Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Hi everyone, and welcome to History Speaks, a podcast brought to you by the Made Ben generously funded by the Henry Lee Foundation. My name is the Ali, and I am your guest host for today. History Speaks is a series that focuses on how the asso historical tradition speaks to contemporary concerns. And today we are discussing Muslim history in the United States. In this episode, we have a very special guest, Edward Curtis Thefor, who's a professor and public scholar of Muslim history in the US as well as African American and Arab American history. He's a professor of religious studies at the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University, Purdue University in Indianapolis. He's the author of multiple books and articles, and today we will be discussing his latest book titled Muslims of the Heartland, How Syrian Immigrants A in Midwest, which paints deeply root history in Specif Midwest histor conversation. So being, being with us, I'm really excited to have you here on the podcast.
Speaker 2 00:01:25 It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me, Taine.
Speaker 1 00:01:28 So you've been writing about Muslim history in the US for many, many years now, um, in a range of different medium. And one of the things that's so striking and distinct about Muslims of the Heartland is the personal dimension to it and the way that uncovering, you know, this rich history of Muslim and Christian immigrants from greater Syria and the early 20th century is in effect uncovering your own family history. Um, you yourself are from southern Illinois, and we were just talking before the recording started about the St. Louis connection. Um, you live in Indianapolis, he deep family roots and connections in the region. And so I wanted to start off by, you know, talking with our listeners a little bit about your own background, because the book really seems to sit at the intersection of your own family history and your scholarly expertise, essentially mediating this history that you and yourself are product of. And so how family history and background shape your motivation and interest in, in writing this book? And what has writing this book meant to you and your that It's in,
Speaker 2 00:02:33 I, uh, as you mentioned, descendant of the populations about who I'm writing. And when I say the population, what I mean are the, um, what we would call Syrian Lebanese or Ottoman Syrians who immigrated to the United States before World War I. Most of them were Christian. Um, but there were in the Midwest significant Muslim minorities among them. Uh, and I think you know the book it does, it was so, their Arabic speaking identities were so important to them that in, in, in so many ways these days when we're studying Muslim Americans, we put the Muslim first. But I think we really, in order to understand them in their context, we have to understand their ethnic as much as their religious identities. And so, so this, this Arabic speaking world that they developed and then the descendants of those people, that's the background of my own family.
Speaker 2 00:03:36 Different people came over at different times, but the, the Samaha later mo and then they changed their name to Moses, came to Southern Illinois, and the, hes came to Southern Illinois before World War I. They intermarried oftentimes that generation did intermarry in their same ethnic, uh, sometimes religious group, sometimes outside of their religious group. And so those were the stories that I grew up with. And one of the reasons why I wanted to write the story when I did was because of this feeling, this need to reclaim our roots in the Midwest in the midst of an era, you know, after Donald Trump was elected. But even before that, when Vice President Mike Pence tried to ban refugees here in the state reclaim our roots and to the long history of our people in the region,
Speaker 1 00:04:37 That's such throughout the, in terms of reclaiming this narrative of the Midwest, we were talking a little bit about this, uh, just before, where the Midwest is not typically the kind region where we associate this kinda diversity, or when we think about people like politicians like Mike Pence or Trump, um, and the caricature of the Midwest is kind this real America in quotations, meaning white America. And your book shows that this was, this was not the history and this was not the case.
Speaker 2 00:05:07 It's remarkable that the Ku Klux Klan got its wish in the twenties, the second iteration of the clan wanted to rewrite American history and a race, the racially and ethically diverse populations who had made America what it was.
Speaker 1 00:05:24 Yes. Who had
Speaker 2 00:05:24 Fueled its factories who, you know, who had done its farming. I mean, it was, you know, this and this region was so shaped by immigration, you know, in the late 18 hundreds and the early 19 hundreds. I mean, you go anywhere in the Midwest and it doesn't take, you know, but a little bit of exploration to see the massive changes in this region after these, uh, immigrant populations come in at this time. A and also of course, especially after World War I, African American migration from the South, which completely changed the region. Unfortunately, that version of US history, which erases everything but white Anglosaxon Protestant, is now redant again, at least among many Midwesterners, especially rural Midwesterners. Well, where I grew up, some of the counties around which I grew up in southern Illinois went over 75% for Trump. These are some of the same counties that voted for Obama before, which is remarkable.
Speaker 2 00:06:24 Right. One of the things I really wanted to do was to reclaim these stories, not so much to convince my fellow Midwesterners who think of me as a foreigner, as a perpetual for, but for me, and people like me to remind us of our people, of the marks that they have left, who we are and why it is possible. I was brought up by my Arab American family members to love the Midwest, we're rural people to love its land, it's flora, it's fauna. That was all a part of it. And you know, as much as anything, this land, which of course was native land mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but land that, land that on which we settled, that that is much a part of us as the, as our, as our fellow Midwesterners. It was almost a way of explaining to myself how I still felt an attachment to a place where a number of people who lived in it <laugh> didn't necessarily want me or people like me to live, to live here anymore.
