Initiated some two decades ago, the turn toward diaspora has been often framed as a disruption or alternative to “area studies,”Footnote 1 the institutionalized framework of knowledge about the world as six or seven discrete territories characterized by specific features of human life. Starting in the 1990s, scholars have traced diasporic histories across apparent world areas in order to draw novel geographies, such as the Latino Americas,Footnote 2 the Black Atlantic,Footnote 3 the Pacific Rim,Footnote 4 and, since the 2000s, similar maps crossing the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.Footnote 5 In fact, these works have advanced one of the rationales of area studies: the “deparochialization” of “U.S.- and Euro-centric visions of the world.”Footnote 6 Yet their consolidation in the final decade of the last century took shape alongside the “so-called crisis of area studies,” which, according to Timothy Mitchell, was part of a wider “crisis in the ability . . . to delimit and legitimate a field of scholarship.”Footnote 7 Based on assumptions of movement of both the scholar and the processes under study, these new spatial units of analysis appeared just as the older objects of inquiry previously “nourished” by area studies—culture, society, and politics—became harder to ground in a given territory and detach from the milieu of theorists themselves.Footnote 8 Writing about diaspora, moreover, was generally presumed to be at safe remove from the politics of area studies, which served not necessarily Cold War interests but rather “the project of a globalized American modernity to which the Cold War also belonged.”Footnote 9 Notwithstanding this late 20th-century conjuncture that made them seem at odds with each other, diaspora is not necessarily separate from or contrary to area studies.
Nonetheless, in Middle East studies specifically, the juxtaposition was inverted with even more deleterious effects: here, as discerned by Akram Khater, it was specialists of the area who “marginalized” the topic of migration.Footnote 10 Unlike African, Asian, and Latina/o diasporic studies that differentiated themselves from homologous area studies, it was Middle East experts who defined the region in ways that precluded diaspora or migration, and such themes are mentioned in only the most recent of the many reviews of the field published since the 1970s.Footnote 11 As part of the shift underway, anthropologists and historians have increasingly studied Hadrami trade and kinship networks across the Indian Ocean,Footnote 12 Omani political and economic ties in East Africa,Footnote 13 and Syrian and Lebanese activism and the Arabic-language press in the Americas and beyond.Footnote 14 But the general delegitimization of migration in Middle East studies distanced these diasporic approaches from postcolonial debates of the field following Edward Said's critique of orientalism, the exception being the work of Ella Shohat.Footnote 15 While diaspora studies informed the postcolonial turn in African, Asian, and Latin American studies for two decades, their disregard in Middle East studies compounded the region's so-called “exceptional” character.Footnote 16 As noted by Andrew Arsan, Akram Khater, and myself in Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies, the Middle East's “entanglements with the world beyond” were limited to western imperialism, and rarely seen through migrants moving from, to, and across the region.Footnote 17
Such “truncated” geohistories, however, are belied by some key figures in the 20th-century academic study of the Middle East. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, George Atiyeh, Albert Hourani, Charles Issawi, George Makdisi, and, in the case at hand, Philip Hitti traced their origin to or migrated from what became their ever-shifting object of study. Throughout long and distinguished careers, they studied the Middle East not from one place, but rather through periodic travels across African, Asian, Atlantic, and/or Mediterranean spaces. Embodying what Khater calls a “globalized history and geography of the Middle East,”Footnote 18 these prominent thinkers defined the parameters for studying a world area as well as cultivated far-flung connections with peoples and places that transformed such spatial schema. In body and mind, their mobility defies the binary logics of colonialist cartography that would parochialize them as “Arab academics in the west” or, worse, “western-educated Arabs.” Their diasporic journeys are the first step toward charting heretofore unacknowledged histories of area studies across unexpected geographies.
As noted by Zachary Lockman, Hitti brought into being a “Program in Near Eastern Studies” at Princeton University, the first of its kind in the United States, and his unique creation “served as a model for similar centers at other universities.”Footnote 19 Subsequently called the “father of Middle East Studies” in the United States,Footnote 20 Hitti also cultivated ties with fellow alumni of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) who settled in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. First visiting in 1925, exchanging letters through the 1940s, and embarking on a second trip in 1951, Hitti dialogued and debated with alumni residing there, including Said Abu Jamra, Taufik Duoun, and three Safady brothers. Based on newspaper clippings, private and published correspondence, and memoirs, this article asks how Hitti approached and was recruited by São Paulo based alumni and others to establish an Arab studies program in Brazil. Borrowing a framework for the delineation and study of the Middle East, this mahjar (diaspora) infused it with a widespread view that the centuries-long presence of Arabs and Muslims on the Iberian peninsula shaped Portugal, and thus Brazil's historical and linguistic formation. In this mahjar's shared vision for the study of the Arab world at what became the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), al-andalus was not only an extension of Arab and Muslim civilization between the 8th and 15th centuries, but also a link to Brazil's history and language through legacies purportedly transferred by its one-time colonial master, Portugal. In transplanting a form of area studies and repurposing its content, Hitti and SPC alumni in Brazil provincialized the U.S. model for knowing the Middle East.
