[Currently in the drafting stage.]

^1. Lone Arab Adventurers in the New World

¹ As with several groups introduced in earlier chapters, a few Arabs found their way to the Americas in small numbers from the late 15th century until the beginning of the mass migrations of the late 18th century. There is historical evidence, for instance, that eight Arabs sailed from Lisbon, Portugal to South America, even before Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Whether they inspired Columbus is not exactly clear; however, among Columbus’s crew was a Spanish Arab or Moor. Then there was Zammouri, a former slave from Morocco, who in the 1528 served as a guide to a Spanish expedition into Florida. Eleven years later, in 1539, another Moroccan Arab named Istafan served as a guide for the Franciscan friar Marios de Niza on the friar’s exploration of the northern frontiers of New Spain.^[1]

² Fast forward to 1779 and we get, quite by accident, the first documented case of Algerian Arab settlers in North Carolina. It was during the American Revolution, and the Continental Congress had struck a deal with Algeria to supply horses for George Washington’s army. Unfortunately, the Algerian ship hit a reef off the coast of North Carolina and sank, but some of the men and horses managed to swim ashore. This seems to be the origin story of the Wahab family who trace their ancestry back to this shipwreck.^[2]

³  However, according to Gregory Orfalea, “the two most celebrated ‘first’ immigrants from the Arab world” were the Palestinians: Antonios Bishallany, a Maronite Christian, who arrived in New York in 1854 and Hadji Ali, a Syrian Muslim, who arrived in the American Southwest in 1856. Bishallany had been “an independent interpreter and guide for tourists to the Holy Land” at a time when the Holy Land was a particularly popular destination for American travelers. Bishallany was well liked by his clients and made many fortuitous connections. After he arrived in New York, he “settled in with a wealthy Fifth Avenue family as a butler.” Unfortunately, he soon contracted tuberculosis and by the fall of 1856, he was dead.^[3]

⁴  The story of Hadji Ali, who became known as “Hi Jolly” among the Americans, is perhaps much stranger. It starts in 1855 with the U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis—the same Jefferson Davis who six years later would go on to become the president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War! Davis had hatched a plan to acquire camels for use in the hot waterless American Southwest. In 1956, Davis sent a U.S. Army major and a Navy lieutenant to the Middle East to acquire the camels. The party returned with “32 adult camels, two calves born aboard ship, two Turks, and three Arab camel drivers,” among them 28-year-old Hadji Ali.^[4]

⁵ In the end, the camel idea turned out not to be such a good one. Implementing it was problematic from the very beginning. One of the first missions, that of blazing a camel trail from Texas to California, broke down almost immediately when Hadji Ali and the camel drivers, who had not been paid in six months, went on strike. And there were other problems as well. For one thing, camels did not get along very well with other work animals, such as horses and mules. Moreover, the soft-padded feet of camels was adapted to sand and did not tolerate very well the dry, rocky ground of the Southwest. Finally, the coming of the railroad was making camel traffic, as well as horse and mule train traffic, obsolete.^[5]

⁶ As for Hadji Ali, he turned for a while to gold prospecting before securing a job as a scout for the U.S. Army. In 1880, at Tucson, Arizona, he became a U.S. citizen under the name Philip Tedro. Shortly thereafter he got married married and had two daughters, but as Orfalea has expressed it:

“Hi Jolly” was called by the desert more than married life and he returned to prospecting in 1889 in Quartzite, about a hundred miles west of Phoenix. It was there in the Arizona desert that the first Muslim immigrant in America died in 1903, unknown by 5,551 fellow Syrians, who arrived in America that year escaping deprivation.^[6]

⁷ But it would not be until the 1880s that the first big wave of Arabic-speaking migrants joined Italians, Poles, East European Jews, and other groups from southern and eastern Europe bound for the United States.

