Growing Better, Not Going Faster: World War I, Holy Land Mania, and Transnational Exchange in the Works of Abraham Mitrie Rihbany

Abstract

This article analyzes the three works published by Arab American theologian and author Abraham Mitrie Rihbany during and in the aftermath of World War I: Militant America and Jesus Christ (1917), America Save the Near East (1918), and Wise Men from the East and from the West (1922). The political climate in which Rihbany wrote the works saw the American public grappling with two issues of particular relevance to the steadily growing Arab American community. Where the global front was concerned, debates on the merits of abandoning isolationist policies, which focused near exclusively on the situation in Europe, left Americans oblivious to the ongoing conflict between the Ottoman Empire and its Arab subjects. On the domestic front, rising levels of xenophobia and the lasting legacy of The Naturalization Act divided legal and public opinion on Arabs’ eligibility for citizenship. Situating Rihbany’s attempts to address both of these problems against the backdrop of his upbringing in Greater Syria, this article reveals how Rihbany called on his training in the cosmopolitan era of the Nahda in order to guide the American public toward a more expansive model of transnationalism capable of encompassing both Arabs and Arab Americans in its fold.