Speaker 1 00:07:24 Right. No, and I I really appreciate that point you just made about audience, right? So this is not, not that Muslims or Arabs belong here in white America, but as a reminder to those communities themselves of what that history is, which is a different, very different posturing than I I I think a lot of earlier literature, uh, about Islam in America, and as, as yourself being one of those pioneering scholars of, of this subfield where there, I think there has been a shift in, in kinda thinking about different audiences and what is now the goal for scholars of Islam in America, a to uncover history, but for who is it to convince this idea that there are Muslim rights claims to the land of being native born or what year you arrived when, as you pointed out, we're on indigenous land. And, and I think that that's an important nuance here, that, that comes through as a sort of celebration of Muslim, of Arab, of Syrian Christians or immigrant history in the region.
Speaker 1 00:08:29 Um, I wanted to go back to this question. Ofor, we've touched on it, Reversing their erasor of Arab Americans, of Muslim Americans from American history is this prominent theme that emerges throughout the text. And I wanna, um, ask you about, if you could talk a little bit more about that historical dynamic of erasure. So what are some of these factors that contributed to this forgotten history of Syrian Muslims in the Midwest? And as you just alluded to this myth making of the KKK narrative that this region has always been white, that this country has always been white. So I wondered if you could just, again, just, just touch on that historical dynamic of erasure. Why are we at this state where there has been this project now to, to try and uncover this, this history of, of Syrian Muslims in the Midwest?
Speaker 2 00:09:16 Yeah, There are multiple levels of erasure. I mean, so first of all, we, we already talked about the kkk, uh, sort of version of American history. The other factor here, of course, is that much of Arab American history has been dominated up to this point by, by Arab American Christians who assumed or thought that they found little evidence of Muslim presence in the Midwest in particular. And so part of what happens is because Muslims are minorities among the Arabic speaking people too, is where they do not have a critical mass of Muslims to pass along their identity. They oftentimes either stop being Muslim, stop identifying as Muslim, maybe they convert to Christianity. This happens in Ros, North Dakota, for example. One of the sites of one of the first American purpose built mosques, and this is normal in rural areas. What happened though, is by the time Arab American historians were writing the history, even the, the, the evidence that Muslims had existed was not as plentiful. In some cases, Muslims were buried underneath Christian grades.
Speaker 1 00:10:33 That was such a example. Yeah. So as you talk about, there was like these patterns of assimilation. There's kinda a sense of conflation, it seems, between the Syrian Muslim and Christian immigrant communities because Christians, as you write, have made up the majority of those immigrants. But there's really striking example of Joe has World War I, uh, Muslim soldier, and I wonder if you could talk about that.
Speaker 2 00:10:57 So Joe Hassen Shami, he comes from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He like so many Muslim and Christian Syrian Americans serves in World War I, the American expeditionary force. He loses his life and he's buried in a cemetery in France. And to this day, it, it, it is one of those cemeteries, you know, it's, it's quite bucolic, these beautiful, But at that time, either got buried underneath across, or a marker with a star of David. Jews were, Jews were recognized, but Muslims were not. There was no way for a Muslim to be recognized in the US military at that time. And so to this day, his body is sitting underneath that. And the reason why we know he was Muslim, he came from a Muslim family. He was talked about as a Muslim, and he even told the census taker in 1915 from South Dakota. They act, they asked about people's religion. He, he said he was a Muhammad or a Muslim. That was just one of them. I found, I suspect there are many more such erasers.
Speaker 1 00:12:01 Right. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That was such a there and there's so many striking examples like that throughout the book.
Speaker 2 00:12:07 I think there's just one other, you know, history graphical reason why, and it was pointed out by Sally, how and Islam in Detroit, the super majority of Muslims in this country today trace their roots to a post 1965 immigration.
Speaker 1 00:12:25 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 2 00:12:26 So they are not connected organically to the pre 1965 Muslim pioneers and founders. As a result, they're cut off from the kind of institutional memory that gets passed along in families. And because there were so many, oftentimes what they, what happened was they would come into a mosque and they would represent the majority in that mosque. And the mosque would become a post 65 immigrant mosque.
Speaker 1 00:12:55 Mm.
Speaker 2 00:12:57 And so the memory of who Muslim Americans were before 65 was not often passed along. And that's another form of era. Some of the post five I leaders thought these people were bad Muslims. They didn't pass. No. Right. They said, Oh no, they were just a social club. They didn't, they didn't actually practice Islam. Of course they did practice Islam, but maybe not in the modern reform version of Islam that the post 65 immigrants wanted. It practiced how they wanted it.
Speaker 1 00:13:28 Yeah. And, and that's such a critical point in terms of thinking about continuities and ruptures in the way that we tell history. Um, which as you just stated, is another form of a erasor, which is how we get to this state where the Midwest is sort of not conceived of as this sort of heartland of, of Muslims or of diversity. Um, so I wanted to get back to some of the, the portraits that you were alluding to right now where you present these really inspiring, beautiful portraits of diverse, multiethnic, multi-religious Midwestern communities in these towns, while also highlighting the very persistent presence of discrimination against Syrian American communities, sometimes, especially the Muslim communities. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the kinds of discrimination that Syrian Muslims, uh, individuals based and, and the places that this shows in the historical, and I wonder sentiment more in the,
Speaker 2 00:14:30 So on the one hand of anti bias, both against Muslims and Christians in the late 18 hundreds and the early 19 hundreds, but took the form of, uh, the kind of xenophobia that was popular at the time, which associated immigrants with dirtiness. I mean the, where Syrian Muslims and Christians lived, whether it was Indianapolis or other places, uh, New York, um, oftentimes it was associated, these neighborhoods was squa with disease, particularly eye disease. Tricom, you know, that was said that they were bringing in these diseases. Know we see that in the way in which, um, some Americans talk about Latin X immigrants, but that isn't the primary way in which Islamophobia takes form. There were other continuities between the antier discrimination then and today. And one of them was of course their, they can't assimilate because of their culture, their exotic, they tend towards fanaticism. Um, these sorts of things were as much a part of that era as they are ours.
