INTRODUCTION
“I left New Orleans [in 1907] for New York by way of Washington, D.C., to print my book, al-Safar al-Mufid fi al-’alam al-jadid [Dr. Abdou’s Travels in America].” (p. 650)
Dr. Nagib Abdou (1874–1942) wrote this brief announcement towards the end of a long essay that was part of the first ever directory of "Syrian" immigrants throughout the world, which he published in 1907. Hidden amongst his detailed accounts of prolonged travels, as well as his ruminations on cities, peoples, journeys, science and medicine, architecture and geographies, this brief sentence reads almost as an afterthought; an unremarkable last step to produce a remarkable book.
The 676 pages of al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) (rendered mainly in Arabic but also English and some Spanish) contain an encyclopedic amount of information. On one hand, it was an unprecedented directory of thousands of “Syrian” business owners and workers across the world. But it was also a guidebook for present and future immigrants to help them navigate state bureaucracies and commercial transactions in a variety of countries. Additionally, in his two extensive travel essays, Abdou mapped the world for his readers with images, maps, and texts, and he provided detailed information about each of the included countries (and sometimes their states/provinces) and their peoples. He supplemented this with indices of all Arabic language newspapers published in the world, consular offices across the globe, advertisements, brief histories of some countries, and biographies of “prominent” individuals or families. In short, it was a remarkable undertaking in its scope and depth.
We have launched this project to make this rich source of information on early Arab immigrants accessible. We have digitized the entries as they appeared in al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) and mapped all 7,337 names of businesses and their owners across the world. We have also created a searchable database and provided various visualizations of that information. Finally, we have written short essays about Abdou and his directory. (You can access and search the book itself at www.arabicsearch.org)
We also see this project as an organic and ever-growing one. We invite you to share with us stories, images, names, and dates of people who were immigrants in 1907 and whose information either did not make it into the directory or you find to be incomplete. You can use this form to do so.
In addition, we welcome your comments and suggestions for ways that we might be able to improve this project. You may contact us by going here.
As always, we are grateful for your support and help in spreading the word about this project and other Khayrallah Center projects. Thank you!
Navigation and Orientation of Website
We invite you to explore the world of Nagib Abdou and over 7,000 of his "Syrian" contemporaries.
- Use the navigation menu at the top of the webpage to access various parts of the website and engage with the directory through different avenues.
- “Home” offers an introduction to this project and a comprehensive map displaying the directory’s thousands of entries.
- “Biography” tells the story Dr. Nagib Abdou, seeking to answer questions about who he was and why he chose to write and compile entries for al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels).
- “Database” enables you to digitally search the directory’s entries and learn more about the lives and work of included individuals. Please note that we digitized the entries as published and that not every record will have data for each criteria.
- “Visualizations” contains two maps and an interactive dashboard that draw from the directory’s listings. The maps note the listed locations of the directory's listed business owners as well as the origins of select individuals. The dashboard displays dynamic data that reveal patterns regarding business types, origins, and the genders of the business owners.
- “Newspapers” shares a listing of the 103 Arabic-language newspapers published in the Middle East and North African region and beyond.
- "Your Story" is where you can provide us with additional information about someone who was not included in the directory, or whose entry you can enhance.
- Finally, "Contact" will offer various means through which you can reach us.
BIOGRAPHY
The sheer scope of Abdou's directory begs several questions: Who was Nagib Abdou? What prompted him to compile and publish this information? And how did he manage to gather information from the far reaches of the world in an age of steamships, letters, and telegrams?
Who was Nagib Abdou?
Nagib Abdou was a product of, and a contributor to, the Nahda: the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual, cultural, and political reform movement in the Arab world (particularly in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria) and its diasporas. The Nahda was marked by transnational networks and efforts to modernize the Arab world by reinventing literature, society, education, and governance through critical engagement with ideas of modernity, all the while revitalizing Arab-Islamic heritage. Abdou fully embraced the Nahda's ethos and purpose from his early years in Mount Lebanon until his passing in Buffalo, New York. The directory was his major contribution to this movement.
