Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (44 page)

My own Arabic teacher in Baghdad, whose name was Nadia, was a Christian whose first language was Aramaic. She told me in 2006 that she dreaded every journey that took her out of her home. She never knew if kidnappers might see her as a viable target, or whether the family who lived across the street and who seemed to stand at their window all day long watching people come and go might perhaps be passing information to terrorists. (The family’s Muslim neighbors were otherwise friendly and supportive, she said.) And there was always the risk of being caught in a bomb blast meant for others. Going to church was especially dangerous. When she got home in the evening, she said, neither she nor her parents had the energy to say anything to one another. They ate in silence and went to bed dreading the next day. Nadia left in 2007. Her parents stuck it out for another year and then moved north to Kurdistan. They didn’t know Kurdish and had to accept lower salaries and living standards, but at least there they were safe. Nadia, reaching Detroit, had a better experience. She found Rafi at the church she had begun attending. They had known each other when they were children in Iraq, but they had not seen each other for years, because he had emigrated before the war. At their wedding, the priest was the same one who had officiated at their local church in Baghdad. He had moved to Detroit, too. It was as if an entire community had been transplanted halfway across the world.

The head of the Assyrian Christians, Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, lives in Chicago. There are more speakers of Aramaic in metropolitan Detroit than there are in Baghdad: over a hundred thousand Iraqi Chaldeans live in the city and surrounding areas, and they have established nine churches, restaurants, a newspaper called the
Chaldean News,
a radio station, an annual festival, and (for the richest among them, which generally means the longest-established) a multimillion-dollar club. Sadly, they have not brought the Iraqi aesthetic with them, the beautiful houses and shrines of the hill villages where the Chaldeans have traditionally lived. When I traveled by bus around northern Iraq in 2012, each village seemed to have a monastery or saint’s tomb, or else a ruined citadel that related in some way to the community’s long history. This is something that emigrants cannot re-create in their adopted country. In greater Detroit there is little that distinguishes one home from the next in the rows of neat, all-American suburban houses. The Egyptian Copts, Iraqi Chaldeans, Lebanese Shi’a, and Syrian Sunnis who live here and in the nearby towns keep their national cultures strictly within the home.

Other Middle Easterners agree that the Chaldeans are among the most conservative of immigrant groups. Church attendance is high and two new priests were lately ordained. Certainly the community newspaper, the
Chaldean News,
gives little sign of the stirrings of rebellious youth. I thought it might when I started to read a review of a play at a community cultural center—a play whose hero is a man who tries to resist his parents’ pressure to marry. An edgy examination of changing values and a community coming to grips with secularism and modernity, perhaps? But no, the play had a happy ending, the paper reported: the hero finds a nice Chaldean woman and marries her.

The play was true to life. In America as a whole, according to a 2013 book by Naomi Schaefer Riley, the interfaith marriage rate is 42 percent, and parents care more about the political views of their possible sons- and daughters-in-law more than they do about their religious identity. That is not true of its Middle Eastern communities, among whom exogamous marriages remain very rare. The Assyrians of Chicago claim that only 10 percent of their community marry out. Some families will go far to control their children’s marriage choices: I met an Iraqi Christian woman at a dinner party in Ann Arbor, near Detroit, who told me that she had run away from home, where she had no freedom to meet men. “As a teenager?” I asked. “No, I was twenty-six,” she told me.

Although Chaldeans and Assyrians do not see themselves as Arab, their history parallels closely that of other communities from the Middle East, both Muslim and Christian. Large-scale emigration from the Middle East began in the late nineteenth century, driven by growing poverty and land shortages in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as Ottoman oppression and conflict. Most of the migrants were Christian, and Latin America was a favored destination because it both encouraged immigration and offered plenty of economic opportunities. As a consequence, it attracted the lion’s share of Arab Christian migrants, with some startling results: today, for example, 5 percent of Latin America’s population is ethnically Arab; there are more Christians of Palestinian descent in Chile than in Palestine; eight presidents of South and Central American countries have been of Middle Eastern descent; and the world’s richest man (Carlos Slim Helú, a businessman), one of its best-known singers (Shakira), and the actress Salma Hayek all have Lebanese ancestry. The 2004 presidential election in El Salvador was contested by two politicians, one from the radical left and the other from the right—and both of their families were Christian Palestinians from the same small town near Bethlehem.

In the United States it is Michigan that has a higher proportion of Arab Americans than any other state. Their history is explained by the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, a city where 20 percent of the population are Arab. When I reached the museum, I found a small knot of people outside. They were staring at a man on the other side of the road, who was standing on the steps of Dearborn’s city hall. He had set up a lectern with the words “Kafir! Infidel!” written on it against a backdrop of black cloth. The man at the lectern was managing to make himself heard over a hubbub of voices from supporters and opponents. “An end to Muslim immigration!” he demanded. “No Muslims in senior government posts!” Pastor Terry Jones, author of the book
Islam Is of the Devil
, whose well-publicized plans to burn a copy of the Koran had caused riots in Afghanistan, was aiming to provoke the people of Dearborn.

Many of the Arabs he was haranguing, I saw, were wearing crucifixes. A majority of Arab Americans are Christian, although the demographic is changing fast thanks to new waves of immigration from the Middle East. A sign in the museum’s blue-mosaic-tiled lobby reflected this change, declaring that it was “an institution that makes a 4th-generation Arab American Christian whose great-grandparents came from Syria and a newly arrived Muslim immigrant from Iraq feel that the museum tells both of their stories.” Until recently, Arabs who came to America tended to arrive with very little and achieved success only through hard work and luck. They were peddlers in the 1850s, $5-a-day manual laborers at Ford in the 1920s, and shopkeepers in the 1960s. Henry Ford’s auto factory at Dearborn, Michigan, which was completed in 1928, was a particular magnet for Middle Eastern migrants (mostly at that stage Iraqi and Lebanese Christians) because it offered work to people who spoke poor English. They formed the nucleus that subsequently attracted others, both Muslim and Christian, who could see better opportunities for themselves in a place where their culture and communities were already established. There are now nearly 3.5 million Americans with roots in the Arab world, according to the Arab American Institute. The big success stories were all featured in the museum: politicians such as Donna Shalala; businessmen such as the founder of Kinko’s, Paul Orfalea; and poets such as Kahlil Gibran.