Speaker 2 00:15:40 Interestingly though, <laugh> when it comes to women, there was a big difference because so many of these Syrian and Lebanese women, um, with the, just a quick reminder that Lebanon really doesn't become its own country. Right. Until the French occupation. Right. Um, after World War I, so when we talk about Syrian, we're talking about Greater Syrian, you know, which includes Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan of today. So these, these shammy or, or Syrian women we're known to be, uh, extremely intrepid. Uh, they were peds, they were, there were complaints in the Minneapolis newspapers that they were too aggressive, um, that they weren't ladylike. One of the social reform movements, as several of my colleagues ever revealed was to get Syrian women back in the home because they were working too much outside the home.
Speaker 1 00:16:31 Right.
Speaker 2 00:16:31 And, and there was the implication of there being a sexual impropriety license. So the problem with Syrian in the late 18 early was that were, they were too free, uh, as opposed to where of course the, the stereotype is, is quite the opposite.
Speaker 1 00:16:52 Right. It's so interesting cause it shows how an anxiety over Muslims oftentimes just, you know, reflect the general anxieties that are happening in American society at the time. And sorted foreigners or outsiders, all wrapped xenophobia. That's really interesting point. Come back to shortly. So as, as crucial it is then to uncover this important history and begin to reclaim particular narratives around Muslim claims to US history. Um, it's clear, as you just mentioned, that as integrated as these communities were, uh, both Christian and Muslim, Greater Syrian and American communities, um, they were, especially the Muslim communities, were routinely subjected to discrimination, often on the basis of their racial identity as you highlight in the text. And so I wanted talk a little bit about whiteness because this was a, during a period in the US when citizenship was tied to whiteness, which of course we continue to see today, maybe stronger than ever in terms of a more recent history.
Speaker 1 00:17:53 Um, but let's say that citizenship was tied to whiteness in more explicit ways in the past. And so there are these really striking examples that you draw from newspapers that particular language. And it's interesting to think about the continuities as you highlighted in your response right now, because I think especially, you know, when we teach about Islam in America at the undergraduate level or teach on Islamophobia, I think there's this assumption that anti Muslim sentiment can be traced back to nine 11 or, or the post 1979 sort of a running revolution context or the nineties, um, Cold War. And of course nine 11 becomes this big sort of factor. But this language, as you show, is very readily applied in the early 20th century. And so it's interesting to think about those continuities and also the ruptures, as you pointed out, with the issue with, um, women in that earlier time period. And you also show how that from place to place from some place like Cedar Rapids or Sioux Falls. And so I thought that was interesting to also think about the, the regional differences in how the discrimination sort of played out. It sort of was tied to the kinda, I dunno if you would say the, the shape or the strength of the communities in those places. How would you maybe describe or account for the differences from place to place in the different sort of towns and cities that you address?
Speaker 2 00:19:17 I, I wanted the continuities between, um, now and then was the role of the federal governmenting furthering today we call islamphobia, you might just call it anti-Muslim discrimination mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And there was also concurrent with the antier discrimination and other forms of xenophobia. One of the things that I found in my research was, uh, um, affirmation of the recent, or I don't know if it's recent, but of the, in understanding Islamophobia not simply as the ignorance of uneducated people there towards Muslim people or the personal hangups or hatreds of, of non Muslim individuals, but rather an institutional and structural form of life that discriminates against Muslim Americans because of critical race theory. We understand more generally how much structures and institutions play an important role in racism. Well, you asked for the question of whiteness. This directly impacted Syrian Muslims because in 1908, the federal government, the Department of Commerce and Labor, I believe sends out federal marshals all over local courts across the Midwest and across the country, telling judges to stop naturalizing to stop giving naturalized citizenship to Syrians because they're not white.
Speaker 2 00:20:55 Now at the local level, they were at least legally speaking, they were white and thus able to be citizens. Cause remember that if you are defined as Asian at this time, you could not become a naturalized citizen of the United States. That was illegal because of all the exclusion acts in, in particular in the 1880s. Right. So it's very important that you fight for your whiteness if you wanna be a citizen of the United States. So there's a legal reason why you would wanna claim whiteness. I mean, that's a nice idea to actually say, well, forget that I'm just gonna, um, be in solidarity with oppressed people around the world. Right. And, you know, but you're, well the price you're gonna pay for that is to be deported. What's interesting to see is so many local opinion makers, white opinion makers and judges say, This is ridiculous.
Speaker 2 00:21:49 These people have been here for long, they are white. You know, they actually defend the whiteness of these Syrian Muslims and Christians. Now, it is complicated though, when this goes down, some of the Syrian Christians are actually agitating against Muslims saying they're not white, but we are. Right. So here we have religion directly related to racial whiteness mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that, that Christians can be white, but that Muslims can't. I think one of the things that my book does that is important and new in terms of understanding anti-Muslim sentiment and discrimination is it insists that we look, as you indicated, we look at different localities for different possibilities. Because in Michigan City, Indiana, until World War I, Syrian Muslims are called Turks, and they are legally discriminated against in terms of their access to public space. That is very different than Cedar Rapids, where Syrian Muslims do have access to public space and are, and are accepted as white ethnic or near white ethnic people. So it changes depending on time and place. And I think that's very important is that while it's, while we look at a lot of our studies of Islamophobia have looked at case law and, and, and federal policy, we also have to look at social history to see where spaces people have access to in order to understand whether or not they have the sort of wages or the privileges of whiteness.