In examining the efforts of Hitti and his colleagues to found an academic program about the Arab world in Brazil, I attend to their engagement with the imperial interests that underlie area studies. Diasporas and empires, as demonstrated by Engseng Ho, share long histories of competition and collaboration across extensive geographies.Footnote 21 As the most famous alumnus of what became the American University of Beirut (AUB), Hitti noted that U.S. government and military agendas bolstered Middle East studies at Princeton University,Footnote 22 while fellow alumni in São Paulo sought to draw upon Hitti's authority in order to establish Arab studies in Brazil. Though attentive to their engagement with U.S. “informal empire,”Footnote 23 I argue that Hitti, fellow alumni, and Brazilian academics imbued their plan for area studies in Brazil with nostalgia for the Portuguese imperial past. Such a relationship imagined with the former colonial master was marked by the 1933 publication of Gilberto Freyre's Casa Grande e Senzala.Footnote 24 Originally a sociohistorical study of Brazil, Freyre's magnum opus quickly became a “founding fiction” for the nation that quixotically differentiated “Portuguese colonizers” from northern Europeans because “of their geographical position, between Europe and Africa,” and their “tradition of interaction with Moors.”Footnote 25 Freyre was not unique. As captured by Ella Shohat, many 19th- and 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean thinkers expressed “a certain nostalgia” for so-called Moors.Footnote 26 This orientalist fascination with the Arab or Muslim past of Iberia and North Africa speaks to what Andrew Shryock calls “Islamophilia,” or “generalized affection for Islam and Muslims.”Footnote 27 Rather than focus on the historiography of this still widely held sentiment, I ask how diasporic intellectuals inflected it in designing the study of the Arab world in Brazil. Through this and other imperial formations, their three-decade-long goal to institutionalize Arab studies in Brazil both relocated and retooled a model of area studies.
As traces of what Rogers Brubaker might characterize as a “diasporic project,”Footnote 28 Hitti saved correspondence sent by Brazilian-based colleagues, including clips from Arabic- and Portuguese-language newspapers. Duoun and the Safady brothers also wrote memoirs that referenced Hitti and Arab studies in Brazil. Both their personal papers and their books documented diasporic exchanges alongside other ethnic, nationalist, and colonialist or anticolonial networks. Active on a variety of fronts during the first half of the 20th century, Hitti, Duoun, the Safady brothers, and others had a stake in how the project for Arab studies in Brazil would be remembered, especially because their efforts did not immediately lead to what became an Arabic letters program at USP in the early 1960s. Notwithstanding the delayed realization of the project, their diasporic histories point to the ways that the systematic study of an area is neither a monopoly of the North Atlantic nor entirely detached from it. To borrow Benedict Anderson's phrasing, their project for the academic study of the Arab world in Brazil reveals that area studies is an institution “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.”Footnote 29
FROM AL-KULIYYA TO A “NEW WORLD”
This story of Hitti and other diasporic intellectuals begins at SPC, founded in Beirut by U.S. missionaries in 1866. Syrian students who enrolled at “the college,” or al-kuliyya, were encouraged to substitute “family, village, and religious” loyalties for “a tightly supervised system of rules and regulations.”Footnote 30 As Hitti reminisced, the SPC student was considered to be a “son of the college (ibn-al-Kuliyah),” and as such “became different. He was expected to be more tolerant, more open-minded, better behaved, and more sophisticated.”Footnote 31 Of course, some students rebelled, criticizing the college through the western notions of progress and liberty that they learned in its classrooms and debating broader political futures through ideas of reform and radical thinking, as illustrated by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi.Footnote 32 Though the half-dozen alumni mentioned here studied at SPC between 1882 and 1920 (and, at best, knew only vaguely of one another before leaving Syria), they shared this fraught relationship to the still amorphous “homeland” upon leaving its physical environs. Whether settling in Brazil or the United States, they thought of themselves as muhājirūn (migrants) and identified with the mahjar. Though the latter term could apply to any “place of emigration,” SPC alumni in New York City, Rio de Janeiro, or São Paulo located their mahjar within a “New World.”
Born in the village of Shemlan, Mount Lebanon, Philip Khuri Hitti (1886–1978) graduated from SPC in 1908. Not long after, he traveled to the United States for a year of study, which was prolonged by World War I. With a letter of introduction from SPC president Howard Bliss,Footnote 33 Hitti recalled opting for Columbia University, “perhaps because there was a Lebanese community on Washington Street in lower Manhattan.”Footnote 34 While finishing his PhD there in 1915, Hitti was given a biography published in English a half-century previously, titled Antonios al-Bishalany. Hitti soon published a summary of it in Arabic, giving al-Bishalany the striking title of “Awwal Muhajir Suri ila al-ʿAlam al-Jadid” (the First Syrian Emigrant to the New World).Footnote 35 However, by 1953, Hitti had revised this view, stating if “writing the story today,” he would keep “Awwal” but change “Syrian” to “Lebanese” and, more tellingly, “‘Muhajir’ to ‘Mughtarib,’ which was then not in current use.” Etymologically, Hitti reasoned, muhājir “simply means to leave the country” while mughtarib “is used for one who leaves his country with the intent of returning.”Footnote 36 Though shifting his terminology during the first half of the 20th century, Hitti clearly articulated a diasporic sentiment. Long before it became a category to theorize far-flung ties, diaspora captures Hitti's own way of imagining the experiences of his contemporaries and forebears in what he called “the New World.”