Early Life
Abdou was born on February 20, 1874, in Baskinta, a town in the then Ottoman province of Mount Lebanon (and today part of Lebanon). Baskinta produced its fair share of intellectuals who ascribed to the ideals and aspirations of the Nahda, including Mikha’il Naimy, a storied literary figure and one of the founders of al-Rabitah al-Qalamiya, and Naoum Mokarzel, the founder and editor of
Al-Hoda, one of the earliest Arabic newspapers published in the Americas. After studying in one of Baskinta’s local schools, Abdou moved to Beirut where he attended the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed to the American University of Beirut), and then its French Jesuit rival/counterpart, Université Saint Joseph. In both, he was immersed in the humanities and sciences, languages, literatures, and biology, among other topics. This is the extent of what we know about his early life, before he began his decades-long travels and migration.
Dr. Nagib Abdou, 1907
Beirut, circa 1800s
First Journey
On August 16, 1888, Nagib Abdou and his father, Tannous Abdou, left Lebanon because “we heard the call of Syrian immigration to the American countries.” This call appears to have been, at least partly, an economic one: for everywhere they went they traded wares for money. It is not clear whether they intended this journey as a permanent departure or a sojourn. Regardless of what their initial plan may have been, they both returned to Baskinta some seven years later, on March 3, 1895. Their journey, as Nagib narrates it across forty pages in al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels), was peripatetic, to say the least. Their travels took them across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, throughout the Caribbean and Central America, to New York, and then finally back to the port of Beirut. In total, they visited over fifty places, with the majority concentrated in the Caribbean, Colombia, and Venezuela, and they spent the longest period of time in Jamaica.
For every village, town, city, or country that he passed through, Abdou wrote down some observations. At times it was a short description of the place. For example, Abdou wrote the following about the island of Saint Thomas–his first encounter with the “New World”:
Today it is solely the possession of Denmark. . . its population is around 13,000, who are mostly Blacks [zunūj] from the African tribe. The fruits of this island are bananas, sugar cane, pineapple, mango and other local fruits. It is the key to the West Indies and its 32 square miles, and after inquiring we discovered that there were no Syrians on it.
Saint Thomas, 1882
In other instances he provided far more elaborate information that included short histories, ethnographic observations about the inhabitants, economic insights into the local industry and commerce, or commentary on the state of the Syrian community living and working there. For instance, the description of Cartagena, Columbia–“our destination”–is far more elaborate than that of Saint Thomas. Nagib’s reflections on Cartagena occupied two long pages and included two photos, one of the defensive wall of the city and the other of Simon Bolivar. Of the Syrians in the city, he wrote:
They are all from north Lebanon. . . and the yellow color on their faces is a reflection of their [poor] health, and the ringing yellow in their sleeves [gold] is the sound of their hard work.
Then, Abdou gave a brief disapproving history of Spanish colonialism in Columbia and the cruelty they visited upon the indigenous population. He did so by way of celebrating the efforts and victory of Simon Bolivar and his fellow countrymen in liberating Colombia and other parts of South America. From there he concluded with an ethnographic observation about the skin color of Cartagena’s inhabitants:
The people’s appearance derives from the skin color of Blacks and Indians, ranging from black to brown according to the factor of mixed marriages between the white Spanish lineage and African lineage from four generations ago, and the same with Indigenous Indians.
Calle Mercado and market place, Baranquilla, Colombia, 1914
Other parts of the narrative read like an adventure tale: travels on river boats through tropical jungles and encounters with wild animals, the elements, and indigenous peoples. Of their nine-month-long journey on the Orinoco river in Venezuela, Abdou wrote aspirationally seeking to be ranked with European colonial explorers:
On this journey in the heart of Venezuela we were like the great explorers Dr. Livingstone and Stanley in dark Africa.
He then went on to describe one of their nights on their river boat as follows:
We spent an anxious night, and our enemies were the mosquitos, the crocodile and the tiger [jaguar], and even the sailors who only stopped trying to kill us and steal our money because of our weapons.