Speaker 1 00:23:30 And I wanted to get back to this idea of solidarity. Right? So you talk about how on the structural level, having these kinds of alliances between Syrian American immigrants and indigenous or African American populations was precluded by the threat of deportation, the importance of trying to buy for whiteness, which was this coveted status. And so there's, they're, they're living this time in citizenship is tied to whiteness. Christianity becomes tied to whiteness where muslimness becomes racialized as non-white. And then some of these Syrian Muslims were indeed granted citizenship if they could prove, um, or others could vouch for their whiteness. But I just wonder, could you talk a little bit about what the communities, a Syrian, Midwestern communities themselves relationship was with whiteness in conjunction with the fact that they were home on native plans that been forcibly relinquished to the US government? Would you talk about in the book, but what were their relation, what their communities relationships like to non-white populations like indigenous and African American communities? You already addressed the factors that, that would lead to their vine for whiteness rather than as people who are themselves seeking refuge from oftentimes oppressive OT rule. What were sort of those individual relationships like, if, if structurally we didn't see, or maybe you can speak to that again, if there weren't sort of structural alliances between Syrian Midwestern communities and non communities?
Speaker 2 00:24:57 So it's hard. I mean, of course I'm sure that there were individual relationships, you know, across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. But in terms of communal cooperation, we don't see that kind of cooperation until, largely until after World War I and Islam, after World War One becomes so known among people of color as an anti imperial resource mm-hmm. <affirmative> and as an anti-racist resource that one sees, uh, in the 1920s and going through the 1950s, increased cooperation between African American Muslim congregations and Arab American Muslim congregations. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, this is evident in the, in the Midwest, in the photographic record. I mean, where we have multiple examples of South Asian, Arab American and Black American people dining together, worshiping together, organizing together, you know, So yeah. So, so at that time, we really can talk about quite a lot of interracial solidarity. And one of the, one of the main reasons for that is early in the 1920s, the acedia movement coming from the Punjab and British India has fantastic success as a missionary movement and, and, and really does a, a very important work in convincing both Arab Americans and African Americans that Islam is an anti imperial, anti-racist religion.
Speaker 2 00:26:37 Right. So that's one of the con sort of one of the consequences of ama creativity and work. So that's, so that's one thing that goes on. But at the same time, what we see among Arab Americans is, um, uh, ethnic religious solidarity that is necessary among themselves to compete in and for resources to participate in American society. This is different than the United States today. There are Arabic speaking congregations among Muslims in the United States, both actually among Muslims and Christians. But, but the number is small. What we find instead is multi linguistic, multi-ethnic Muslim and Christian congregations. And so we have to remember this is an era that was really quite different. And in order to participate in American society, you tended to rely on your ethnic religious group, whether that was Ashkenazi Jewish or Scandinavian Holiness or Polish Catholic, you know, that this is, that, that being a member of those ethnic religious communities, especially in the Midwest, was essential to participating in public culture.
Speaker 1 00:27:51 That's so fascinating. And I think that in, in terms of, you know, going back to this idea of assimilation and that being tied to ethnicity, which is something that you started with in, in your earlier remarks about the importance of sort of ethnic identity as opposed to just thinking about religious identity when we think about greater Syrian Ottoman immigrants who had built these connections over a shared ethnicity, Interesting to think about the way that you talk about the role of ethnic religious congregations in the early 20th century, and the impact of these early institutions as actual tools for assimilation. And so it's a way to think about being Muslim as an actual tool for assimilation, which is really interesting way to think about Muslim national belonging through the contemporary lens. You know, in a, in a time when there, there's, there's a steady aggressive resurgence of which implies that to be Muslim is to be unAmerican, uh, or to be anti-American, or to necessarily be outside of what can be a community that belongs nationally. And so could you say more on that, particularly in the context of how mosques and ethnic religious congregations more broadly were central to these narratives of assimilation for these groups?
Speaker 2 00:29:07 Yeah, and to be clear, what I'm talking about when I say assimilation, a lot of people May 1st think of, oh, assimilation, that means they lost their traditions. They're particularity, right? But if you think about what it means to be assimilated in the United States, that is simply not the case in terms of how we organized our society here or how it was organized. Right? Right. Because because ethnicity and race were absolutely key to the ways in which we participate in public culture, in the economy, in politics, uh, and, and in civil society. And one of the things that any scholar or historian of religion in the United States would tell you is we are quite strange in that the local religious congregation is so very, very important to our civil society in the United States. I mean, to this day, the best funded philanthropy is the local religious congregation.
Speaker 2 00:30:15 It consumes, uh, more dollars. And it was even more important. One could argue before world wari, I mean, to be American to participate in American life was to be a member, is to have your own religious ethnic congregation. And, um, that then gave you the power to participate in society. And that's what I mean by assimilation to assimilate, is to participate with others in your society. The older sociologists used to read this as some sort of segregation. It wasn't, that's what everybody did, whether they were white, Protestant or, you know, or black Catholic in order to, to participate. So I see that as a form of assimilation, but one of, of building power, and it's so different if you think about these first and second generation Arabic speaking people from the greater Syria from which they came, first of all, well, women did not tend to go to Friday congregational prayers.
