America in An Arab Mirror

Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature: An Anthology

K. Abdel-Malek, Kenneth A. Loparo, Mouna El Kahla

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780312229634
• eBook ISBN: 9780230120587
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This distinguished anthology presents for the first time in English travel essays by Arabic writers who have visited America in the second half of the century. The view of America which emerges from these accounts is at once fascinating and illuminating, but never monolithic. The writers hail from a variety of viewpoints, regions, and backgrounds, so their descriptions of America differently engage and revise Arab pre-conceptions of Americans and the West. The country figures as everything from the unchanging Other, the very antithesis of the Arab self, to the seductive female, to the Other who is both praiseworthy and reprehensible.

Appendix

Accounts of Arab Travelers to America Unlisted in Part One

Sinbad in the New World (1984)

HUSAYN FAWZI was one of the most prominent Egyptian intellectuals of the twentieth century. He was a polymath combining expertise in science, oceanography, music, art appreciation, literature, and journalism. He was truly a Renaissance man. He recorded his account of his trip to America in 1974 under the title of Sinbad in the New World, using the name Sinbad, one of the Arabian Nights’most celebrated travelers. His account was published in 1984 and had a drawing of an Arabian Sinbad with a duffle bag on shoulder heading toward the Statue of Liberty with New York cityscape in the background: the old world meeting the new. The account treats various topics ranging from the history of the American presidency to social issues in today’s American society through education and music and ending with a close look at the political career of Thomas Jefferson and Henry Kissinger.

 

Washington, DC, obliged me to show her my utmost respect and love because of her romantic atmosphere and her quiet banks on the river Potomac, her clean streets, broad and long, surrounded on both sides by impressive and tall buildings. I have not seen in Washington, DC, the kind of congested crowded streets of other cities—except the other bank of the Potomac which lies in Virginia and Georgetown . . .

As for Boston in Mass. it is really the cradle of American civilization, and the center of revolutionary activities and agitation against the British. Only the one versed in the history of America can appreciate the importance of this city as a capital of art and science since the arrival of the early pilgrims on the Mayflower in the early years of the 17th century. One may say that what is known as New England is the birthplace of American revolutionary figures and American constitution: revolutionary figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, and Adams . . .

It was natural for me to admire greatly American history which I came to know much later in my life. The reason being that our cultural life in Egypt, after it familiarized itself with Europe did not really know more than the history of France, especially the French Revolution, and less so British history and less so the history of other European countries. For example, we in Egypt are ignorant of the history of modern Germany and know only a smattering of Italian history—jumping from the Renaissance to the modern period . . . I began to read pocket books about American history . . . it is a history of an old European culture making its imprint on a savage landscape, inhabited by the early emigrants and their descendants and managing to turn this new land into a brave new world. Those early emigrants from Europe were indeed civilization-builders who transmitted the civilized habits of their home countries.

The emergence of the USA was truly a momentous event in world history. The challenge for the pioneers was how to cope with a rough environment throughout vast territory that ranges from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The melting of diverse communities of people hailing from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds has created something new, something that blended and modified inherited outlooks, institutions, and ways of life. The American federal system is indeed one of the marvels of human achievements for it blends many diverse elements of good and evil and art and pragmatic spirit and idealism of the English and the Scottish and Irish and the Germanic and the Italian and the Scandinavians and the Checks and the Hungarians and the Spaniards and Jews and Polish and the Russians, . . . etc.

I say it was a marvel, this American experiment in history, for this blend of cultures and communities consecrated religious freedom, racial tolerance, democracy, and equal opportunity for all. The common theme in American life is certainly their intelligence and their experience and their love of freedom and their willingness to protect it and fight for it.

Index

America

as a virgin land, 12

Arab students, 99

Arabs in, 121, 135, 140

art in, 24–25, 43

barbers in, 26, 50, 52

Blacks in, 87, 91, 140, 141

churches in, 19, 20, 21, 45, 46, 51

cinerama in, 74

clergy (male and female) in, 46, 68, 71, 72, 79

clothes in, 25

as compared to Egyptian women, 129–131

cowboys in, 22, 24, 45, 87, 91

dance in, 31

and decadence in, 21–22

efficiency in, 49

films in, 24, 112

Finishing Schools in, 131–133

food in, 25–26, 50

guns in, 95

Halloween in, 43–45

jeans in, 43ff, 46

Jews in, 85, 87, 91, 140

loitering in, 43, 149

longevity in, 53

love of work in, 50–53

machine guns, 146

marriage in, 131ff and materialism, 22, 23

newspapers in, 45ff, 57, 75, 76, 78, 79, 109, 136

religion(s) in, 18ff, 136, 140

sales and salesmen in, 45–46, 50

sex in, 23, 94

skyscrapers in, 49, 62, 72, 88, 98, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Accounts of Arab Travelers to America According to Their Date of Publication (1668–2008)
• I: America in the Eyes of A Nineteenth-Century Arab
• II: The Making of an Image: America as the Unchanged Other, America as the seductive Female
• III: America: The Dream and the Reality, the American as an Example to Emulate
• IV: America in the Eyes of arab women travelers
• V: Satirical Views of America
• VI: Colonial Spanish America in the Eyes of a Seventeenth-Century Arab (1668)
• VII: Early Egyptian Travelers in America: Muhammad Ali Pasha’s Trip In
• VIII: Accounts of Arab Travelers to America Between 1996 and 2000
• IX: Accounts of Arab Travelers to America After 9/11
• Appendix: Accounts of Arab Travelers to America Unlisted in Part One: Sinbad in the New World, Husayn Fawzi (1984)
• Index