Reversing injustice: on Utopian activism.

• Author: Hagopian, Elaine C.
• Position: Association of Arab-American University Graduates - American Arabic Association - Organization overview

THE BEGINNING

IT WAS MAY 1967. I HAD JUST SAID goodbye to Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and their four children in Northampton, MA. They were to depart later in the summer for Evanston, Illinois, where Ibrahim was to take up his new academic position at Northwestern University. I was leaving that day for Cambridge, MA to prepare for my new position at Simmons College in Boston. We had both completed five years at Smith College. It was during those five years that I developed a warm and wonderful kin-like relationship with the Abu-Lughod family. Little did I know then our lives would become more intensely intertwined as a result of war, the June 1967 War.

As soon as the war broke out, I began looking for an organization in the Boston area concerned with justice in the Middle East. I became aware of the American Arabic Association (AMARA), itself a break-off from the defunct Syrian-Lebanese Federation (a federation of mostly social groups). It was Dr. Frank Maria, a Syrian-American, who salvaged the Federation's foreign relations committee and turned it into the politically oriented AMARA. While AMARA sponsored programs and produced a newsletter, it remained a very local and limited organization. I was outraged by the war and the anti-Arab racism that came pouring out of television, print media and radio. I was looking for something on a national scale, better informed and definitely more active.

Later in the summer, I got a call from Ibrahim from Evanston. He informed me that a group of academics and professionals were discussing the need to form a national organization to confront Zionist misinformation regarding Palestine and the Arab world and to protect the Arab-American community from the increased racism and overt acts of discrimination against them. Subsequently, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) was founded in Chicago in October 1967.

The publications and general educational programs of AAUG are well discussed in this collection of essays and need no further elaboration. In this essay, I will discuss why the founders decided on the name they gave the Association, a name that became increasingly controversial as the years passed. Thereafter, I will share with you a number of my experiences which affected my perception of what the Association could accomplish. While these experiences forced me to lessen my expectations, they never lessened my commitment to reversing injustice. Embodied in the discussion of my experiences is an analysis of why the Association failed to sustain itself over time. Yet, I will argue that AAUG was a successful undertaking, and its accomplishments continue to have an impact on Middle East Studies. I will conclude with a few observations which I hope will be helpful to present and future Arab-American activists.

THE NAME

The Association was regularly criticized for the elitist nature of its name. Some felt it should have a different name and be a grassroots popular movement aimed at organizing the Arab-American community for political action. There were two reasons why the name Association of Arab-American University Graduates was chosen. First, it was a deliberate effort to convey to the American (and Arab) public that there are Americans of Arab origin who hold university degrees and who aim to challenge, by scholarly production and example, the Orientalist image of Arabs and Muslims as ignorant, conniving, lecherous and bloodthirsty peoples. Second, according to one of the major founders, Attorney Abdeen Jabara, it was decided at the initial meeting of several scholars (Summer 1967) in Ann Arbor

... that the name should be descriptive of the type of member we wanted to attract (and organize). Since all of the individuals present at that meeting were academics except for myself, there was discussion about how the organization should be of some intellectual standard which we tried to capture by including the words 'university graduates.' It must be remembered that the principal audience for the AAUG membership would be those Arabs who came [primarily in the 1950s and thereafter] to the U.S. to study, and for one reason or another, chose to remain here.... [Also], we wanted to project [the fact] that the caliber of the materials and discussions of what became AAUG would be of a level that non-Arab-Americans ... might find more credible. (1) [In fact, the majority of AAUG members were born abroad. Those of us born in the U.S. were much fewer initially.] The name should have automatically conveyed that the Association was not and could not be a grassroots organization. The founders and leaders did envision AAUG as protecting the Arab-American community from discrimination and of educating the new and earlier immigrants about events in the Middle East. The assumption was that this would enable the community later to become informed grassroots activists locally and nationally. Given the fact that the broader Arab-American community was itself ill-informed, even if emotionally engaged, and given the lack of solid literature on the issues that could challenge and displace Zionist ideological tracts, it was crucial that a national organization have the brain power and talent to establish the credibility of the Arab perspective through substantial academic writings and educational programs. Hence, a grassroots organization was not seen as the first step to take in Arab-American organizational efforts. Providing knowledge was. Nonetheless, various members and later leaders continued to have differing ideas about what they expected AAUG to be and to do. Some attempted to transform AAUG into either an Arab-American community service and assimilation facilitator or into a radical grassroots movement engaged directly in seeking redress for Palestine and the Arab world. Neither succeeded, but elements of both orientations could be found in the Association's work. In any case, the Association's name became controversial and often embarrassing. Some saw it as exclusivist; others as rather silly. Nonetheless, no AAUG Board ever contemplated changing its name. It had become established and associated with progressive political thinking.