Speaker 2 00:31:15 And the villages, the mosque was a male space. The shrine, the shrine was more of a, a male and female space. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But the mosque is a male space oftentimes, at least for Friday congregational prayers. Two is you don't have sports league picnics documents of, um, rules. Uh, you don't file for a tax exemption. I mean, none of this is part of being a member. And you're not a member of a mosque per se, in Ottoman, Syria. You might go to one mosque if it's close to you, and then another mosque for prayers if you happen to be away from that mosque. It, it's, so, it's very different. So, so by building a mosque, it's not just about preserving one Islam, one's Islamic identity, it's about making Islam an American religion in the same way that there are other American religions, whether we're talking about Judaism or Christianity,
Speaker 1 00:32:08 That's interest of Americanization of Islam as becoming way that of religious congregations take a very unique shape in the, and religious congregations become more American in a sense. They start to look more Protestant. So when we think about synagogues introducing family pews where women start come being a part of that public space, Mosque becoming these like community centers in the US where it is more family oriented, of course, one could argue that they're still very mosques, are very male dominated. But there are a lot of different alternative kinds of spaces up. But also just the shape of mosques as community centers where they're doing events that involve more than just men coming in for prayer. And so that's something that's interesting in the way of thinking about a goal beyond preservation about, but what it looks like to sort of set roots down for most, Well,
Speaker 2 00:33:05 We've, the family pew, but it's also important to remember how much among Protestants up until after World War ii, men and women were generally sitting or oftentimes sitting on different sides of the congregation. We Right. We, we've overemphasized because I mean, it's like when Lela Ahman talks about going to Britain for her education from Egypt, and she talks in one of her autobiographical chapters about perfecting the har Protestant Christianity in the Angle. American tradition is oftentimes about gender segregation, not about gender integration. So it's both, you know, But yes, I mean that, but still it's that, it's, I think the, the thing to it to emphasize is the congregation as the most basic unit of civil society beyond your family, I think that's really what we're talking about here. And that's different than most places in the world, including many parts of Europe.
Speaker 1 00:34:04 Yeah. That, that's an, and I think that's an important distinction to think about how Protestant communities had these same sort of patterns of gender segregation. But I, I guess I more so met even the introduction of women into public worship worship spaces.
Speaker 2 00:34:18 But that's, but they were a public Syria, There were plenty of women in public worship spaces. So when you go to, when you go to the shrine of a saint, to the ea, to the friends of God, there are plenty of women there. Women have always been public in Islam. There's never been a time when women weren't part, when women weren't in public spaces, but because the congregation rather than the shrine was so central to the
Speaker 1 00:34:40 Creation Right.
Speaker 2 00:34:41 Of American religious identities, we just didn't establish shrines here.
Speaker 1 00:34:45 Right. Right. So that's such an important distinction to think about these other kinds of religious public of worship, like the shrine as opposed to central on the mos, which I think such for bringing up that clarifi, that's such an important distinction to think about what it means when we talk about public roles of, and in sort of worship.
Speaker 2 00:35:04 It doesn't do any in favors. When I'm introducing my students to Islam and I talk to them about the whole, you know, about the centrality of the ea the friends of God to women's public spaces, you know, and then they can't go see it in their neighborhood <laugh> because, uh, because besides Bawa Moha Dean's Maza in Phil in Pennsylvania, there are just very, very few places I can send them to.
Speaker 1 00:35:29 Right, right. What about this is kinda, this is largely related to something that you were saying before about maybe this perception that ethnic congregations can be very isolating or as sort of segregation from the rest of society. So what, uh, how would we think about the role of, let's say, these kinds of ethnic religious congregations of Syrian Muslims in this period, as opposed to, you know, in your, in your work, you've also written a lot about the Nation of Islam in terms of having these spaces, or, or even if we think about the black church as, as this like, place of political participation and organization almost in, in as a response to thinking about being excluded from sort of more public spheres of political participation. And so how would we think about the role of these ethic religious congregations in comparison to, let's say, the role of black church or the role of the nation of Islam in around, you know, Twentie century?
Speaker 2 00:36:28 Well, for the most part, these mosques were very explicitly the Syrian Muslim mosque committed to the ideas of citizenship, of US citizenship that were so popular among religious congregations, whether Jewish or Christian in general. So that these are very explicitly when they, when they file their articles in the corporation with the secretaries of state, almost always, it's just something about, and this is gonna teach us to be better citizens of the United States, more loyal citizens of the United States. That's very different than the alternate social and political citizenship that is offered by the nation of Islam, which is an, you know, an afro pessimist institution that, no, no, they'll never accept you. It may mirror in many ways, a, a, a nationalist tendency, but it's about creating a, you know, safe space for self love, um, with the possibility of, of dignity and pride outside of an anti-black racist environment. Now that's very different than many of the African American churches, which again, prominently displaying the US flag, sending their sons and daughters to serve in the US military, you, you overwhelmingly, you see black churches being, you know, an engine of the civil rights movement about participation in the political mainstream, you know, trying to exercise what they believe to be their 14th and 15th amendment rights in the United States.
