Locating Arab Americans in Greater Detroit: An Overview of MENA Archives in Southeast Michigan

Over the decades, people of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent have established robust communities throughout the United States.¹ However, because archives tend to privilege the narratives of “white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, [cisgender, citizen,] heterosexuals, [and] able-bodied [men]” (WEBCCCHAM),² MENA voices have often been left out of, or otherwise obscured from, many traditional repositories, such as academic archives, museum collections, and state and local government archives. Archivists have written extensively on the problem of white supremacy and privilege embedded in traditional archives.³ For example, Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez argue that community archives like the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) offer a way to recover the records, interviews, and stories of groups excluded from traditional institutions and produce feelings of “representational belonging” in a community.⁴ Recently, scholars of MENA and, more specifically, Arab American communities, have also started similar efforts, creating online repositories and traveling exhibits such as Arab Indianapolis, Little Syria, and Halal Metropolis that focus on bringing MENA voices back to Indianapolis, New York, and Detroit, respectively.⁵ While developing these nontraditional archives is crucial work for empowering historically underrepresented and marginalized communities, it is also important for traditional archives to be actively involved in efforts to uplift the MENA voices represented in their collections and facilitate more inclusive, equitable, and effective research environments.

The authors of this article use repositories in southeast Michigan as a case study to demonstrate how institutions, regardless of size or type, can accomplish a collaborative and inclusive effort when collecting MENA stories. Drawing on the holdings of two university archives (the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University Archives), a national museum (the Arab American National Museum), and a local history museum (the Dearborn Historical Museum), they provide, via this article, a guide to several notable MENA holdings in the region while highlighting how their collections overlap and complement each other.⁶ Through this effort, the authors feel that they have begun to develop the personal relationships and knowledge that will hopefully facilitate the creation of the kind of collaborative archival environment proposed by F. Gerald Ham in “The Archival Edge” as well as by Scott Anderson and Robert Allen in “Envisioning the Archival Commons,” one that highlights rather than obscures materials because of institutional territorialism.⁷ Through the creation of such a space, they will begin to more effectively and cooperatively aid in telling the stories of MENA peoples (and other historically marginalized groups) in a way that helps disrupt the biases and legacies of white supremacy and other prejudices embedded in many traditional archives.

As home to one of the largest, most highly concentrated populations of people of MENA descent in the United States, southeast Michigan offers an ideal place to provide a guide to developing an archival commons that helps uplift MENA voices.⁸ In Dearborn, Michigan, home of Henry Ford's sprawling automobile factory, almost 50 percent of residents claim some sort of MENA ancestry.⁹ The vast majority hail from Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq, and identify as Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Consequently, southeast Michigan has become a center for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars researching MENA communities, specifically Arab and Chaldean communities.

A brief overview of southeast Michigan's MENA history demonstrates why it represents such a key destination for MENA scholars. The region's communities are not only among the nation's largest, but also its oldest. At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Christian and Muslim immigrants left the Ottoman province of Greater Syria to peddle, take factory jobs, and open small stores in metropolitan Detroit. In the 1920s, a burgeoning Yemeni community of young men worked in the automotive and shipping industries. By the 1970s, Shia Muslims from Lebanon and Iraq came to the region as refugees of war and were soon joined by Iraqi Christians, Palestinians, and Yemenis fleeing political oppression, economic hardship, and population displacement. Most of these new immigrants chose to settle in the Detroit area because they had kin in the region who helped them navigate America's immigration system; find jobs in small, family-run shops; and acclimate to life in the United States.¹⁰ As devastating civil wars persist in Syria and Yemen, thousands of refugees have continued to settle in enclaves across southeast Michigan, where they have helped to invigorate a local economy suffering from depopulation and deindustrialization.¹¹

In contrast to the large immigrant MENA populations in New York and Los Angeles, Arab immigrants in southeast Michigan established national organizations for social justice and community activism that tapped into the energy of the region's labor and civil rights movements. Detroit, once America's fourth city in population and third in industrial production, became the site of sit-down strikes and hunger marches that led to the formation of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and paved the way for industrial labor organization across the nation.¹² Beyond workers’ rights, residents of southeast Michigan have also been at the forefront of civil rights struggles, lobbying for equal pay and housing in a fierce drive that culminated in the Urban Uprising of 1967.¹³ It is important to note that Arab immigrants traveled to southeast Michigan not for social justice, but for jobs in the automobile industry and to join fellow Syrian, Lebanese, and Yemeni migrants in ethnic neighborhoods that allowed them to buy homes in neighborhoods and cities where restrictive real estate covenants excluded African Americans. Amid the local fervor of UAW organizing and civil rights activism, however, a certain segment of the region's Arab American population, many of whom were the children of immigrants, launched social justice campaigns on behalf of the US Arab community.