His fellow alumni in São Paulo thought of themselves in parallel and connected ways. Enrolling in the preparatory course at SPC in 1895 and graduating in 1903, Taufik Duoun (1883–1966) settled in Brazil in 1914 and for the next several decades served as a key interlocutor in the mahjarī press, as noted by María del Mar Logroño Narbona and Oswaldo Truzzi.Footnote 37 In 1925, on the front page of his short-lived newspaper in São Paulo, Al-Dalil – O Guia, Duoun featured Hitti as an “American University” graduate “from Syria” during the latter's first trip to Brazil.Footnote 38 Duoun praised Hitti as a “link” among AUB alumni, underlined his call for “teaching Arabic” at a Brazilian university, and witnessed the collective pride he sparked among muhājirūn. In the title of his own autobiographical text published in 1953, and analogous to Hitti's shift at that same time, Duoun adopted the moniker mughtaribūn as well.Footnote 39 The term mahjar and its Portuguese translation as terra da emigração (land of emigration) were also used by the Safady brothers, Jamil (1908–1950), Jorge (1912–2005), and Wadih (1898–1965); the last of these graduated from AUB in 1920, and their father ran a trading business between Beirut and Rio de Janeiro before World War I.Footnote 40 For Duoun and the Safadys, the lands of emigration constituted a Novo Mundo (New World), sometimes contrasted with a Mundo Velho (Old World).Footnote 41 In Brazil and the United States, alumni saw themselves as migrants inhabiting a “New World.”
These alumni also shaped an “Old World” through Ottomanist, nationalist, and colonial politics. A SPC graduate in the class of 1882, Nami Jafet (1860–1923) shifted from Ottomanist to nationalist loyalties. In a São Paulo newspaper in 1914, Nami and fifty colleagues signed an open letter to the Sublime Porte, affirming “their loyalty to the government and its definition of the motherland.”Footnote 42 Three years later, Jafet called for Syrian patriotism against “Turkish invaders” in front of the French ambassador to Brazil.Footnote 43 As an editor, translator, and general admirer of Jafet's speeches and writings, Taufik Kurban (1891–1980), whose father came from the same village and studied with Jafet at SPC, supported an independent Syria.Footnote 44 These nationalist hopes were tempered by colonial prognoses in the perspective of Dr. Said Abu Jamra (1871–1954), a graduate of SPC in the late 19th century and editor of the newspaper al-Afkar – Os Pensamentos (The Ideas [in Arabic] – The Thoughts [in Portuguese]).Footnote 45 Interviewed by a Brazilian journalist in 1915, Abu Jamra criticized “Turkish Ottoman administrations” that “sought to stifle Arab energies,” and predicted that “France would make Syria and Mount Lebanon a likely protectorate under its direction” while “England would extend its dominion to Arabia and Mesopotamia.”Footnote 46 More subtly distancing himself from “Turks” in 1917, Hitti reflected that Syrians “go by the name ‘Turcos’ . . . in Central and South America,” though they had very little in common with them.Footnote 47 Two years later, Hitti stated that “the unity of Syria” should be maintained “as a federated State,” initially under a Western power.Footnote 48 In a New World during World War I, SPC alumni projected a range of overlapping as well as competing Syrian nationalist views onto the space that they would come to collectively study.Footnote 49
Regardless of their acquiescence or opposition to “western tutelage” after World War I, alumni expected al-kuliyya, renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1920, to play a civic role in their places of origin and settlement, an example of what Andrew Arsan has called “interwar Middle Eastern internationalism.”Footnote 50 Accordingly, Jafet founded and presided over the Associação dos Ex-Alunos da Universidade Americana de Beirute (Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut) in 1922.Footnote 51 Based in São Paulo, it brought together half of the 100 or so alumni in Brazil, mostly factory owners and physicians. The association sought to maintain ties between “the University and its former students” and to “publicize Arab literature and culture in Brazil.”Footnote 52 When Jafet died of a heart attack the next year, Abu Jamra took over the leadership of the association.Footnote 53 In mid-1925, during Abu Jamra's mandate, Hitti traveled to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to visit alumni and fundraise for AUB.Footnote 54
“Dr. Abu Jamra met me and is with me all the time,” wrote Hitti in the first of many letters to his wife, Mary, in Staten Island, adding: “the Syrians are more Syrian here than in Syria.”Footnote 55 Hitti spoke to “delegates from societies, representatives from schools,” “Arabic and Syrian Brazilian papers,” and Brazilian academics, journalists, and politicians.Footnote 56 Though drained by having to “appeal to pro-French and anti-French, reconcile Maronites, Orthodox, and Muslims,” and “please rich and poor, men and women, ignorant and fools,” Hitti expressed both curiosity and surprise at having been characterized as “the intellectual ambassador of the Syrians” as well as at the large donations raised for their alma mater.Footnote 57 Hitti confided to his wife, “our colony here is large, rich, and influential, and has seized upon this opportunity to show . . . the Brazilians that they have professors and authors.”Footnote 58 At the same time, he sent a telegram to an AUB director in New York City noting that “ten thousand dollars [was] raised in one sitting by fourteen Syrians.”Footnote 59 In exchange for donating to their alma mater, alumni in Brazil used Hitti's persona to gain greater distinction in the public sphere.