Speaker 1 00:38:01 Yeah. That, that's a really important, I think, distinction to think, think differently about their attitudes towards citizenship. But it goes back to this idea of vying for in, in the context of these early congregations of what it means to, for whiteness in a period where citizenship is so closely tied to that. Cause it makes me think about, um, ve balls work on, on Bengali Harlem, where similarly you have, it's, again, this, I'm uncovering this lost history of, um, Bengali Muslim men setting down roots in Harlem, in York City, but marrying into black and Puerto Rican families. And for even the ones that sort of retained their religious practices, their Muslim practices, although over time assimilation and a lot of the patterns that, that we see you describe happening to these early OTs, Muslim immigrants, but there's a way in which they're not recognized as Muslim cause of their blackness. There's that sort of level of erasor on the level of, on the one hand, where Muslims are being racialized as other, but then they also slip through their cracks when, when blackness is not recognized as Muslim. So that's because it's happening around the same region. It just made me think of these different kind of scenarios and different patterns of migration and assimilation, really depending on relationships white, whereas these Bengali men couldn't argue for white on the basis tone
Speaker 2 00:39:28 Were who also couldn't pass mean had you, you know, Arabs like, um, Latino and Latinas, people are multicolored, we're black, white, and brown. And, and to this day, you know, how dark our skin is really does affect our reception in public space.
Speaker 1 00:39:51 Right, right. I jump back to the role of women, which you talked a little bit about before. Some of my favorite profiles in the book were these fascinating female characters from business women and farmers to poets religious leaders. And women's stories are so often obscured and missing from the archives for some of the reason that we just list, we just talking about in terms of we think about women being absent from the mosque, um, that sort of taken synonymous with absent from public religious life, where, as you just mentioned, the existence and shrine and other kinds of public worship spaces. And so women's are often so obscured for all of these d reasons and missing from the archives. And so this was very exciting to see, and I wondered, you could preview for our listeners who haven't read the book yet, some of the roles that Muslim women played, especially in early Islamic institution building.
Speaker 2 00:40:40 So the first chapter begins with the story of Ali, a Husan who is born around 1910 in western South Dakota on a homestead that her dad, Ali and her mom Fatima filed there. And then she grows up in Sioux Falls. And really, she is one of the figures in the book that we could, that we can trace throughout the book. And really the story in, in some ways begins with her story and then ends with her story. What was so fascinating, she was a very public about a lot of her struggles as a young woman. She was a poet. She learned to be a poet in the public schools of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And she took that with her the rest of her life. But she ends up becoming one of the, if not the most important era of American Muslim woman leader of the 1950s and sixties, the intellectual, I mean, decades before people were writing about the founding, uh, the, the role of women in early Islam.
Speaker 2 00:41:42 She was writing about that in the 1960s and Muslim American publications. Um, she was a liaison to Malcolm X from, from the Arab community. She crossed racial and other boundaries. You can't believe, given the history that of her that I discovered in the records that she herself left behind at the Arab American National Museum and at the Bentley Library of University of Michigan, you, you couldn't predict that she was gonna be so important from these, from these humble backgrounds. So she's one of the people, I mean, more than anyone else, we get to see in her life the challenges, personal challenges of a bad husband, um, of illness, but also of an incredible Muslim American consciousness that is formed not in contradistinction to, but in concert with her Midwestern upbringing. And that's a theme that of course, it comes back over and over again, uh, in the book. So she's one of the, she's a very important leader in Cedar Rapids. I talk a lot about the women, especially from the I and the Ossie families who helped to establish the, what would later be dubbed the Mother Mosque in 1934 and 1935. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And one of the comments I love in the book is one of them says, Well, the men were very helpful too,
Speaker 1 00:43:14 Highlighted.
Speaker 2 00:43:15 Yeah. They're raising money for the mosque, you know, and costs around 5,000, $5,500 at the time. These are, you know, such important founding figures. So we learn about their unique, and then we learn some of those stories. I kind of alluded to before, of the women who aren't just at home, who are outside the home and who are doing really hard work. Mary Juma, who has maybe the first Muslim kid in western North Dakota, Charlie Juma, she's out there busting sod and planting the field. This is extremely hard work. I mean, and she lives in this shack, and it's extremely, you know, and then we also learn about Ishi, uh, sh who is Cedar Rapids answer to, um, to Rosie the Riveter. She's working the line in World War II packing up deliveries for the troops in Europe. So, I mean, so we've got, you know, we've, we've got all kinds of part public participation of Muslim women, both as leaders in their religious communities mm-hmm. <affirmative>, including sometimes leading prayers mm-hmm. <affirmative> Yeah. Which would surprise that, but also just more publicly involved.
Speaker 1 00:44:28 Yeah. That's so fascinating. And I, that exact section posted and highlighted where it was like the women were the, um, the breeds and the labor behind Mother Mos of America, like what we think of these essential sort of, uh, institutions in American Muslim history, where it's like, yeah, men sort of helped out to, um, and essentially also serving as religious followers and teachers and resources for the community, which is exciting to see. Cause of course, these stories exist everywhere, but they're obscured and they're often missing from the archive. It just really exciting to see that
Speaker 2 00:45:02 I was excited as well. And the other thing oftentimes is that women's, most women's religiosity is oftentimes talked about in terms of ritual or, you know, or material culture, clothes, you know, these sort maybe, uh, music, you know, folk songs. But what was very clear about many of these women, particularly in Cedar Rapids, is just how important Islamic knowledge was to them. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that is something that is even, you know, among contemporary Muslim Americans, I think is not well known that long, that a hundred years ago, you know, that there were Muslim women who car deeply about studying and understanding Islam and who valued Islamic knowledge.
