2024 Iwan Morgan Lecture - Promoting the “Arab Point View”: Tracing the History of Arab Diasporic Anti-Colonial Thought from the First World War to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War

As renowned postcolonial scholar and Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, powerfully argued in his first public foray mounting a defence of the Palestinian people: “If the Arab occupies space in the mind at all, it is of negative value. He is seen as the disrupter of Israel’s continuing existence, or in a larger view, a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948.”1 The article was the result of Said’s political radicalisation during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, breaking with his predominantly academic public knowledge production in the field of English Literature. Crucially, the essay featured in an edited volume assembled by his mentor, the Palestinian political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and printed by the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG)’s publishing outfit, a group that emerged from the radical campus anti-imperialist organising and the influence of pan-Arabism arriving with international students from the region. The focus of this lecture will answer the deceptively simple question: how did we arrive at that moment? It will trace the US Arab diasporic anti-colonial intellectual tradition that culminated in Edward Said, recovering the advocacy, English-language writings and political organising of a small, predominantly Christian, male, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian cohort of intellectuals whose arrival to the US began during the hey-day of mass immigration from Eastern and Central Europe in the 1880s. 

Arab diasporic intellectuals understood that the persistence of a colonised Levant disrupted their attempts to forge a modern Arab world after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The lecture will show that their anticolonial political thought and organising was deeply bound up in their visions of a postcolonial Arab world. The primary struggle that occupied the minds of these intellectuals was that of Palestine. They registered their objections to the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 establishment of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinian people placed under continued colonial rule. They did this in monographs, liberal political magazines such as the Nation and the Forum, newspapers such as the Princeton Herald, and even worked within a dedicated US-based propaganda infrastructure financed by the newly created Arab League in the immediate years following WWII.  In turn, I will show how they became students of Zionist thought and its implementation, in order to counter it. My lecture, and research more broadly, is concerned with recovering how the Arab diaspora advanced and articulated their anticolonial and pro-Palestinian politics to an American audience. It builds upon and is indebted to scholarship exploring their political organising and draws upon their under-utilised English language writings as its source base.  The lecture’s form will be grounded in an examination of the political thought of three intellectuals, Ameen Rihani, Philip Hitti, and Fayez Sayegh who represent different junctures in the development of the Arab diasporic anticolonial tradition. I posit that we should understand these Arab diasporic intellectuals in the context of US intellectual history, recognising their ability to converse with multiple and sometimes overlapping audiences: the diaspora in the US, the peoples of the Arab World, international institutions such as the UN, US media, politicians and the broader public in order to agitate for Arab liberation.

Yasmin Dualeh is a Ph.D. student in 20th Century U.S. history at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explores the political thought of Arab diasporic intellectuals in the US from the First World War through to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. She is primarily interested in their anticolonial/anti-imperialist thought, writings on race, attempts to influence and critique US foreign policy, and finally their visions of Arab modernity, subjectivity, and liberation. 

 1. Said, Edward. “The Arab Portrayed.” In The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: an Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Evanston, [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1970.p. 3

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this event is free but booking is required.