For MENA communities in Dearborn, these campaigns for social justice culminated, in particular, with the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS). Founded in 1971 as a nonprofit organization devoted to helping Arab American populations, ACCESS has grown over the decades from a local nonprofit to a national organization that provides social, mental health, educational, employment, legal, and medical services to recent immigrants and established Arab Americans across the United States. Profiled in collections at both the Bentley Historical Library (BHL) and Eastern Michigan University Archives (EMUA), ACCESS has also devoted significant resources to preserving Arab American culture and history, as exemplified by its founding of the Arab American National Museum (AANM).¹⁴ Similarly, the Association for Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), founded in 1967 amid the same fervor for rights and justice, emphasized the importance of engaging with the Arab world in a thoughtful and meaningful way; it also shared close ties to ACCESS.¹⁵ While the AAUG's organizational records are at EMUA, the papers of one of its founding members, Abdeen Jabara, can be found at the BHL.¹⁶ These examples of collections with overlapping or identical provenances demonstrate two things. First, they reinforce that researchers must currently (and often) conduct their work across multiple institutions to uncover and illuminate the histories of MENA communities and activism in the greater Detroit region. Second, they show also that collaboration among institutions—as well as creating collaborative case studies such as this article—are crucial to developing spaces that most effectively support researchers as well as to tackling institutional legacies that have often resulted in the obfuscation of MENA voices in traditional archives.

As a further example of the importance of archivists and community historians working together to actively develop an archival commons, consider the fact that scholars of Arab American studies and MENA communities have long relied on the holdings of some or all of the aforementioned institutions to conduct their research.¹⁷ In doing so, many have also helped build their own connections and relationships between institutions in southeast Michigan and grow this concentrated collection of MENA materials. Most notable, Sally Howell—professor of history at the University of Michigan–Dearborn—has not only been instrumental in developing the collections of the Bentley Historical Library and the Arab American National Museum, but her 2009 book Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering America's Muslim Past draws on and expands the collections she had already helped to establish.¹⁸ Howell's experience as a scholar and resident of southeast Michigan has meant that she is better connected than most. For other researchers who are interested in learning about these communities and their histories, however, their lack of connections (in comparison to Dr. Howell) may mean they overlook related collections at smaller regional libraries like EMUA or the DHM. The existence of an actively developed archival commons would play a major role in addressing issues such as these.

To develop an effective archival commons, it is important for everyone— archivists as well as their researchers—to understand what collections will be a part of that environment. While working in partnership on this case study, it became clear that the authors affiliated with the Arab American National Museum, the Dearborn Historical Museum, and Eastern Michigan University Archives possess intimate knowledge about the collections in their repositories related to different MENA communities. In contrast, the author from the Bentley Historical Library was in a different position. He had been employed at the BHL for a comparatively shorter time, meaning they lacked deep familiarity with their repository's collections.¹⁹ This was further complicated by the institution's broad collecting scope and large size, which has ultimately resulted in the creation of nearly 3,600 finding aids related to various subjects associated with the state or the University of Michigan.²⁰ Given both these challenges, a systematic review of the Bentley's holdings to identify collections related to different MENA communities was determined to be necessary.

To begin identifying potentially significant MENA collections, the Bentley author first needed to identify what identities would actually fall under the category of the term “Middle East and North Africa.” After reviewing several online resources and consulting with the article's coauthors once it became clear that secondary sources defined this term in a variety of ways, it was decided that all countries listed in the “MENA definitions by United Nations agencies and programmes” table on the Wikipedia page for MENA would be considered to be within the scope of the term.²¹ Next, to actually identify potentially relevant archival materials, the BHL author adopted the data collection methodology articulated in the graduate thesis of Michelle McClellan, the BHL's Johanna Meijer Magoon Principal Archivist, which focuses on assessing the scope of the Bentley's nonuniversity collections relating to Black history.²² McClellan located collections by reviewing the contents of exported MARC records, a related subject guide created by BHL archivists and BHL finding aids, and similar resources were used for this project. First, the BHL author reviewed a subject guide produced around 2014 on “Arab Americans, Chaldeans, and Muslims” to identify extant²³ archival resources. Next, a key word search was conducted in the BHL's instance of ArchivesSpace to identify potentially relevant collections associated with a particular country from the aforementioned Wikipedia table; this search included both various names of the specified country and the name of that country's citizenry. For example, the search phrase “Lebanon OR Lebanese” was used to identify collections that potentially contained materials related to Lebanese immigrants, Lebanese Americans, the Republic of Lebanon, and the Lebanese Republic.²⁴ Wildcards were also used as appropriate in this search to maximize the number of results that were returned at this stage of the data collection process.²⁵