Speaker 1 00:45:48 Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so valuable to, to situate that in history as opposed to right now emergence women's scholars ss and sort of able to situate that part of the US and of course, elsewhere.
Speaker 2 00:46:14 And it contradicts stereotypes of Muslim Arab Muslim men as well, because guests who's oftentimes paying for these Muslim daughters to go to, to, to get a, a higher education, if they, I mean, we sometimes forget just how many women in the first half of the 1920s in this country went to college. It declined after that and the Great Depression, but it was a great deal. And so they were, I mean, and my grandmother, you know, uh, went to St. Mary's College where he, she met her husband at Notre Dame University because her father, an Arab Christian immigrant in this case, wanted very much for her to have a higher education.
Speaker 1 00:46:53 Yeah. I, I wanted to get back to your grandmother because I wanted hear it generally about the experience of researching and writing this book. You know, going back to where we started about how personal it was. And so you paint these really vivid pictures of, of profiles of, in your profiles of individuals, and there's quite a range of characters. You just talked about some of them and was really moved by how your grandmother serves as the first person that we meet. Um, and so I'm curious about what that experience was like writing about her, but also how you chose the other figures. Was it for particular anecdotes you were drawn to that jumped out at you, or was it more so, or to what extent did the available material in the archives determine who you could actually profile?
Speaker 2 00:47:34 Well, and as you know, my grandmother was not Muslim, so it was perhaps an odd choice to, to begin with her. But, um, she may have been descended from a Muslim, I pick her because she was so typical, not of Muslims, but of Arabs, including Christians and Muslims of her generation. And I mean, her story really does parallel so many of the other, the stories of women in the, um, in the book. And so I think, and I was actually gonna put that in a, um, in an afterward, but the initial readers of my book said, You've got to start with this story. Yeah. Um, you know, it's, um, it explains how you became interested in the topic and why it means so much to you personally. So I, so I did decide and tried to show what was similar and different from the other women and, and men.
Speaker 2 00:48:25 When I write a book, I oftentimes will count the number of men in it and the number of women in it. Mm. I'm committed to, to basic gender equality in my writing that women's experiences are important as men. So, um, so that's very, And oftentimes I try to highlight them because, you know, because they, because their history has been ignored. Right. And so, but honestly, I would never have been able to do this if it hadn't been for Alexa Nap. Part of the reason why I could hope to get that amount of detail is because the most important historian of the Arab American experience, the woman after whom the collection, Epi Smithsonian, the National Museum of American History is name the NAF Collection. She cared enough to interview women and men. It matters that the most important historian of Arab America was a woman that really, the founding figure in so many ways.
Speaker 2 00:49:27 She recorded you were, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of oral history interviews. And so where I include all of the, uh, details of their lives so that you can picture where they are when they are, maybe, you know, what they were doing precisely what they were doing on a certain day. Oftentimes that was because they had told that story to Alexa app or to one of the people who worked for Alexa app. And that was my single best source. Now, I, of course, I used hundreds of other documents, especially to unearth stories that were not, but, but where you got the kind of detail you're talking about, almost always, that depended on a first person voice, you know, or from their child who would tell us about their, and cause she was recording these interviews in the seventies and eighties. That's now 50 years ago. Yeah. So we're talking about significant, you know, uh, uh, significantly closer time to, to 1920 than, um, or even 1900 than today.
Speaker 1 00:50:28 Yeah, that's fascinating. And, you know, with Muslims of the heartland, this is now an addition and an important sort of crucial part of documenting that history. And so you're continuing that work here.
Speaker 2 00:50:40 Could I mention the one thing that she didn't have? Right. There were certain questions she couldn't answer because she didn't have all the census data. There were certain sort of, she had the kinda oral history interviews. Right. Which is fantastic source. But I was able to go further because I've got city directories, I've got newspaper articles that I could do keyword searches in, or get the old microfilm. So I did the, you know, what a historian normally does, you know, in addition to that, in order to get even more detail, uh, and to make sure, sometimes I would find things where people would say something and it wasn't quite right, you
Speaker 1 00:51:17 Know? Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, So before we move on to the last question, I wonder if you had any reflections that you could share maybe your own emotional experiences of uncovering and piecing together, uh, and going through the archives and matching them with, um, census records and things like that. So I know that, um, you know, these are stories of resilience, of hardship, sometimes intimate family issues, um, obviously discrimination, racism that we've talked about, and ultimately erasure. And I know that, you know, scholars, especially scholars of color have often spoken about the trauma and the violence of the archive throughout the process of sort of piecing together histories of places and peoples that, you know, are predicated on mass displacement, force migration, trauma, um, violence, but also hope as, as you sort of, and also the sort of reclaiming as you talk about. So I just wondered, you know, if you could share any of your sort of reflections in your own sort of emotional experiences of, of the process of researching and writing this.