I was browsing in the museum’s shop when Yusif turned up. A friend of a friend, he was to be my guide to local Arab landmarks. He arrived dressed in a wooly hat, cowboy boots, and a jacket decorated with antiwar badges, one of which declared, “I’m already against the next war.” We went to a boot shop so he could look for a new pair. He was every inch a Palestinian and yet somehow had managed also to fit into a particularly American category: the rebellious hippie. Though he was in his seventies, he was in better shape than me, due to a routine of swimming in an ice-cold lake every day.

Yusif Barakat shows a younger member of the Arab American community how to perform a traditional Arab dance, the
dabkeh,
in Dearborn, Michigan, in summer 2012. Photo by the author

That evening was the first night of an Arab-American festival in Dearborn, and the festival was our next stop. When we arrived, an Egyptian band was playing at full volume, and a closed-off section of the street was crowded with people, many of them standing in a semicircle and watching. A small group in the center of the circle were dancing the
dabkeh,
an Arabic dance that involves people holding hands and stepping swiftly and rhythmically from side to side. To my horror, Yusif bounded straight onto the dance floor; lacking rhythm, balance, and the confidence not to mind about either, I skulked to one side. A couple of young men, who looked as if they were Yemeni, started to take instruction from Yusif in the finer points of the
dabkeh.
An old woman in a veil moved her feet to the tune as we passed her.

When he had danced enough, Yusif offered to drive me around the area. He showed me the Orthodox church where he had been altar server and nearly became a priest, and the Ford factory, where, like so many other immigrants, he had worked to support his family. Near the factory stood an Arab cultural center that he had helped to set up. He also showed me the young offenders’ school from which he had only lately retired as a volunteer. In the verdant countryside around the school lived many of his friends, several of whom were Jewish peace activists.

Yusif had come to America as a refugee, denied the right of return to his family home in what had been Palestine. He remained bitterly angry at Israel. Yet his own life in America seemed, like those of several other American Middle Easterners that I met, to be bound up with the Jewish community. Soon after arriving in America he had two children by a Jewish woman and, feeling that he was too young to marry, had decided with their mother to give them both up for adoption: one to a Jewish charity and one to a Catholic one. Decades later, in middle age, he wanted to find his children and succeeded in tracing his daughter, who had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew. He was still searching for his son.

—————

YUSIF’S RELATIONSHIP
was an unusual one not because his girlfriend was Jewish—several of the émigrés that I met in Britain and America, from religious minorities, said they found an instant affinity with American Jews—but because these minority communities tend to keep to themselves, and certainly to discourage cross-religious sexual relationships. “Sterling Heights is where we live,” one Chaldean told me. “Dearborn is Muslims.” The suburb of Troy was the best place to find Egyptian Copts. To find Maronites, I was advised to head to Grosse Pointe.

Immigrant churches both benefited from and helped cement communal identity. The priest at Livonia’s magnificent Orthodox basilica, Father Shalhoub, proudly showed me around. His community—Arabic-speaking Syrian and Palestinian Christians who follow the same traditions and teachings as the Greek and Russian Orthodox—are called Antiochan Orthodox and have five hundred churches in the United States. Father Shalhoub’s church looked like it might be one of the very best of the five hundred. “Here is marble from Syria,” he said as he pointed out the beautiful icons, which had been painstakingly painted in Syria and shipped over. The whole church was modeled on the church of St. Simeon Stylites near Antioch.

Their communities back home were, by contrast with the Chaldeans, not especially religious. But that changed when they came to America. “People make more effort to go to church here than in the old country,” he said. “What keeps the Orthodox Christian is the church. It preserves their culture, keeps their identity as Arabs. The first thing that families do when they come to America is look me up—the church becomes like a haven, a memory of home. The neighborhood at home”—meaning the Middle East—“protected people from outside attack, and here the church takes the place of the neighborhood. People come here and they see others who look like them, and they hear Arabic spoken. It’s a fellowship not just of religion, but of ethnicity and culture.” The priest’s room was full of books and photos and cards from the Middle East. “In this envelope is five dollars from
my money
,” a child had written on one of them. “Please give it to a needy person.” The Orthodox, he felt, would not assimilate in any meaningful way. Unlike Chaldeans and Maronites, they could not be tempted by their local Catholic parish, because they were not in communion with Rome. And so, it seemed, this Orthodox church would not just keep its people Christian: it would also keep them Arab.

A member of this Orthodox community later said something similar. After she arrived in the United States from Lebanon in the 1970s, the church was her link to home. It helped her make the transition to American life. “It’s a family away from family,” she said, although she added that her son had taken a different view, wanting to be Arab first and Christian second, and staying away from church as a result. The good thing about being religious in America, she said, was that it was not politicized: one’s livelihood does not obviously depend on one’s religion. She was drawing a contrast with her home country, Lebanon, where Orthodox Christians rarely get government jobs. What she did miss was the easy way that people in Lebanon mixed with those of other communities, such as Muslims and Druze. She believed Muslims in America were more religious than those in Lebanon, and all the
hejab
-wearing women she saw in Dearborn made her feel like an outsider among them. “People here group around religion rather than nation. People feel if they stick to their own, then their children will marry someone from their own religion.”