Though not a major goal at the time, Abu Jamra later recalled that Hitti first raised the possibility of an Arabic course during a visit with a Portuguese philologist, then director of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 60 The director's negative response—though he acknowledged Arabic's “importance” in Portuguese philology—failed to dampen Hitti's enthusiasm. According to Abu Jamra, he and Hitti were shown the library's Arabic-language collection and encountered books personally signed by SPC professor Cornelius Van Dyck, who had given them to Brazil's then-emperor during his late 19th-century travels in the eastern Mediterranean. Abu Jamra also recounted that Hitti's idea for a course in Arabic language and literature appealed to a professor at the Academy of Law in São Paulo. Such interest was likely kindled by Hitti's keynote speech at the academy's anniversary dinner on “the cultural and historic points of contact between Syria and the Iberian Peninsula.”Footnote 61 In 1925, even before the creation of Brazil's federal university system that absorbed this and other schools, Hitti suggested that fellow alumni and Brazilian academics establish a line of study akin to the Semitic languages program that granted him a PhD from Columbia University, but with particular attention to the linguistic and historical interplay between “Syria” and Brazil's former colonizer in Iberia.Footnote 62
Brazil's nationalist mythology made an impression upon Hitti as well. After returning to the United States, he read a Saturday Evening Post article that derided Brazil as “evolving” toward corruption and disintegration.Footnote 63 In response, Hitti sent a letter to The New York Times editor in late 1925.Footnote 64 He wrote that, across the Americas, Africa, and Europe, “Brazil stands pre-eminent as one [country] in which no color line, racial prejudice or religious discrimination is noticeable.” Brazil's “true melting pot,” opined the Middle East specialist, was due to Portuguese colonizers who mixed with indigenous inhabitants and now intermarried with “Spanish, Italians, Germans, and Syrians.” As further proof of this apparent openness, he added, “members of the Syrian colony in São Paulo, some of whom are graduates of the American University of Beirut, occupy prominent positions.” After the Brazilian ambassador in the United States sent him a personal letter of “gratitude,” Hitti's letter made the front-page of a major Brazilian newspaper.Footnote 65 An unnamed writer celebrated his statement about Portuguese miscegenation in the making of a more open society, notwithstanding what Jeffrey Lesser has found to be contemporaneous elite ambivalence toward non-European migrants because they failed to “whiten” (embranquecer) the African and indigenous background of the nation.Footnote 66 Reinforced by his visits to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Hitti inflected Brazilian nostalgia for the Portuguese colonizer. Before the release of Gilberto Freyre's work that codified it, Hitti and other al-kuliyya alumni in São Paulo were already stamped by a Brazilian affect for the one-time colonial master. This Luso-centrism came to imbue their diasporic project for the academic study of the Arab world in São Paulo.
DIASPORIC DIALOGUE AND DEBATE
Shortly after this trip to Brazil, Hitti became an assistant professor at Princeton University. The new position increased his status among muhājirūn, but Hitti found U.S. students and faculty recalcitrant to the study of Arabic or Islam.Footnote 67 Publishing houses were fickle too. In 1927, a MacMillan Press executive invited Hitti to write the History of the Arabs, and a decade later he delivered the unprecedented 400-plus-page synopsis of Arabic and Islamic historiographies and histories over the course of several centuries.Footnote 68 Though a publicist at Macmillan expressed doubts that it would sell even one hundred copies, Hitti's book would be reprinted and revised at least ten times in the coming decades.Footnote 69 In the early 1940s, Hitti's luck continued to improve when the U.S. army funded courses in Arabic and Islam for soldiers dispatched to “North Africa and Western Asia.”Footnote 70 According to Hitti, the U.S. government's need for area specialists and Arabic speakers during World War II strengthened Middle East studies, which had first emerged as a field in the United States during the interwar period.Footnote 71 In 1943, the shortened version of his magnum opus was published as The Arabs: A Short History for Americans. In its preface, Hitti calls for domestic readers to learn more about Arabs and Muslims because of “American boys” stationed in North Africa as well as “the work of such American educational institutions as the American University at Beirut.”Footnote 72 This preface explicitly connecting U.S. power to knowledge about the Middle East was soon translated into Portuguese and published in A Pátria. Founded in São Paulo in 1909, this Arab Brazilian periodical was characterized by Wadih Safady as “an important medium of diffusion of the ideas of . . . Arabic studies” and “cultural approximation between [Brazil] and the Arabs.”Footnote 73 Initially published for a U.S. readership, Hitti's writings about the Arab world were picked up and disseminated by Arab Brazilian colleagues.
Hitti gained diasporic recognition across the Americas not only due to U.S. power but also because of his own progressive politics. In 1944, Hitti testified before the foreign relations committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in support of the “Arab point of view” on the question of Palestine and against what he called “political Zionism.”Footnote 74 Six months later, the speech was translated into Portuguese and published in its entirety on the front page of A Pátria.Footnote 75 Hitti's statement also reached Chile and Mexico, and he received a telegram from the latter that declared, “Palestinians living in Mexico wish to express their deep appreciation for [the] excellent defense made by you of [the] Arabic cause in Palestine.”Footnote 76 In the same year, Hitti took part in a conference in New York City that led to the creation of the “Institute of Arab American Affairs” (IAA) and became its first director.Footnote 77 IAA published materials on Palestinian self-determination and sought to change U.S. foreign policy and public opinion in support of it. In a subsequent letter from São Paulo, Wadih Safady thanked his illustrious colleague for the “publications of the Institute of Arab American Affairs.”Footnote 78 Critically engaged with the domestic and foreign policies of the state where he was a naturalized citizen, Hitti came to serve as a lightning rod of intellectual and political thought across the mahjar.
At the same time this area studies expert in the United States positioned himself in relation to that nation-state's “contending visions of the Middle East,”Footnote 79 Hitti cultivated his Latin American counterparts’ “special relationship” to what he called the “Arab East.” In 1945, Hitti called on Arabs in “Brazil” and the rest of “Latin America” to surpass “their brothers of the North” in efforts to establish an academic program for the linguistic and historical study of the “Arab East.”Footnote 80 The appeal was made in his article “Arab Studies in the New World,” first published in Arabic in al-ʿUsba al-Andalusiyya (also called the Liga Andaluza de Letras) and later reprinted in A Pátria.Footnote 81 Much of the article was an overview of what Hitti called “Oriental Studies” in the United States, which had originated in Biblical studies across the wider “Anglo-Saxon” world and was then being systematized into an academic field by Europeans and Americans, including those of “Syrian” and “Lebanese” origin. Yet given the “much stronger bonds” between “Arab civilization” and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands, Hitti reasoned, Arabs in Brazil must strive to dedicate material and intellectual resources to strengthen “Arab-Spanish-Portuguese . . . research.” Wadih Safady's younger brother, Jamil, translated this and other writings by Hitti on the Arab world, mostly for periodicals run by Syrian-Lebanese migrants and their descendants in Brazil.Footnote 82 Introducing a model of “Oriental Studies” (which was itself undergoing rapid change in the United States), Hitti encouraged Arabs in Latin America to refit the field by emphasizing the Iberian dimension of Arab and Islamic civilization.