Speaker 2 00:52:14 I understand the trauma of the archive. I think sometimes actually the most traumatic incidents that I was, uh, narrating were those in which, um, the homesteaders were taking land that had been occupied just a couple years before by Native American people. And my emotions were on the one hand seeing that as, you know, a travesty. But I also remember that they themselves had been displaced by a global economy in which they were victimized. These were very poor people, you know? And so it was hard to see, to see it simply as victim and victimizer. Right. And I'm not sure in the end how much they understood about the land <laugh>. I mean, their, of English was very limited, often times. Right. You know, and they certainly couldn't speak native languages, um, in 1900. So, you know, so I wondered, So that was one thing I think with aah of these struggles, honestly, I worried about whether they would, because she had struggles in her marriage and she had a bad husband.
Speaker 2 00:53:26 I wondered whether readers would affirm their own stereotypes about Arab men. But I loved, I mean, her truth telling felt empowering to me rather than something else. And so I wanted to, wanted to include it. I mean, she wanted it to be known. She, it was, you know, I wasn't revealing something that she didn't want reveal. She wanted people to know her whole self. And so that felt empowering rather than, you know, disempowering. I must say though, overall I did not feel traumatized by this experience. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I felt energized and I felt a sense of wonder and delight and joy as I rediscovered these ancestors whom I really didn't know existed. Yeah. And I felt so strengthened by their presence. And, you know, that probably just reflects my own whatever it is that I needed at that time. You know, I mean, again, I'm writing this in the post Trump era, or the Trump Trump era, and so, but, but I, I mean, the, the moment I, I can't explain why it is that the moment I found out that a Syrian farmer had planted homeless chickpeas in the 19 teens and the Dakotas, I, I don't know why that gave me such delight.
Speaker 2 00:54:48 Exactly. But it did. I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. And it was reported in the paper as, uh, the Syrian P can be, uh, readily adaptable to the dry farming techniques of our region in its native country. It's called Hamas, H A M U S. And I said, No, that's homeless. And, uh, you know, so I, I don't know why, but it, it, it brought me a lot of delight.
Speaker 1 00:55:12 Yeah. That's for sharing that. And I to you were saying earlier about this is a book communities Arab to remind you your, um, and communities in terms of Muslim Arab communities, of where they're from and their own history. And that's always something that would be heartening. And so I'm not surprised that, you know, learning of how these farmers are planting from this was a sort of exciting, uh, delightful experience to learn. And so I wanted to you of the questions that the Speaks podcast is invested in exploring is how Islamic history in its own context helps us to understand our contemporary moment. So we've talked a bit about that in this conversation, but I wondered if we could just end with, could you highlight for our listeners some of the stakes covering this history and recap some of the goals for writing the book? So in other words, like what does it mean to affirm that Muslim Arab Muslims are not a recent or foreign addition to the us? You know, as opposed the balance between arguing for this more accurate narrative that yes, Syrian Muslim immigrant origin stories are very similar to other immigrant origin stories that date back to the early 20th century, while also pushing back against anti-immigrant xenophobia that implies that to be foreign or new to this country somehow makes you lesser. I think you touched on this. You said this is not accept Arabs as part of American history. That in terms sort of maybe highlighting what the stakes are for this history.
Speaker 2 00:56:44 Well, Islamic history doesn't just speak to the middle <laugh>, the Arab world, the Middle East to South Asia. Right. Islamic history in this case speaks, uh, deeply to Midwestern history. First of all, I, from a scholarly perspective, this very small population in terms of being a small percentage of the overall Midwestern population illustrates how it was that the Midwest worked as a human geography. Because they came at a time when, I mean, what, what does, what do the short grass prairies of the Western Dakotas have to do with the Great Lakes? You know, I mean, well mm-hmm. <affirmative> their comings and going, illustrate exactly what it had to do. At this time, the Midwest is this economic powerhouse of the country because Native American lands are taken or seized, put into agricultural production and technological, this kind, the industrial revolution around what we call the Rust Belt, The Great Lakes, is absolutely connected to the agricultural surplus that these immigrants help to create.
Speaker 2 00:57:56 So for, from a scholarly perspective, in this case, Islamic history illuminates Midwestern history. But second, in terms of, of today and the larger, the larger sort of political impact of this story is, it is a powerful anecdote to the idea that still exists among many of the people around whom I grew up in rural southern Illinois. That diversity is something new. It just, it just did the, the, the, the, that it just happened in the last couple years mm-hmm. <affirmative> what this story powerfully shows. And we began, you know, our, our our, our our our long conversation about this, what this story powerfully shows is that the Midwest, as we understand it, has never been culturally monolithic from the Native American peoples who spoke different languages, who were themselves diverse to the first Afro ura, Asian immigrants who came here, this region, so associated with whiteness, with lily whiteness and white redness. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> has always been diverse. And if we want to speak the truth, <laugh>, you don't have to be, uh, sort of, um, woke in order to recognize the truth that people of different racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds are responsible for creating the region in which I grew up and in which all Midwesterners live today. And that is a powerful story about Islamic history is part of Midwestern history.
Speaker 0 00:59:39 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:59:40 That's such a powerful corrective thinking about the Midwest more broadly and sort of the way that myths have overtaken are sort of the contemporary public US imagination. Thank you so much, Edward, for this insightful conversation on your book, Muslims of the Heartland, How Syrian Immigrants Made a home in the American Midwest, uh, which we will link to in the show notes. I'll also link to Arab Indianapolis, a book of essays accompany documentary Professor Curtis has produced attest to the contributions Arab, Indianapolis, and.