Once an initial list of results had been generated—and the results filtered to include only collection-level records—each collection's front matter was manually reviewed to determine if it was topically significant to that particular country. Collections with at least one agent record or subject heading associated with the searched-for country were considered significant.²⁶ To try to address one of the issues noted in McClellan's methodology—that their MARC and finding aid “data-set would only be as reliable as the cataloging practices that assigned metadata to each collection”—select collection-level notes (i.e., scope and content and administrative/biographical history notes), as well as the inventories of collections, were also reviewed to surface collections that should be considered significant but that had the potential to be accidentally excluded because they did not have one or more appropriate subject headings or agent records.²⁷ Ultimately, those collections that were determined to lack a noticeable number of collection materials dedicated to the sought-after country were not considered further. Once a finalized list of collections was identified for that particular search, collection-level metadata was entered into a spreadsheet that included each collection's extents in linear feet, gigabytes, and miscellaneous other extent types, such as oversize folders; creation dates associated with that collection; associated BHL collecting area (see the next section for more information); MENA country, countries, or other identity term(s) associated with that collection; and subjects or agents, with relevant subject or agent terms bolded so that they could be identified more easily.

These searches and data-entry work were next repeated for every MENA country until the initial list of countries from the Wikipedia article's table was exhausted. Afterward, searches related to certain demographic categories—Arabs or Arab Americans, Chaldeans or Chaldean Americans, members of the Druze faith, and Muslims and Islam, to be precise—as well as broader geographic regions, such as the Middle East (as its own search) and North Africa (as its own search), were also conducted using the same process. Finally, a similar series of keyword searches was then done in the University of Michigan (UM) Library online catalog to identify archival publications (e.g., serials, maps, etc.) and web archives collected by the BHL that related to these geographic and demographic topics.²⁸ This process, ultimately not only led to the identification of many collections related to MENA peoples, but also resulted in conversations that showed how similar kinds of collections (especially those with similar or related provenances) could be found in other southeast Michigan repositories.

Founded in 1935, the Bentley Historical Library is a University of Michigan repository that widely collects materials relating to the university and the state of Michigan. More than thirty staff work together to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to the archival materials in these two collecting areas, respectively known as the University Archives (UA) and Michigan Historical Collections (MHC). These collecting areas represent thousands of feet of physical materials and terabytes of digital content ranging from paper documents and volumes to archived websites and digital audiovisual materials.³⁰

In terms of overall collections development, the Bentley has a long-standing interest in documenting immigration and various groups in Michigan. Materials related to MENA communities fit well within this larger thematic focus while also reflecting changes over time in the social and demographic history of the state. The Bentley also regularly collects materials originating from university units and community members that include faculty, staff, and students, to support its mission.³¹ In addition to being used for scholarly research, MENA archival collections are used in teaching efforts, and area studies classes often draw on these materials, many times by students who wish to learn more about their own family background. This combination makes a particularly opportune setting to teach archival research skills.

As of 2023, the Bentley has more than 120 archival collections, 60 serials and related publications, and dozens of archived websites—among other resources, such as vertical files—that relate in some way to different MENA countries, ethnic groups, and religious groups.³² These materials collectively represent over 2,000 linear feet and 1.4 terabytes of content that range in date from the 1740s to the modern day, although most of the BHL's holdings in this area are dated from 1960s to the present. These collections, which are predominantly found in the MHC collecting area, focus on different topics associated with Armenia, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, the Middle and Near East, and Palestine. Also well represented are materials about Arab and Muslim Americans. Some materials, to a lesser degree, relate to Algerian, Afghani, Cypriot, Jordanian, Libyan, Maltese, Moroccan, North African, Pakistani, Syrian, Tunisian, Turkish, and Yemeni subjects, as well as Chaldean Americans and members of the Druze faith.

