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Alan Jabbour, “A Cultured Man”: Foodways, Music, and Syria Dreamin’

History & Culture

An Arabic-language newspaper, al-Sayeh.

Jul 23, 2025

Bob Haddad on Arab-American Community, Literature, and Identity: the Voices of the Mahjar Podcast

The Khayrallah Center’s newest podcast series, Voices of the Mahjar, shares the experiences of Arabs and Arab Americans living in the diaspora. In our most recent episodes, Khayrallah Center Director Dr. Akram Khater and NC State Assistant Professor Dr. Elizabeth Saylor interviewed self-identified Syrian American Brooklynite Robert Mitchell Haddad. The Khayrallah Center is fortunate to…
Tarzan comic strip in Arabic. Al-Hoda Newspaper

Oct 17, 2024

Tarzan in Arabic

“Who is Tarzan?” Salloum Mokarzel (1881–1952) asked this question in his November 18, 1932, editorial in Al-Hoda. He wrote it as an introduction to, and in anticipation of, the debut of the Arabic-translated Tarzan of the Apes comic strip that was to appear in al-Hoda over the next thirteen years. In an effort to appeal…

Nov 28, 2023

Muslim Pioneers* in Canada’s North

How do Muslims live Islam in Arctic Canada, so distant from its cradle? How do they foster a sense of home and belonging in these distinctive surroundings that challenge their religious practice in manifold ways? One such strategy of homemaking and rooting the community within its locality is the construction of mosques. In recent years,…

Oct 20, 2023

The Health Consequences of Researching Our Family and Community History

In 1992, I was thirty-nine years old, living in Sydney, Australia, when my father died in South Africa. I was heartbroken, as most migrants are, with the loss of significant others overseas. I began dedicated research into my family history. Every week, I faxed ten questions to my mother; for example, “When and where was…

Apr 27, 2023

Ameen Rihani and Zoe Norris: Cross-Cultural Friendship of Writers at the Ragged Edge

In the early 1900s, two self-invented writers in New York, Kentucky-born Zoe Anderson Norris (1860-1914) and Lebanon native Ameen Rihani (1876-1940), forged an improbable but enduring friendship.

Feb 22, 2023

Visible at Last

In writing our lives, we find a starting point in a memory or an experience, something we feel it is important to document. As a child, growing up under apartheid in South Africa, there were things I observed for which I had no words. 

Jan 31, 2022

The Moghabghab Family in Cyprus, New York, and Madeira, 1878-1974

The name of Theophilus Mogabgab (1886-1965), a native of Famagusta in Cyprus, was well known to Cypriots and to visitors to the island. He became an authority, entirely self-taught, on the history of the ancient walled town of Famagusta and impressed the many visitors whom he guided with his enthusiasm and extraordinary knowledge of the…

Sep 23, 2021

Syrian Families in the Colorado Coal Mining Communities

Colorado Coal  In its mining heyday (1890s–1920s), Colorado was often ranked as the eleventh largest producer of coal in the United States and mined bituminous, sub-bituminous, coking, lignite, and anthracite coal. This coal was intended to feed the western railroads, the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company steel mill in Pueblo, the state’s powerful beet sugar…

Jul 27, 2021

My Mother’s 78 RPM Arabic Record Collection

My mother used to love to listen to Arabic music, especially when she was working in the kitchen. At first, her Arabic records were 78 RPMs, and later on, Arabic cassettes. As a ten or twelve-year-old, I recall that our family had a console radio that had a turntable on top that was located in…

Mar 4, 2021

Alan Jabbour, “A Cultured Man”: Foodways, Music, and Syria Dreamin’

As we five folklorists conversed with Alan Jabbour about his family immigration saga over the course of ninety minutes, he guided us from stories of his grandfather’s and then his father’s experiences as adult immigrants to his own life as the first of his family to be born and to spend his childhood in America.…