British Guiana, 1916
He repeatedly recounted stories of misadventure where the locals tried to rob and kill them, but were always defeated by the “bravery” of his father, as well as his own exploits with a gun or knife. He remarked on the “strange” customs of the people they encountered along the banks of the Orinoco, and their “simple” minds wherein they would trade a metallic whistle for nuggets of gold. Thus, for Abdou, the journey was as much one of "scientific" discovery and observations as it was about making money.
Throughout, Abdou deployed racist tropes where he clearly saw himself as superior in intellect and learning to most people he encountered. He was only salutary of those in power like judges and princes (and maybe one or two influential Syrians in the Mahjar) that he met, and he was keen to relay how they admired his facility with language and his knowledge, as well as that of his father. Of those who were indigenous Indians or descendants of enslaved Africans he was condescending and contemptuous, as he regarded them as “barbarian” or, at best, “noble savages.”
After spending four years trading in Jamaica–about which he only wrote of two episodes of illnesses and his mistrust of the “blacks” who constituted the majority of the population–Abdou and his father began their return journey to Baskinta, where they arrived in March 1895. He does not say much about his return beyond expressing joy to see his beloved town again, and that his sister, Asma, met them at the Port of Beirut with poems. Yet Abdou only stayed in Lebanon for a very short time before leaving for New York in late 1895 or early 1896. This time around it appears that he left for the Mahjar permanently. Perhaps after experiencing broader horizons, Baskinta could not fulfill his growing ambitions. But we can only speculate, since he never made it clear why he chose to leave, and to do so alone this time.
Kingston Market, Jamaica, 1900
Emigration to "Amirka"
As a single man in his late twenties, Abdou set out to chart his own path and life. He wrote:
I had many ambitions once I found myself. . . in [New York] the city of Rockfeller, Morgan, Carnegie and Vanderbilt.
But despite trying different means to make money, he saw “no other way but to follow the well-beaten Syrian path” of peddling. So, he purchased a qashé [case] of different products from “the store of Maroun Fakhr” and traveled to Ogdensburg, nestled on the US-Canada border in upstate New York. That venture lasted but briefly because in fall 1896 he enrolled in the medical school at Laval University. Four years later, Abdou graduated on June 7, 1900, as a medical doctor and surgeon.
Subsequently, Abdou began yet another peripatetic journey that took him across the breadth of the US twice, and to the Caribbean and beyond multiple times. In the time between his graduation in 1900 and the publication of al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) in 1907 Abdou held a number of positions in various North American locales. First he was appointed as a health inspector for the City of Montréal, and then in 1904 he worked as a doctor at Saint Winnifred hospital in San Francisco. A year later, in 1905, he was in New Orleans serving as an inspector for the immigration administration. Later that year he was temporarily called as a doctor/inspector for the Key West naval base. From there he traveled “twice each week to Havana to inspect Cuban passengers.” By the end of 1905 he arrived in Laredo, Texas–“by orders from Washington”–to serve a tumultuous and brief stint as immigration inspector there. Early in 1906 he was back in New Orleans, working as a military medical officer to fight the outbreak of yellow fever. Subsequently he spent most of 1906 on a US medical mission sailing between New Orleans and the Caribbean and Central America. It is at this point that Abdou begins to conclude the narrative of his second voyage by stating:
I left New Orleans [in 1907] for New York by way of Washington, D.C., to print my book, al-Safar al-Mufid fi al-’alam al-jadid.
After 1907, our information about Abdou comes almost exclusively from Arab-American newspapers and journals. We catch glimpses of him through an article he wrote or in a newspaper blurb reporting his comings and goings. In total, there were around fifty such articles and mentions, the first of which appeared in 1900 and the last in 1939. The articles he penned focused mainly on one of three topics: medicine and health; “Syrian” immigration; or racism against Arab immigrants. For example, in September 1902, Abdou authored a two-piece article on the science of air. He opened up his discussion with the following:
I wrote this article to provide our compatriots an immediate and necessary benefit particularly for those who do not understand the rules of hygiene. . . for only ten percent of [immigrants] know of the importance of air they breathe in their life and health, and that most illnesses, especially in crowded cities, are caused by air.