Echoing his call for this kind of Arab studies in Brazil, Jamil Safady also characterized the professor from Princeton as “the idealizer of the movement for Arab-Brazilian cultural rapprochement.”Footnote 83 In his own Pátria article in 1945, titled “The Idea of Arab Studies in Brazil,” Jamil Safady outlined a field of Lusophone studies of the Arab world that began in 18th-century Portugal and continued through the Brazilian emperor's 19th-century journeys to Ottoman lands.Footnote 84 In the 20th century, he concluded, “Dr. Philip K. Hitti, present-day chair of Arab Civilization at Princeton University . . . disseminated the idea of Arab studies in Brazil when he visited this country (1925).” In a later article, Jamil substantiated Hitti's significance by citing his earlier visit from the published memoirs of Taufik Duoun, who nearly two decades previously had featured Hitti on the front-page of the aforementioned Al-Dalil—O Guia.Footnote 85 In response to being recruited to legitimize Arab studies in Brazil, Hitti collaborated through an open letter to A Pátria. The Princeton University professor expressed “delight” in the “progress achieved by Arab studies in Brazil,” and reiterated that “Arab studies in Brazil has a wider and more intimate influence [than in the United States] among . . . our [Syrian and Lebanese] countrymen and even Brazilians” due to Arab and Muslim history in the Iberian peninsula.Footnote 86 Resonating with the then-dominant Freyrian nostalgia for the Portuguese, Safady and Hitti envisioned the study of the Arab world in Brazil through imagined linkages between Portugal and its former colony.
These logics and efforts extended into USP, which was established in 1934.Footnote 87 Jamil Safady began to teach an Arabic language course through the student union, and “formulated a system” of transliteration to “represent Arab phonemes non-existent in Portuguese.”Footnote 88 Although al-kuliyya alumnus Taufik Kurban dismissed this pedagogical model as an “attempt to latinize Arabic,” Jamil's course drew the attention of a senior professor, Dr. Francisco da Silveira Bueno, a Portuguese philologist.Footnote 89 Silveira Bueno's interest intensified with the publication of the first volume of Miguel Nimer's 800-page Influências Orientais na Língua Portuguesa (Eastern [or Oriental] Influences in the Portuguese Language), which detailed borrowings between Portuguese and Arabic, among other languages.Footnote 90 Born in São Paulo, Nimer (1895–1972) was the son of a Lebanese couple from Zahle. His father's firm bankrolled trips not only to Lebanon, where the young Miguel studied at the Université Saint-Joseph, but also to France, where he spent a decade specializing in Oriental Studies.Footnote 91 Upon returning to Brazil, Nimer taught at a bilingual high school and worked for the French consul. In 1943, Silveira Bueno publicly praised the then relatively obscure Nimer as “one of the greatest” thinkers in “Portuguese philology.”Footnote 92 Intent on establishing and endowing a chair of Arabic letters to complement the study of Lusophone civilization, Silveira Bueno reached out to both Syrian-Lebanese associations as well as the USP administration.
In order to maintain an endowed chair and library at USP, a dozen or so Syrian-Lebanese businessmen founded the “Brazilian Center for Arab Culture” in 1944.Footnote 93 Diverging from Silveira Bueno's own preference for Miguel Nimer, the center's founders chose Taufik Kurban because his degree was from AUB.Footnote 94 At the 1944 inauguration of the endowed chair, Dr. Jorge Americano, the rector of USP, stated that while Arabs are seen in film as desert-dwellers with “flowing white garments . . . it is up to the Brazilian Center of Arab Culture to show us . . . true knowledge of Arabs and their culture.” Similar to Safady and Hitti's calls for an “Arab studies in Brazil” that emphasized an Iberian dimension, A Pátria hoped that teaching Arabic letters would “revive the splendid past of the Portuguese language,” in a clearly Freyrian-inspired narrative.Footnote 95 Despite such hopes, many of the students taught by Jamil Safady dropped out of Taufik Kurban's course, and businessmen squabbled over who would continue to endow the chair. Kurban thus indefinitely suspended his curriculum at USP. After a short period, however, Silveira Bueno invited Professor Nimer to teach courses on the Arabic language as well as on “Eastern [or Oriental] influences in the Portuguese language” in USP's College of Arts and Sciences.Footnote 96
During this time, Wadih Safady sent Hitti “periodical reports” regarding “the normal march and the rather rapid movement which involved arabic studies in São Paulo.”Footnote 97 Composed in English, his letters listed the Portuguese translations of Hitti's Arabic and English writings as well as news articles about Arab studies in Brazil, clippings of which were enclosed and which Hitti saved. Wadih frequently referred to the aforementioned Abu Jamra. In 1944, Wadih's letter to Hitti related that his brother Jamil met with Abu Jamra in order to restart the barely active “Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut,” and “both have mentioned your effort” regarding Arab studies in Brazil.Footnote 98 Wadih's next letter more gravely noted that Abu Jamra wished a “continuous death” for the association while Jamil tried to “reanimate” it through a “journalistic campaign against these old-fashioned [men] who have prejudiced Arabic studies.”Footnote 99 In 1945, as part of the campaign, the Safady brothers translated into Portuguese and republished in A Pátria an earlier debate between Hitti and diasporic writers in Brazil, which Jamil initiated by interviewing Abu Jamra, who downplayed his own “inertia.”Footnote 100 In response to Hitti's calls for colleagues to fund an Arab studies chair and/or program of study in a Brazilian university, Abu Jamra and others claimed there were no qualified specialists to teach Arabic in Brazil and that Arabic texts should be translated into Portuguese, not vice versa, since the Arabic language was poorly understood by descendants and unappealing to non-Arab Brazilian students.Footnote 101 In his rejoinder, Hitti spoke of specialists in Spain and elsewhere who could fulfill the role until a student from Brazil, such as a descendant of patrícios (Syrian or Lebanese “countrymen”), could be sent abroad for specialized training.Footnote 102 Toward this end, the Safady brothers allied with Hitti in efforts not only to legitimize the study of Arabic letters in Brazil but also to personally persuade Abu Jamra and other diasporic intellectuals to support Arab studies in São Paulo.
