Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities ...

A Turbulent Arab American Relationship

The turbulent Arab American relationship stems partly from American interference and intensive involvement in political affairs of different Arab countries. This arises chiefly because of America’s interest in the region’s oil, and partly from American commitment to and support of Israel and indifference to Arabs and the atrocities committed against them. Commenting on this latter point, Edmund Ghareeb says that “the American public today generally sees Israel as ‘little,’ ‘brave,’ ‘beleaguered,’ and ‘heroic,’ while seeing Arab nations seen as ‘backward,’ ‘ignorant,’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ ” (ix). Even before Israel’s creation, however, from the Middle Ages with their anti-Muslim Crusades, the West has regarded Arabs as alien and hostile, has accused them of not sharing Western Christian values, and has considered them a threat to Western civilization. Indeed, Arab American hostility unfortunately also has a deeply rooted religious connection. The West tends to view Islam, the dominant religion in most Arab countries, as something foreign and opposed to Western Christian values. This hostility has created a dichotomy between the East, with its barbarism and evil religion, and the West, with its good Christian values. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said explains the Western attitude toward Arabs and the East: the West casts its essence over that of the East, measuring social, political, and academic issues against European cultural standards, “setting itself off against the ‘Orient’ as a sort of surrogate and even underground self, an ongoing discourse perpetuated by the basic assumption of the Orient as mysterious, unchanging, unable to represent itself, and ultimately inferior” (4–5). This view of the East as different from the West and opposed to its interests and values has always dominated the American view of Arabs. Americans see Arabs as inferior on one hand and yet exotic and mysterious on the other.

As Americans view the West in terms of Self and the East in terms of Other, they assume a cultural essence contained in the constructed representation of the Western mind as superior to and highly differentiated from the Oriental and backward mind (Northrop, 455). Indeed, this assumption guides American foundations of knowledge and power, including multimedia, mass culture, and foreign policy, revealing a consistent bias against Arabs and their political causes.