In 2001, the influential and widely circulating Argentine daily Clarín speculated that Osama Bin Laden and several Al Qaeda leaders had travelled through the South American border cities of Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este. A couple of years later, the popular Brazilian weekly Veja claimed that Bin Laden spent three ‘pleasant’ days in this border region. US media warned of the supposed security dangers posed by Muslims residing on the Brazilian and Paraguayan sides of the tri-national border with Argentina. In the interest generated by those accusations and the heavy-handed responses by authorities ranging from the Argentine government to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Middle Easterners of the tri-border region were fashioned as security threats, drug traffickers, arms smugglers and foreigners unwilling to integrate into local societies. The 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Centre, both in Buenos Aires, marked a first backdrop to these unfounded suspicions. Then came the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, further sparking critical interest in tri-border Muslim communities.
John Tofik Karam is a leader in the emerging field of Global Middle East studies. His 2007 Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Temple University Press) is widely cited and used in courses on topics related to ethnicity, diaspora and transnationalism. His recent Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule is a sequel to his first book, but at the same time very different from it. In Manifold Destiny, Karam turns his attention to the tri-border region and presents a new analytical framework for understanding Middle Eastern communities.
Karam highlights the key role of Middle Easterners in the making of national and regional geographies, for example, and in the circulation of ideas, goods and monies in the Americas and beyond. Based on impressive archival and ethnographic work, the book features the dynamic ways in which Middle Eastern immigrants adapted themselves to constantly changing political and economic circumstances. Thus, for example, in the 1960s−1980s, those on the Brazilian side of the border exported Brazilian-made goods to Paraguay, taking advantage of the Brazilian military regime's renewed westward expansion, while Arab immigrants in the Paraguayan border town imported consumer goods from Panama that were then sold to Brazilian clients, in line with the Paraguayan dictator's geopolitical agenda, the so-called ‘March toward the East’. These entrepreneurial activities strengthened ties between Brazil and Paraguay, relegating Argentina and the United States to secondary positions as Paraguay's principal sources of capital and technology. At the same time, Arabs’ transnational trade drew new economic flows from the United States through Central America to the Southern Cone. Arabs in Paraguay used the zona franca in the Panamanian city of Colón, which attracted businesses with tax benefits and exemptions, strategically located near the then US-dominated Canal Zone. From Panama goods were transferred to Brazil and then to Paraguay. In this way, Arab traders fashioned a supply chain for the Brazilian consumer market.
What distinguishes Manifold Destiny from Another Arabesque is the author's distinct political approach, following many of the important trends in activist scholarship. Karam writes, ‘I take my place alongside Arabs at the border and other circumstantial protagonists on a hemispheric field of exceptional rule’ (p. 20). He also affirms that ‘it was what cultural critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam might characterise as an “anti-US-policy” stance that kept me going in the research that resulted in this book’ (p. 20, emphasis in original). Karam has become more politically engaged with the plight of his subjects and this allows him to make a compelling and original theoretical case for his characterisation of Middle Eastern traders as subaltern elites, given Cold War US influences in Latin America and the post-Cold War Global War on Terror.
Yet at times his analytical emphasis on Middle Easterners as victims of very real discriminatory practices means he does not have the space to cover the range of other topics that may define personal, political, ideological, religious and community lives of Karam's subjects. For example, Manifold Destiny does not focus on culture, gender, hybrid identities, marriage patterns, education and language issues, and interactions with other ethnic communities.
Many scholars of ethnic communities draw the conclusion that their subject populations represent homogeneous communities. In so doing, they may devote insufficient attention to a polyphony of voices and to unaffiliated ethicised citizens. I wish that Manifold Destiny painted Middle Easterners with a more delicate brush than might be seen by readers with phrases like ‘In this Ummah America, Arabs shaped and were shaped by the ideal of a universal Islamic camaraderie’ (p. 86). As a result, the impact of internal political, ideological, social and other divisions on the community's disjointed reactions to the strong defamatory campaigns against them is not stressed. Neither are Shia and Sunni rifts and those between Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian Muslims. Even so, he does show that responses to the United States’ heavy-handedness and that of their local authoritarian allies led to broad ‘community’ responses.
At times, the author is unconvincing in his argument that discrimination was the cause of specific problems. In reference to the creation of the Mercosur free-trade zone, for example, he argues that ‘Arabs were not necessarily welcome in this common market with continental pretensions’ (p. 119) because of their ethnicity. Most traders in Southern Cone border zones, Middle Eastern and otherwise, faced challenges following the establishment of Mercosur. In many border zones around the globe, contraband and tax evasion have been an integral part of daily life, as they were for Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern tri-border residents. Additional governmental regulations required readjustment to changing circumstances.
Karam insists correctly that authorities in Argentina unfairly blamed Arabs at the border following governmental failures to bring to trial the authors of the still-unresolved 1992 and 1994 attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets. Such accusations encouraged some in the Middle Eastern population to express their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, Libya's revolutionary regime and Iran's Islamic Revolution. Still, only a small minority of Middle Easterners took part in these solidarity campaigns and the promotion of Third World projects.
Manifold Destiny is an important book. It should be of interest to scholars and students of US studies, Latin American studies, Middle Eastern studies and international relations.