AREA STUDIES IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES
Such dialogue and debate among al-kuliyya alumni carried direct implications for the Brazilian university curriculum and structure. In a letter in early 1946, Wadih Safady asked Hitti to meet with Dr. Jorge Americano, the aforementioned USP rector who was touring U.S. university campuses.Footnote 103 Americano planned to build a U.S.-inspired campus for USP, displacing it from São Paulo's city center to a peripheral neighborhood, with support from the populist mayor, Ademar de Barros.Footnote 104 Rather than stress Americano's Brazilian accolades, Wadih twice stated that Americano was “a great Brazilian friend of the Arabs and our culture” and emphasized that the rector “presided over the solemn installation of the Arabic Chair in São Paulo,” mentioned earlier. Wadih also requested that Hitti ask “Arab entities and centres in Washington and New York . . . to enter into direct relations with the rector.” Though it is doubtful whether Hitti—or other U.S. Arab Americans—met with the USP rector, this letter suggests that an AUB alumnus in São Paulo sought to use the prestige of Hitti in efforts to impart new ideas about Arabic language instruction and program building to a Brazilian university official.
Hitti's prominence also appealed to Dr. Eurípedes Simões de Paula, a key figure within USP's College of Arts and Sciences (FFCL). The Safady brothers and others of the disbanded Brazilian Center for Arab Culture commiserated with Simões de Paula when he became FFCL director in 1950.Footnote 105 Simões de Paula was trained in ancient and medieval history under Jean Gagé, one of the French academics who taught the first generation of Brazilian professors at USP. Specializing in world history and conscientious of the fact that he was training the next homegrown generation of scholars who would determine “whether or not Brazil becomes a great nation,” Simões de Paula viewed the “History of Civilizations”—including “specific areas for the study of language and culture”—as the backbone of a Brazilian national university system.Footnote 106 As part of this vision, Simões de Paula became a driving force to create curricula in what was called “Oriental Letters” and other area studies at USP. After gaining authorization to re-establish curricula and a chair as well as inquiring into endowments from the Arab community, Simões de Paula invited Hitti to give several talks to reinaugurate the program in August 1951.Footnote 107
In the inaugural ceremony, Simões de Paula stated that “the talks to be given by Dr. Hitti are an auspicious opening” for the “program of Oriental Letters,” which would be staffed by “specialized professors,” “grant diplomas,” and stand on “equal footing” with other units at USP.Footnote 108 He outlined the program's courses, including Arabic and ancient Hebrew, the history of Arab civilization, Arabic and Biblical archaeology, and “Portuguese philology.” As referenced earlier, Miguel Nimer had been teaching both a language course in Arabic as well as a course on “Eastern [or Oriental] influences in the Portuguese language” since 1946.Footnote 109 The inclusion of a Portuguese course within an Arabic letters program speaks to a kind of area studies envisioned by Hitti, the Safady brothers, and others in Brazil, a kind that imagined an Iberian connection between “Arab civilization” and Brazil. In Simões de Paula's own book, Marrocos e suas relações com a Ibéria na antiguidade (Morocco and its relations with Iberia in ancient times), published five years earlier, the FFCL director highlighted the “links” between “Iberia and North Africa” as “one of the facets of our . . . [Brazilian] national history.”Footnote 110
Though not referenced in his speech, Simões de Paula's interlocutor was Gilberto Freyre. The epigraph to Simões de Paula's book, in fact, cited Freyre's remark about Portugal as “a kind of bi-continentality between Europe and Africa.” The quote was taken from Freyre's Casa grande e senzala, which most famously argued that the legacy of “the Moors” in Iberia shaped how the Portuguese colonized Brazil.Footnote 111 For Simões de Paula, then, an Arabic studies program in Brazil would logically include the interplay between the Portuguese-speaking and Arabic-speaking landscapes of Iberia and North Africa. While Middle East area studies in the United States cast Iberia as the setting of the rise and fall of Muslim and Arab civilization between the 8th and 15th centuries, roughly the same region was understood by Brazilian academics as a framework to study their own history and language apparently inherited from the Portuguese. The social and cultural terrains that area studies ostensibly fix also animate the very models themselves.