^2. First Big Wave

¹ The vast majority of Arab immigrants who began arriving in the 1880s were from what was then referred to as Greater Syria, a territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. At the time, this region was part of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled from Constantinople since capturing the city in 1453 from the Byzantine (or eastern Roman) Empire. Though the empire had already begun to shrink by the late 19th century, it still controlled much of the Arabic-speaking world. Ruled by a Muslim elite and shaped by Islamic institutions, the Ottoman Empire included a diverse mix of religious and ethnic groups, including Christians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, and various Slavic peoples.

The Ottoman Empire at its height in 1566 and on the eve of World War I in 1914, showing the dramatic territorial losses that occurred over the centuries. Following defeat in World War I, the empire was formally dissolved, and in 1923 the Republic of Turkey was established as its successor state.

² Between 1889 and the beginning of World War I, about one hundred thousand immigrants came to the U.S. from Mount Lebanon. The majority were Christian, especially Melkite and Maronite Catholics and others were Eastern Orthodox. One common narrative is that the migration was driven by the desire to escape religious persecution at hands of the Ottomans. However, prominent scholars have pointed out that this narrative exaggerates a truth that is much more complicated. For example, Aminah Al-Deen has pointed out that Arab Christians in the Ottoman Empire “were protected and enjoyed a limited amount of religious freedom.” However, “while they were free to worship in their churches, they could not build new ones and had to get permission to repair those that had stood for centuries.” Moreover, under Islamic law, Christian Arabs also had to pay a tax that Muslims did not have to pay.^[7]

³ But it was really a combination of many factors that eventually motivated many Arab Christians to migrate. The increasingly burdensome taxation was certainly one factor. The sense of being second-class citizens was undoubtedly another. At the same time, two major events occurred, creating economic crises that disrupted the livelihoods of many farmers across the region. First, there was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 through the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt. The canal connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, and hence to the Indian Ocean, which enabled faster and cheaper transport of goods between Europe and East Asia. Consumer goods, such as silk from Japan, for instance, became more inexpensive. As a result, the demand for Middle Eastern silk decreased, driving many farmers out of business. Secondly, the spread in the 1890s of microscopic lice devastated grape farms in Mount Lebanon, a region where grape cultivation was a critical component of the local economy, confronting grape farmers with a similar hardship. Thus, the first wave of Arab men immigrated to the United States primarily seeking greater economic possibilities.^[8]

^3. The Peddling Life

¹ The earliest Arab immigrants were, for the most part, not only poor and uneducated, but they lacked the skills needed to fill the niches in the rapidly industrializing American labor force. Arab farmers who tried to make a go of farming found the lands more difficult to cultivate and the weather harsher than they were accustomed to in their homelands. When they failed at farming, a great many turned to peddling.^[9]

² Peddling was not as lucrative as farming had been in the good days back home, and it was hard work too. It could also be dangerous as peddlers were vulnerable to theft and violence. But a good peddler could still make a lot of money for his effort. Peddlers often earned as much as $1,000 a year at a time when the annual income for laborers was only about $650. Moreover, like many economic migrants from southern and eastern Europe, Arab migrants at the time saw themselves only as sojourners. They intended to work hard for two or three years and return home with substantial savings.^[10]

³ Peddling was a get-rich-quick enterprise in the minds of many Syrians, and it became a magnet for many who immigrated before 1910. They entered the country through New York or some other major port of entry, heading for a particular peddler settlement in some well-chosen location. Veteran peddlers in these locations often recruited relatives and villagers from his native village in the “old country.” Peddling networks reached into every corner of America. Working from an established home base, peddlers covered great distances on foot and were often away for days and weeks at a time, traveling on foot from place to place. They sold ready-made school clothes, men’s work clothes, fabrics, towels, jewelry, tablecloths, bedspreads, and much more. The peddler was in essence a mobile department store.^[11]

⁴ By 1910, the era of peddling had largely ended as American consumers turned increasingly towards the new department stores and mail-order houses like Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. At the same time, immigrants were confronting the reality that they would not return to their villages. French and British colonial expansion in the Middle East had only further undermined traditional livelihoods and continued to create economic instability across the Middle East. Many former peddlers gave up on the idea of returning home and decided it was time to settle down and make permanent homes in the United States.^[12]