In an Al-Hoda article published in October 1911, Abdou reported on his conversation with Frederico Boyd, the Panamanian Minister of Foreign Relations, about the recent exclusion of “Syrians” from
immigration. According to Abdou’s report about the conversation, Boyd explained that “Syrians” were excluded because they are “a degenerate class at the same level as the Chinese. . . and that the
Panamians considered them devoid of refinement or honor.” Abdou “defended” his compatriots to the Minister on the premise that “you cannot judge a whole nation on the basis of one person’s actions.” Supposedly, this argument curried favor with Frederico Boyd, and he promised Abdou to lift the restriction. (What is striking is that the editor of Al-Hoda published a harsh rebuttal of Abdou’s letter on the very same page, writing: “It is absurd that Dr. Abdou is trying to take credit for these efforts away from those who preceded him, and to claim that it [the exclusion of “Syrians” from Panama] was nothing but a tempest in a teapot.”)
Marriage Certificate for Nagib Abdou and Annie Tulley
May 11, 1919
By 1915 Abdou appears to have started settling down. After attempting to take the New York medical exam three times (once in 1913 and twice in 1914), Abdou registered as a practicing
doctor in New York, where he remained and practiced the way through 1935. By 1940 he had moved to Utica, New York, where he passed away two years later at the age of sixty-six. In May 1919, Abdou married Annie Tully, an Irish immigrant who immigrated to New York in 1904 and was listed as a “servant” on the arrival manifest. By 1910 she was working as a waitress somewhere in New York. It is unclear how the two met, but she was six years younger than him; after Abdou passed away in 1942, she moved from Utica back to New York City where she passed away in 1958.
Why al-Safar al-Mufid?
In the English introduction, Abdou explains his decision to compile and publish this directory as follows: "This is to make a closer commercial connection between the Arabic speaking people at large and America." While this may in part explain the directory section of the book, the fact that it contained many other parts all of which were printed in Arabic indicates a larger purpose.
There is one obvious answer for why Abdou undertook this daunting project: others had done it before him. By the early twentieth century, directories had become widely available throughout the world. From city directories to ones that covered wider geographies, and from general listing to specialized collections, it had become commonplace to gather and publish information for the general public. For example, before Abdou published al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels), he very likely encountered the first printed directory of the city of Beirut. Al-Jam’ia aw Dalil Bayrut (The Compendium or the Directory of Beirut) was published in 1888 in Beirut by Amin al-Khouri. As Jens Hanssen notes, “the Directory [of Beirut] effectively facilitated a new way of imagining or ‘reading’ the city without actually knowing, seeing, or living it.” By extension, Abdou’s directory allowed anyone with a copy to imagine a global network of “Syrian” immigrants, and to feel a sense of immediate connection and belonging. In other words, al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) offered the first visualization of the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who left the shores of the Mediterranean for Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific world. The directory was one key way that they built transnational networks which sustained immigration as well as links to home and the world.
Even more specifically, many directories were published by and for immigrant communities in the United States and other receiving countries. These directories served as essential resources for new arrivals, helping them navigate their new environment, connect with businesses, and maintain ties to their cultural and linguistic heritage, as well as imagine their community. In the US, Abdou would have encountered many other examples of such new ways of imagining the diaspora. For instance, there were already prior editions of The Jewish Directory and Almanac, Deutsches Adressbuch für New Yorkund Umgebung (German Address Book for New York and Surroundings), the Guida Commerciale Italo-Americana (Italian-American Commercial Guide), and the Polish Business Directory of Chicago. It is quite likely that Abdou had encountered one or more of these directories, and that may have spurred him to undertake his own project. This is affirmed by the detailed information he provides for immigrants and merchants.
Title page of Dr. Abdou's directory
But within the Arab diasporas in the Americas and beyond, al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) was very likely the first of such directories, and certainly the most expansive. For example, the Syrian Business Directory (Mokarzel and Otash) was published in the United States in 1908 (a year after Abdou’s directory) and contained only listings for "Syrian" businesses in the US. Similarly, Guía Assalam de Comercio Sírio-Libanés (Wadi Schamún) appeared in Argentina in 1927, followed by Guía de Comercio Sírio Libanés (Salim Constantino) in 1942. These directories only listed businesses and names of those residing in Argentina.