Notwithstanding such variation, the “modular” idea of a world area was not sui generis to Brazil. As Simões de Paula welcomed Hitti in the reinauguration of Arabic letters at USP, his interlocutor, Gilberto Freyre, related that “area studies was developed in U.S. American universities during WWII,” where he first learned of it as a visiting professor at the University of Indiana. For Freyre, the Brazilian university should also specialize in estudos de área (area studies) because it “incorporates the major techniques of . . . the multiscientific examination of complexes characteristic of given physical-social spaces.”Footnote 112 Adopting the model of a “world area” from the U.S. academy and imbuing it with the cultural and historical “stuff” of Lusophone spaces, Freyre called for a luso-tropicologia (“Portuguese tropical studies”) of the past and present spaces of Portugal's empire. According to Jerry Dávila, Freyre's ideas about “Portuguese colonizing virtues,” such as their proclivity toward miscegenation, were then used by Portugal's dictatorship to justify ongoing imperialism in Africa.Footnote 113 In dialogue with the development of area studies in the United States and its imperial interests after World War II, Simões de Paula welcomed a diasporic project for an akin program in Brazil through nostalgia for the Portuguese empire.
After Simões de Paula's opening address at the inauguration ceremony for Arab studies at FFCL in downtown São Paulo, the student union president, José Resstel, took the podium.Footnote 114 This Brazilian of German descent remembered that, between 1943 and 1950, he, Jamil Safady (who died in 1950), and others fought for courses in “Arab civilization” within FFCL. This “Campaign for Arab Studies” at USP, Resstel stressed, “did nothing more than germinate the idea introduced by Professor Hitti when he visited São Paulo in 1925.” He concluded by expressing hope for “the visit of Professor Hitti to be the point of a rebirth of the official activities of the Arabic chair in our school, as the journey of 1925 was the initial mark . . . Arab Brazilian bonds ask for it.”Footnote 115 Rather than construe area studies in Freyrian terms, this student framed Arab studies in Brazil in relation not only to Jamil Safady, among other students, but also, if not more importantly, to the professor from Princeton University.
For the next few weeks in August 1951, Hitti gave eight talks,Footnote 116 half of which focused on “Arabs’ contributions to the West” in literature, philosophy, science, and art. But Hitti rarely mentioned “the West” as such. As implied by the title of his inaugural talk, “Arab Contributions to Western Civilization, Especially to the Iberian Peninsula,” Hitti frequently made reference to Iberia, and the nearly 1,000-year presence of Arabs and Islam there. The Princeton University professor invoked the Arabic translations of King Alfonso X of Castile and the “Aljamiado literature of Moriscos”; the treaties on surgery by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, who died in Córdoba; the philosophical oeuvres and translations of Ibn Rushd; and the architecture, calligraphy, and colored ceramic tile that remained after Muslims were exiled by the Spanish crown between 1609 and 1614.Footnote 117 Of course, Hitti dedicated a chapter of The Arabs: A Short History for Americans to Muslim Iberia. When, in 1948, the book was translated into Portuguese by Otávio da Costa Eduardo and released as Os árabes (The Arabs) without the subtitle, the chapter on Iberia remained in this original—and minor—form.Footnote 118 More than he had done in this or any other book, Hitti emphasized the Iberian history of Muslims and Arabs in the context of a Brazilian and Arab audience that would be especially interested in hearing how the imperial power that ruled their country for more than three centuries was itself shaped by Islam and Arabs. Expressed and incorporated by Hitti himself, this Brazilian nostalgia for the Portuguese empire was one of the implicit, broader rationales for area studies at USP.
Hitti gave his last talk at the Universidade de São Paulo's College of Law, attended by Syrian, Lebanese, and U.S. diplomats, Arab Brazilian community association members, and members of the wider public. After he finished, a university official named Paulo Sawaya took the floor.Footnote 119 Sawaya was the son of Lebanese migrants who arrived in Brazil in the 1890s.Footnote 120 Trained by French professors, he earned his degree in medicine from USP and began teaching there in 1937, becoming FFCL vice director by 1946.Footnote 121 But Sawaya hardly spoke as an academic. According to Wadih Safady, Sawaya first addressed Hitti in Arabic, calling him one of Lebanon's “distinguished sons” and a “propagator of Arab culture” who “illuminates our cultural renaissance for American peoples.” In Portuguese, Sawaya continued that Arabs “are an integrated part of” Brazil, and their academic exchange with a fellow Arab from the United States “has no equivalent in any other part of . . . the Americas.” Sawaya then referenced this encounter in relation to Hitti's first visit:
This, your second trip to Brazil, is a natural consequence of the first one in 1925, when you planted the idea of Arab studies in São Paulo. This idea was strengthened in 1940 when, in the magazine Al-Usbat, you insisted for us to institutionalize Arab studies at the University of São Paulo . . . That idea grew and flourished among students . . . and your idea, illustrious Dr. Hitti, is now a consummated fact.Footnote 122
Sawaya, as the future director of FFCL and of Lebanese origins, credited Hitti with “planting” the idea of Arab studies in Brazil. Whether or not Hitti felt that the spotlight on him overshadowed the coeval efforts of Duoun, the Safady brothers, and other colleagues in Brazil, this statement suggests that Sawaya, Simões de Paula, and other USP officials sought to further legitimize an area studies program through Hitti's authority, not only as a Lebanese-born intellectual but also as a professor at one of the most elite U.S. universities.