These collections—ranging in size, complexity, and coverage, among other characteristics—often congregate around topics that researchers may wish to explore further. For example, the BHL has actively documented areas of the University of Michigan and its history that relate to MENA communities and topics. Consequently, the BHL holds the records, publications, and website of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies,³³ as well as physical and digital materials originating from programs like the Armenian Studies Program³⁴ and the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship.³⁵ Facebook and related web archives from the Students Allied for Freedom and Equality—a university student organization whose goals include Palestinian self-determination—can also be explored at the Bentley Historical Library and serve as further evidence of the variety of perspectives documented in its collections.³⁶

Other collections are more directly connected to members of different MENA communities. For example, the Bentley has collected some records and the web archives of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services,³⁷ as well as the papers of several of its most important contributors and staff over the years, including Helen Atwell,³⁸ Aliya Hassen,³⁹ and Barbara C. Aswad.⁴⁰ The BHL also houses several collections related to the Islamic Center of America (ICA), one of the country's largest and oldest Shia mosques, including the papers of ICA cofounders Hussein Makled,⁴¹ Charles Khalil Alawan,⁴² and Imam Mohamad Jawad Chirri;⁴³ former ICA board member Allie Fayz;⁴⁴ and the ICA's website.⁴⁵ Other religious organizations represented in the Bentley's collections include the American Moslem Society, which founded the first mosque in Michigan.⁴⁶

The Bentley also stewards the collections related to various MENA activists, community leaders, and other professionals. These include the papers of Suzanne Sareini, an Arab American businesswoman and the first Arab American to be elected to Dearborn's City Council;⁴⁷ Nabeel Abraham, an Arab American activist and Henry Ford Community College faculty member;⁴⁸ and Professor Sally Howell of the University of Michigan–Dearborn.⁴⁹ The Bentley also holds the papers of Dr. Jack Kevorkian,⁵⁰ an Armenian American medical pathologist and assisted suicide activist, and some of the papers of Abdeen Jabara, a Lebanese American attorney originally based in Detroit whose clients included Sirhan Sirhan, who was later convicted of the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.⁵¹

The Bentley has, as exemplified in this portion of the case study, developed a significant collection in this area. It also continues to actively collect materials related to MENA women, politics, community activism, and religion. An example of one such recent addition are the broadcast materials of Radio Tahrir (Radio “Liberation”), which were processed in spring 2022.⁵² Radio Tahrir ran from the late 1980s until 2013 under the leadership of Arab American author, anthropologist, and journalist Barbara Aziz, with the assistance of numerous Arab and Muslim American volunteers. The program explored a wide range of political, cultural, and religious topics related to Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and around the world, often in discussion with guests from a wide variety of backgrounds. This large collection—representing 868 audio files and a small number of physical materials—is complemented by the archived website of Radio Tahrir⁵³ and the records of Radius of Arab-American Writers, Inc.⁵⁴ (which Aziz cofounded) and offers further insights into the experience of Arab and Muslim community members through some of the most tumultuous events of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Much like the Bentley Historical Library, the archival, object, and library collections of the Arab American National Museum aim to tell the story of the diverse Arab American community from the earliest immigrants in the 1880s to the present day.⁵⁵ Situated in East Dearborn, the AANM was opened in 2005 following a community fund-raising campaign by the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, the parent organization of the museum and one of the largest and longest-serving Arab American nonprofits in the nation. A Smithsonian Affiliate accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the AANM's 38,500-square-foot facility houses one of the largest Arab American archival collections in the nation, as well as a comprehensive collection of published materials by and about Arab Americans, including approximately 5,000 volumes in the Russell J. Ebeid Library & Resource Center.⁵⁶

AANM's archives comprises approximately 2,800 photographs, 2,000 artifacts, and 220 linear feet of documents that represent the material culture of Arab Americans from the late nineteenth century through the twenty-first. With approximately 10 percent on display in the museum's core exhibition space, most of the archives—which includes family papers, objects and photographs, and individual stories illuminating contributions to the fields of political democracy, medicine, science, and art—has been collected from the national Arab American community over the last two decades. The collections—accessible through digital collections, object database, and library catalog—are managed by trained archivists, curators, and librarians and used by researchers and scholars from across the nation.