MY AAUG EXPERIENCE

My AAUG experience started out with great expectations. After all, we Arab-origin academics were embarked on a worthy enterprise of seeking to promote justice. We did not expect to solve all or most of the problems we faced as Arab-Americans nor those in the Arab world. Nonetheless, we did expect we would lay the foundation for sustained efforts to redress wrongs, and we would see actual progress being made with each year of our work. My experiences over the AAUG's first decade and beyond began to whittle away my copious optimism. While I never wavered in my determination to seek redress for the horrific injustice imposed on Palestinians and to engage in, and encourage knowledge-based alternative perspectives on Arab societies, my experiences abroad and with Arab-Americans peeled away the outer layers of my idealism. Considering so many of us in AAUG were social scientists who understood political realities and the complexities of organizing a whole community on a volunteer basis, our idealism was incredibly disproportionate. AAUG was founded on a mythical belief that all Arab-Americans and Arabs abroad were highly motivated to pursue justice and Arab World political and economic independence from the West at any cost. In the end, however, reality developed the contours of the possible.

I served on the Board of Directors five times, two of them as an officer of the Association: 1968 (at large), 1969 (Secretary), 1972 (at large),

1976 (President), 1977 (ex- officio). In between I served in a variety of roles such as Acting Treasurer, Acting and Convention Program Chairperson, and Planning Committee Member for the joint conference with the Kuwait Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters (December 1975/January 1976). I also served on the Palestine Open University Feasibility Study Team (1979-1980). The latter was not an AAUG project as such. It was a UNESCO project in collaboration with the PLO Ministry of Education and the Kuwait Fund. It was headed by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod who selected his personnel from among AAUG members as well as Arab counterparts abroad. Nonetheless, it was understood as part of the AAUG endeavor to contribute to the development of Arab peoples.

During the first years, we were all imbued with a "can do" attitude which was inspired by the charismatic leadership of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Ibrahim's constant assurance that "we will win" motivated everyone to work beyond their human limits for justice in Palestine and the Arab homeland. These were unbelievably productive years. AAUG initiated a comprehensive set of activities, described early on as "a finger in the dike" that would become a permanent bulwark against Zionist and Western imperialist machinations, leading eventually to a reversal of injustice. Clearly, we were not simply overambitious, but utopian.

PALESTINIANS IN LEBANON

After an exhausting but empowering and productive three years of engaged efforts, I interrupted my work with AAUG to take up my first Fulbright Faculty Research Grant (1971). I had seen AAUG grow and become a major public voice challenging the given "wisdom" on M.E. conflicts. We knew we were making some headway because the Zionists made every effort to suppress our voice. However, I wanted grounded experience in the area. I wanted to identify how we could relate to alleviating the problems in the Arab World--be they political and/or developmental. I was based in Lebanon with extended visits to Syria, Egypt and Jordan. This period served to inform, clarify, and further engage me in the goals of the AAUG. It would greatly enhance my understanding of the issues. It certainly reinforced my motivation, but it was also a period in which the signs of Arab disunity and conflict emerged.

In Lebanon, the Palestinian...