Ironically, the diaspora of al-kuliyya graduates that underlay Hitti's academic ties to Brazil was not a major point of reference during his month-long stay in 1951. But two years later, in 1953, alumni associations in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro hosted AUB president Stephen Penrose. The AUB alumni magazine noted that, besides Philip Hitti (who by then was a member of the university board of trustees), Penrose was the only AUB official to visit alumni and potential donors of Arab origin in South America. The magazine went on to relate that, “In São Paulo, they [Penrose and his wife] met an enthusiastic group of alumni as well as those with Arab ties” and were later received with equally “royal” enthusiasm in Rio de Janeiro. Penrose alleged that one Arab Brazilian gentleman even remarked, “I think it is high time that the Arabs of the world should take [charge in] support of the University.”Footnote 123 Although al-kuliyya alumni and friends were very much present in São Paulo, the diasporic project they initiated had acquired a dynamic of its own through the overlapping but distinct U.S. and Brazilian agendas to study the Arab world.
UNFINISHED HISTORIES: STUDYING THE MIDDLE EAST IN ANOTHER AMERICA
Apparently due to a lack of funding, the Arabic language chair at USP remained vacant for the next several years. It was filled only after the 1960 signing of a cultural accord between Brazilian president Jânio Quadros and Egypt's Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir, probably because the former was “impressed” with the latter's unwavering stance toward the world's superpowers.Footnote 124 Little surprise that one of the movers behind this agreement was the aforementioned Simões de Paula, though he himself credited Jamil Safady as “giving birth” to “Arab studies in our University.”Footnote 125 In 1962, Helmi Nasr was designated professor of Arab Letters at USP. Born and raised in Egypt, Nasr held a degree in Islamic philosophy from the University of Cairo and earned his doctorate from the Sorbonne.Footnote 126 He headed Arabic language studies in the Department of Letters housed within FFCL (which became FFCLH) and, after five decades, students who trained under him founded USP's current Program in “Arab Language, Literature, and Culture.”Footnote 127 In other words, the now more than fifty-year history of studying the Arab world at USP did not directly originate from earlier diasporic intellectual exchanges.
What, then, is the significance of the initiatives led by Hitti and colleagues in São Paulo? Their diasporic histories reveal that the idea of area studies can move across and merge with varied social and cultural settings, that the model of a world area is not only mobile but also animated by the imagined geographies that it ostensibly renders as fixed. At the same time that the template of a world area is more diasporic than heretofore thought, its subject matter is contingent upon the social and cultural environs that it seems to demarcate. My article has focused on members of a migrant network as protagonists in this overlooked history of area studies beyond the North Atlantic. Both a founder of Middle East studies in the United States and a self-identified migrant with significant ties across the mahjar, Hitti is just one example among his generation of scholars whose far-flung ties helped to both disseminate and transform the idea of studying a world area. At the same time Hitti developed the program of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University since becoming an assistant professor there in 1926, he joined fellow migrants and their colleagues with similar plans for Brazil's academia. Over the course of the next three decades, Hitti's collaboration with Duoun, the Safady brothers, and others to build “Arab Studies in Brazil” was not immediately fruitful. Yet the tattered letters and news clippings they sent to each other as well as the yellowed pages of their memoirs demonstrate how area studies, to again borrow Anderson's wording, are both “modular” in their circulation across the hemisphere and “distinguished” by “the style in which they are imagined.”Footnote 128
Relocating and retooling a model for studying the Arab world in Brazil, Hitti, Duoun, the Safadys, and others imagined Moorish or Andalusian geographies and Arabic-Portuguese philologies through imperial lenses. Their project to study the Arab world in Brazil was shaped by U.S. “informal empire” as well as Portuguese imperial nostalgia. Hitti himself opined that Middle East studies grew in the United States due to World War II militarism, and his colleagues in São Paulo drew upon such authority to strengthen Arab studies in Brazil. At the same time, these SPC alumni were shaped by a Brazilian nationalist affect for the Portuguese empire and what they imagined to be its colonial legacies. Initiated after his first trip to Brazil in 1925, Hitti's Luso-centric vision of Brazil continued in his correspondence with the Safady brothers through the 1940s as well as during his second trip to Brazil in 1951. Whereas his earlier observation concerned the mythic benevolence of Portuguese rule for Brazil, his later thoughts shifted to Portuguese-mediated ties between Brazil and the Arab world. Spearheaded by the Safadys, this diasporic project of Arab studies in Brazil resonated with the Freyrian-inspired vision of “world areas” in the Brazilian university system that was concomitantly used to justify Portuguese rule in Africa. Like area studies, the imperial interests underlying the field are plural and merge with one another.
Most important, the diasporic project of Hitti and colleagues in Brazil provincializes the U.S. model for studying the Middle East and calls attention to competing configurations of area studies within a U.S.-dominated hemisphere. Although Hitti, the Safadys, and other alumni were indirectly related to the USP program that institutionalized the study of the Arab world in Brazil, Middle East studies have since been founded in other universities across Latin America. As part of another America too often presumed beholden to the study of U.S. and European languages and histories, Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, and Mexican universities witnessed the founding of research centers and/or programs for knowing the Middle East from the 1960s on, and especially in the 2000s.Footnote 129 Despite more variegated approaches and limited resources, these programs support area studies of the Middle East and ethnic or diasporic studies of Middle Easterners in Latin America. That is, although Hitti and his colleagues may have been disappointed toward the end of their three-decade-long diasporic project, their wider aim to promote the academic study of the Middle East in Latin America is now beginning to take hold. A critical area and ethnic studies in the 21st-century United States must take into account such past efforts as well as present-day initiatives to study our world. In following this diasporic turn, area and ethnic studies scholars will be able to broaden the “particular” positions they were historically assigned by the disciplines and provincialize the latter's seemingly “universal” knowledge.Footnote 130