The museum's collecting goals focus on the following: material culture and decorative arts made or used by Arab Americans; academic and folk art and photography by Arab American artists or depicting Arab American life; archival materials and original documents relating to Arab American life; and material culture of the Arab world, as it is impossible to tell the Arab American story without the Arab world story as well. Broadly, the collections mainly illuminate individual and family stories of Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants. The collections are continually growing and, recently, the museum hired two full-time community historians whose main duties are to collect oral histories and artifacts from community members across the country. In 2022, they took collecting trips to Houston, Texas; Washington, DC; and Paterson, New Jersey, and there are plans to visit other cities with large or growing Arab American communities in the future. Most of the collected oral histories are available online, while the hundreds of other oral histories that have been donated by scholars and researchers are available for use on-site.⁵⁷

The majority of requests for materials—from researchers, journalists, or film-makers—are for items that tell the story of the growth of the Arab American community of Dearborn and metro Detroit. As a museum with a national scope, some of these important materials can be found in the collection, but the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan was actively collecting archives from the Michigan Arab and Middle Eastern community before the AANM was established. Because of this, both the Bentley and the AANM have portions of multiple collections, most notably the Aliya Hassen collection. However, the most important collection at the AANM, in regard to the local Arab American community, is the archives of its parent organization, ACCESS, which has a history spanning more than fifty years of service delivery to the community. The ACCESS collection has hundreds of photographs of community events, such as festivals and protest marches, newsletters and publications by ACCESS from the 1970s until the present, artifacts collected for a small museum that used to be housed in the ACCESS main offices in the 1980s and 1990s, and oral histories with community leaders.

Some of the highlights of the AANM's collections include rare published materials from the earliest Arab American writers, including Gibran Kahlil Gibran; the largest known archives on the early history of the Arab American community of Boston, with most materials dating to the Word War I era; the Michael W. Suleiman collection, comprised of 125 bankers boxes of secondary materials about the community, spanning 150 years of published and informally published materials;⁵⁸ a personal photograph collection of noted scholar of Arab history Philip Hitti; scores of early Arab American musical recordings; as well as a growing Arab American visual art collection. The Russell J. Ebeid Library & Resource Center at the museum has the most comprehensive collection of published materials about the community in the nation, including a large thesis and dissertation collection, a community cookbook collection, and a comic book and graphic novel collection named in honor of Geoff Mahrib Johns, the former chief creative officer of DC Entertainment and noted comic book writer.⁵⁹ The collection has some deficits, though, with objects and photographs in the archives heavily representing the earliest periods of immigration from the Levant (mainly present-day Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine) and tends to skew toward Christian Arab Americans. AANM staff is actively seeking materials and collections that more represent the national Arab American community, particularly folks from Iraq, Yemen, and North Africa.

Unlike the BHL or the AANM, institutions with significant and discrete MENA collections, the MENA-related holdings at the Dearborn Historical Museum are embedded within its collections about the city of Dearborn, Michigan. Since its inception in 1950, the DHM's Floyd & Mary Haight Archives has been the primary historical repository for the Dearborn city government.⁶⁰ While the DHM collects local history donations, acquiring histories of the Arab American community has not been a primary focus until recently. Even without it being a targeted area for collection, records generated by the Dearborn city government (and preserved by the DHM) have documented the demographic changes of a city that, since the 1920s, has been home to a large population of Arab Americans. Largely concentrated in the eastern portion of the city of Dearborn, in an area known as the South End, immigrants historically gravitated toward the jobs provided by automotive magnate Henry Ford's Rouge Plant. Over the decades, newer Arab immigrants mostly joined these well-established enclaves throughout the South End. Partially, but not entirely, due to these conditions, the Arab community has been geographically and socially isolated from most activities of the museum, thereby resulting in limited artifact and archival donations. Thus, the DHM's materials that document Arab Americans are primarily found in collections that focus on the city population as a whole. For example, the museum's city government photo negative collection contains over 400,000 images that show city officials attending the opening of numerous Arab American businesses and large-scale Arab American events, among others, but also images from the city's attempt to inflict urban renewal upon Arab neighborhoods.⁶¹ The local newspaper and clipping collections, which were often gathered by previous staff who sensed the demographic change resulting from growth in the Arab American community, have been used by researchers to examine how more recent Arab American immigrants have settled into the community. City directories from 1926 to 2001 have also become a valuable resource for tracking where Arab Americans lived and worked.