The impetus Abdou found in the examples of other directories is but one part of the story. Across the span of his articles and travel narratives, two things become apparent about Nagib Abdou: he traveled extensively, and he was a keen observer of his world. In other words, he was the embodiment of the Nahda. As such, the publication of al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels) appears as a natural outcome of the intersection of his life as an immigrant and his ethos as a member of the Nahda'spolitical and cultural reform project. He clearly references this at one point in his narrative. Abdou mentioned that he attended the parliamentary debates in the Canadian parliament, “and I hoped for the establishment of a parliament in Turkey to reform the country. My wish came true as you can see from the image [below.]” Beneath this comment he printed a photograph of “The Scholar Solieman Effendi Bustany, the translator of the Iliad and one of the Beirut delegates to the Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul.” His choice of Suleiman Bustany was not by happenstance but rather because the latter was one of the luminaries of the Nahda. His translation of the Iliad was only one of his many intellectual and political efforts at reform of society and state. In other words, Abdou printed the photo and caption as an homage to someone he admired and emulated for his production of "modern" knowledge. In this sense, Abdou's directory and travel guide fits within that Nahda rubric: a project to catalog and explain the world, as well as to edify and shape the "modern" Syrian.
Nagib Abdou's Passport Application, 1920
Of course, most immigrants led mobile lives. Even after they immigrated it was likely that they would move within a country or even across countries. However, very few would have matched Abdou’s itineraries. In his first trip with his father he visited over fifty places (see the video at top of this page for visualization of his journey); by the time he was thirty years old, he had visited, lived, or worked in nearly one hundred different towns and cities. This extensive travel meant that he had accumulated a wide network of acquaintances and contacts over a large swath of North and South America, as well as Europe and the Mediterranean. A network that proved invaluable as he set about compiling information about “Syrian” businesses and people across the world.
At another level, Abdou–at least by his own account–was not an ordinary immigrant. At one point, he described himself as a latter-day Dr. Livingstone, traveling into the “heart of darkness.” Thus, he places himself as an extension of (and a counterpoint to) the European colonial project of mapping, “discovering,” and conquering the world. His travel narratives were filled with “scientific” observations of practically every place he landed. More often than not he adopted the tone of a detached observer, remarking on the appearances, behaviors, and lives of the peoples he encountered through the filter of a racial hierarchy wherein those who were Black or indigenous were seen as “barbarians.”
He also regarded himself as particularly adept at being a cultural intermediary. His education in European and American institutions, his facility with multiple languages, and his cosmopolitan worldview that privileged “modern” knowledge and behavior all permitted him to navigate new spaces in Europe and the Americas more easily, perhaps, than most other immigrants. Moreover, his roles as interpreter and inspector (where he came under suspicion for exploiting "Syrian" immigrants) for the US Government, as well as for the United Fruit Company, privileged him with a higher level of authority (maybe larger in his mind than in reality), which he wielded quite frequently in promoting himself.
Within this context, it becomes apparent that Abdou was quite well situated to undertake the writing and publishing of al-Safar al-Mufid (Dr. Abdou’s Travels). His own extensive observations, his access to wide sources of information, and his large network of contacts were all critical elements to a project like his book. In compiling his list he reached out to editors of Arabic newspapers, to postmasters of various towns, and to friends and acquaintances who sent him telegrams or letters with information about the "Syrian" community in various locales across the world.
In undertaking this laborious process, Abdou leveraged his education and worldly experiences to create a formative and uniquely personal contribution to the Nahda, one that furthered connection and understanding for his "Syrian" compatriots as well as those seeking knowledge about the "Syrian" diasporic experience across the globe. In the process, he narrated a world of racial hierarchy and colonial/capitalist conquest but one where "Syrians" stand on equal footing as "Whites" rather than being dismissed as the "trash of the Mediterranean," as one US Senator described them.
