Powell
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Joined: 27 Nov 2004
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 Posted: Wed 11 May 2005 19:37 Post subject: Arab-Americans Tell Their Own Story |
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If being Arab isn't obvious and not volunteered, isn't that "passing"? It is when Anglos and Creoles do it.
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LEISURE & ARTS
| Quote: | Arab-Americans Tell Their Own Story
A visit to Michigan's new immigrant museum.
BY PAUL M. BARRETT
Wall Street Journal
Thursday, May 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
DEARBORN, Mich.--In a compact stone and glass building here, the creators of the Arab American National Museum seek to set the record straight.
"If somebody else tells your story, it's not your story," Ismael Ahmed told me, "and in this case, we even think the story has been told with malice" by others. Mr. Ahmed heads the nonprofit social-services organization in Dearborn that built the museum, which opens today. By malice, he meant a desire to portray Arab-Americans as out of the mainstream, hostile toward the U.S. and possibly sympathetic toward terrorism.
The museum uses personal artifacts, skillfully distilled reminiscences and absorbing interactive displays to recount the tale of Arab immigration and accomplishment since the late 1800s. There is much to boast about, but just below the surface of the museum's colorful exhibits--and sometimes emerging into full view--is a sense that corrections are needed; wrongs must be righted. It makes for a lively museum experience.
Dearborn provides an apt venue for the new institution. Drawn by work in the infant auto industry, immigrants from Syria and what is now Lebanon came to the area beginning in the early 1900s. The working-class Detroit suburb became both an Ellis Island annex for Arab immigrants and a place where some families decided to settle. Today, 30% of Dearborn's 100,000 residents are of Arab descent, giving it the highest such concentration of any place in the country. With its excellent Arab restaurants and bakeries, bustling strip malls, and numerous mosques, Dearborn offers a living, breathing extension of the museum.
Big chunks of the museum's initial $15.3 million in funding came from car makers General Motors and DaimlerChrysler, as well as from overseas. Qatar chipped in $1 million, and Saudi Arabia and Dubai each contributed $500,000, Mr. Ahmed said. Fifteen hundred individual donors helped, as well.
A tour of the new museum begins with a step back in time to a traditional Arab courtyard decorated with handsome mosaics. Displays concisely explain ancient Arab culture's many achievements. Beginning under the seventh-century leadership of the Prophet Muhammad, Arabs conquered lands stretching from Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. They devised ingenious navigational tools and graceful architectural elements like the arches and dome of the museum itself. Scholars in ninth-century Baghdad translated and elaborated on classical Greek works otherwise lost during the European Dark Ages.
Using these and other high points of Arab culture as the foundation for the new museum makes perfect sense. Still, the narrative ends abruptly, without addressing the gradual disintegration of Arab intellectual and military dominance. At some point, curators ought to plunge into the contentious historical debate over the decline of Arab influence. That skirmish--pitting those who emphasize the deleterious effects of Ottoman and European colonialism against those who stress factors internal to Arab culture and Islam--sheds important light on the forces that have driven Arabs to come to America.
On the museum's second floor are three galleries concerning immigration, life in America and the contributions of the likes of surgical innovator Michael DeBakey, Kinkos founder Paul Orfalea (whose kinky hair led to the famous copy-store name), former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, consumer-rights activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader and prominent Republicans John Sununu, Spencer Abraham and Mitch Daniels--Arab-Americans all. You might have guessed zany rocker Frank Zappa, but how about Tiny Tim, whose real name was Herbert Khaury? Overall, there are 4.5 million Arab-Americans, according to the museum--far more than the 1.2 million estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000. For a variety of reasons, many people don't check the box for "Arab," Mr. Ahmed said.
In the first two galleries, curators underscore ordinariness, albeit a high-achieving ordinariness: peddlers who became storekeepers whose children or grandchildren became doctors and lawyers. The message is that the American dream is the Arab-American dream.
The arrival of large batches of immigrants has reflected strife back home: Palestinians fled after the creation of Israel in 1948 and the war that followed. The Six Day War in 1967 sent Egyptians and more Palestinians. Lebanese escaped their long civil war from 1975 to 1990, and Iraqis came after the war with Iran and the first Gulf War. Presumptions of Israeli culpability built into a few of the explanations will rub some visitors the wrong way. On this point, the museum risks falling into a trap vis-à-vis Israelis that it cautions against when it comes to Arabs--namely, crude typecasting. The exhibits never get deeply into the tortuous history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Given the centrality of that clash to the lives of so many Arab-Americans, the topic deserves more thorough attention.
The museum similarly plays down religion. One basic fact that may surprise many non-Arabs, though, is that most Arab-Americans are Christian, not Muslim. A small section on Islam highlights welcome themes of moderation and tolerance.
A multimedia display on stereotyping grabs the visitor's attention, as intended. On one wall, a mini-documentary of person-on-the-street interviews shows Americans saying that when Arabs appear on television, they're usually terrorists. To the viewer's left, a second wall shows still photos and cartoons from TV and movies. These depict lecherous-looking sheiks and bulging-eyed fanatics firing automatic weapons. Opposite the grotesques is a wall full of news images: angry Arab mobs, 9/11 hijackers, and Osama bin Laden, among others. On a fourth wall there are portraits of average, wholesome Arab-Americans.
The presentation effectively conveys the sources and dangers of stereotyping. But strangely, it seems to suggest that the news images are as bogus as the Hollywood clichés--and that both should simply be replaced by the reassuring Hallmark greeting-card portrayals.
The Arab American National Museum makes a persuasive case for paying more attention to the compelling history and everyday lives of its subjects. In coming years, it will be interesting to watch how the museum wrestles with complications in the stories it tells.
Mr. Barrett, a Wall Street Journal news editor, is writing a book about Muslims in America to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. |
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