Dearborn's dramatic demographic change toward becoming a more Arab American city is well documented in the museum's political archival files. Arab Americans are not always referred to by name nor are they the explicit target of all political discussions, but researchers are encouraged to “read against the grain” of such materials to extract relevant information. Consider the example of the papers of Mayor Orville Hubbard, which were collected with an almost hoarder mentality. Hubbard, who closely watched his opponents, kept records of his adversaries that ultimately documented topics ranging from segregationist policies to plans for urban renewal directed against Arab Americans. The museum also has copies of Mayor Michael Guido's derogatory campaign materials from 1985 which refer to Arab immigrants as “The Arab Problem.”⁶² Detailed opinion surveys in the museum collection show this derogatory language had an effect in shifting discourse.⁶³ Other items collected by Hubbard that can be found at the museum and could be of interest to MENA scholars include numerous gifts and rare video recordings of programs on Arab Americans that aired locally. In more recent times, the museum has collected campaign materials from a variety of local Arab American candidates including councilperson Suzanne Sareini (who has also made contributions to the BHL) and Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.

The museum's future goal is for its collections to better reflect the local Arab population as the latter continues to expand. To achieve this, the museum needs and plans to undertake radical outreach strategies to draw Arab and other underrepresented groups to the physical museum, especially via appealing to local activist groups. Dearborn groups such as Accountability for Dearborn and Homage 2 Black Excellence (H2BE) have approached the DHM for either archival resources for their activism or with the intent of collaborating with the museum. Identifying willing collaborators can be the difference between preserving the records of activist and community-based organizations and those records being lost forever.

Located in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is a midsize comprehensive public university located at the midpoint between the AANM and the BHL, along Michigan Avenue that stretches from Detroit through Dearborn, Ypsilanti, and Ann Arbor. Founded in 1849, EMU was the primary institution for teacher training for the first half-century of Michigan statehood. Eastern Michigan University Archives was established in 1970 to collect only institutional records housed within departments or administrative offices; it was never the intended mission or published policy to collect records from outside organizations or community groups. These policies, along with the underresourced nature of EMUA, led to decades of records related to university faculty being donated to other archives (such as the Bentley Historical Library, which holds a number of collections from EMU faculty) or simply being lost through disposal or neglect. It is not unusual to work with collections with displaced records or poor recordkeeping, especially when it comes to documenting donor relationships built over time. This was also the case at EMUA, where some acquisitions were influenced by institutional politics and/or personal relationships rather than by their relationship to EMUA's collection-development mandate and priorities.

Take, for example, the fact that EMUA is home to the records of the Association of Arab American University Graduates. Founded in 1967, the AAUG was a nonsectarian, and nonpolitical organization that published books, papers, and periodicals on Arab and Arab American affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and US foreign policy, as well as held an annual convention and midyear conferences. Dedicated to fostering a better understanding between Arabs and Americans while promoting informed discussion, the AAUG served as a forum for Middle East specialists and scholars from around the world and donated the professional services of its members. It assisted in the development of the Arab world by bringing its members, professional skills to bear on socioeconomic and technological needs of the community.

The Association of Arab American University Graduates collection⁶⁴ contains the records of the organization; the papers of Abdeen Jabara, an attorney who also served as the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee;⁶⁵ and records pertaining to the Symposium on Zionism in Baghdad that took place in Iraq in November 1976.⁶⁶ How the AAUG operated as an organization means a number of significant affiliates are also documented in the collection, including the American Council on the Middle East, the American Middle East Peace Research Institute, the American Jewish Committee, Arab World Human Rights, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Middle East Council of Churches, Palestinian Human Rights, and Sabra Shatila, to name a few. This is mentioned because, while a number of doctoral dissertations and academic publications have already cited materials directly from the AAUG collection, as James O’Toole notes in “The Symbolic Significance of Archives,” “an ingenious researcher can find uses for records that no creator, collector, or curator ever imagined.”⁶⁷ This collection has much to offer to any “ingenious researcher” interested in not only Arab studies, but also in the intersectionality of cultural movements during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in the rise and decline of an organization that provided much to a community of students and scholars alike.

