious concern, as Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan Anthony Bashir gave "fiery sermons against colonialists" in Indiana, and Syrian Fuad Mufarrij, working for the Arab National League, visited churches, halls, and other Arab Midwestern public spaces to stoke opposition to Zionism. Dr. Jabir Shibli's Palestine Reality was distributed and read across the Midwest. Local fundraisers took place in Cedar Rapids' mosque to benefit philanthropies such as George Barakat's American Middle East Relief fund. The words of Melkite Archbishop, later Patriarch Maximos V, reprinted in the Ark, described Palestine as a "nation in chains." Muslims, Melkites, and Orthodox united in Michigan City, Indiana, to host conferences with pro-Palestinian content.

Moreover, I will argue, riffing on Thomas Tweed's theory of religion, that inter-religious unity was only one form of crossing and dwelling among these Arab Americans. The writers and readers of the Ark crossed local, state, national, and diasporic boundaries to map a world where Arab Midwesterners and the people they cared about in the Middle East and the diaspora would flourish economically, enjoy one another’s comraderie, laugh together, sacrifice for their new homelands, secure liberty for Palestinians, and embrace one another across religious differences. The utopian home imagined on the pages of the Ark was a remarkable act of creation, amalgamating terrestrial and cosmic identities that, when viewed in the mirror of contemporary Islamophobia, U.S. nativism, and Middle Eastern geopolitical conflict, may seem improbable or even incongruous: According to the Ark, Arab Midwesterners were patriotic and pro-Palestinian. At home in the American heartland and in the Arab diaspora. Committed to their own faith tradition and respectful of others’. 

Their solidarity with Palestine was not the embodiment of a nostalgic identity longing for home--an idea with which many later exiles would identify--but instead a basically patriotic U.S. identity seeking to extend basic fairness and the ideas of liberty and justice for all. The commitment to Palestine was thus not in tension with their local, regional, and national identities—at least not as they were imagined on the pages of the Ark—but were in fact generative of communal solidarity and homemaking in these various domains. Though many of the Ark’s writers traced their roots to what became the modern countries of Syria and Lebanon, Palestine was part of their Arab diasporic dwelling.

My presentation will conclude with a hypothesis about the demise of Arab Midwestern inter-religious solidarity with Palestine in the 1950s. By this time, the multifaith framing of Syrian, Lebanese, and Arab American identity so apparent in the Syrian Ark was no longer reflected as much in the Midwest Federation and its new parent, the National Federation of American Syrian Lebanon Clubs. In 1950, for example, National Federation President Joseph G. Rashid welcomed delegates to the fourth national convention by crediting their "Christian culture and background" for their success as Americans. No mention was made of Muslims, who had a strong institutional presence in the Midwest. The whole convention halted on Sunday mornings when everyone was encouraged to attend church. Philanthropy among Midwest Federation members also took a decidedly confessional turn. Indianapolis’ Michael Tamer and LaVonne Malouf Rashid were primarily responsible for raising the $43 million needed to build Danny Thomas’s St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis. The American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), still the richest single Arab American philanthropic organization today by far, was explicitly Christian in its appeals.