In the years after the world war that ravaged the Ottoman Empire, Hassan left his native village in modern-day Lebanon to join his parents and siblings in the growing Midwest town of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. To do so, he had to sidestep the stringent immigration quotas newly implemented by the US. But years later, when the authorities learned that he entered and was living in the US illegally, he was threatened with deportation. Through Hassan's story, we'll learn about the experience of Arab migration to the United States and get to know the Syrian-American community that despite numbering in the hundreds of thousands by the 1920s, found itself repeatedly compelled to prove its worthiness to be included in a society where nativism was on the rise and being entitled to full citizenship often meant being considered white.
Studying the Mahjar
The United States was one of the major destinations for Arabic-speaking migrants from the Ottoman Empire beginning in the late 19th century. Most of these people came from modern-day Lebanon, but these Arabic-speaking migrants were generally referred to collectively as Syrians. Major centers of settlement were around New York City, Boston, and Detroit, but by the 1920s, Syrians could be found all over the country. Many worked as peddlers, a profession that took them to small towns in rural areas of the Midwest, where they established small communities bolstered by chain migration.
As Reem Bailony explains in the above interview, most Syrians in the US were Christian, but Muslims from all the communities of Greater Syria came as well. There were mosques founded in cities of the Midwest as early as the 1920s. The oldest standing purpose-built mosque in the United States is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Alixa Naff (1919-2013) was a pioneer in the study of the Arab-American experience. Recordings and transcripts of her oral history interviews conducted in the Arab-American community over the decades, as well as many other resources pertaining to the history of Arabs in America, are open to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. They have been vital to understanding of the process by which Arabic-speaking migrants established new roots in the United States. In the clip below, Grant Farr talks to prominent Arab-American activist Aliya Hassan about the rise of the Highland Park and Dearborn communities during the 1920s.