The records of the AAUG, which fall outside of EMUA's mandate to collect only institutional records, were acquired through a member of the history faculty, Dr. Janice Terry. Terry was extremely active in professional organizations like the AAUG and the aforementioned Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services.⁶⁸ In her introduction to the fortieth volume of Arab Studies Quarterly, she highlighted the account of Randa A. Kayyali. Kayyali, who served as the last executive director of the AAUG, recounted the diminishment of the organization and also her desire to ensure that the records of the AAUG and the Arab American community would be preserved:

Rather than being added to the extensive backlog of university records, this promise by the “special collections librarian” was likely the reason the AAUG collection became a processing priority. Regardless, because the collection was included in the library catalog, it was discoverable and thus became a major resource for scholars of Arab American history. As the largest collection of materials related to the AAUG and various other affiliate organizations, and given its national and international scope, it is one of the most frequently requested collections at the EMUA by both national and international scholars.

While the AAUG papers constitute the majority of the MENA collections at EMUA, another collection may be of interest. Starting in 1963, Eastern Michigan University, in partnership with the US Department of Education, received a series of grants to establish teacher training schools internationally, the first in Somalia. The activities of Basic Education Development Project No. 279-0053 are documented in the Yemen Project collection.⁷⁰ This program was intended to aid in the modernization of Yemen via its public education system during a turbulent period in the Middle East. Much of the correspondence from the employees gives a glimpse of daily life in Yemen and the struggles of teachers and administrators in adjusting to working in an entirely different country and culture. It contains administrative files, employee files, and reports that were completed before, during, and after the project. The project in Yemen was the final project of its kind, in terms of a joint international academic-federal agency initiative within EMU College of Education.

When the authors began writing this case study, they did so with the original intent of bringing attention to their respective collections and illustrating the benefit that their close geographic proximity could bring to researchers. The insights and value that were ultimately gained from working on this project and activating the benefits of an archival commons were unexpected, but extremely important, outcomes with long-term benefits. For example, as a result of working on this case study, the BHL author noted not only their increased personal knowledge of MENA collections at the Bentley Historical Library, but also the realization that many collections among these institutions had similar or identical provenances. This fact, along with the research output from this project and broader conversations relating to the archival commons, were ultimately passed on to the Bentley's field archivists, who are responsible for acquiring materials from donors. This was done in the hope that the outcomes of this project can be used to support future MENA collection development efforts.

Another unexpected benefit of this project was the identification of connections across multiple institutions and how that will allow the authors of this article (or their colleagues) to more effectively support researchers from all walks of life. For example, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, despite having its main holdings at the AANM, also has a presence at the BHL and EMUA. The DHM also has materials that document the work of ACCESS nestled through-out the aforementioned urban renewal materials nestled within the collections of Dearborn politicians. Empowered by this knowledge, the staff of the DHM, while creating access tools such as catalog records, can make sure to document these relationships and encourage scholars and activists to also examine and learn from ACCESS materials present across various institutions (and vice versa). Similarly, researchers interested in activists like Abdeen Jabara are now directed to the Jabara papers at the Bentley, followed by a trip to EMUA to review the papers of his organization, the AAUG. Finally, on a broader scale, while the BHL's, the AANM's, and EMUA's collections detail national anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia, the Dearborn Historical Museum offers a rare glimpse at how discrimination against people with origins in MENA operates at more local levels in the United States. By connecting with one another, having honest discussions about their repositories’ past practices and current holdings, as well as teasing out the different facets of their related collections, the authors of this article feel that they have begun to lay the foundation of an archival commons that will help them effectively and efficiently address their users’ information needs, dismantle implicit territorialism by centering the voices of MENA community members, and—ultimately—undermine those biases present in traditional archives.

In 2022, the theme of National Archives Month was “Collaboration in the Archives,” a reminder that only through collaboration can institutions begin to dismantle institutionalized racism and privilege. This case study has used an investigation into MENA sources to model how collaboration between organizations can begin to identify patterns that transcend institutional boundaries and connect resources to researchers and local communities. Using the concept of an archival commons for MENA collections, the authors of this case study focused on archives in southeast Michigan; however, it is important to note that this kind of work is not confined to just this portion of the United States. For example, our colleague from the AANM, along with the Khayrallah Center and partners in Houston, Texas, received a planning grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) in 2019 to create a web-based index of Arab American–related archival collections. The initial index noted almost forty collections in fifteen states with significant information about the community's history and experiences.⁷¹ Not only was it through the collaborative process of writing this article that additional holdings were identified and will now be included in the web-based index of Arab American–related archival collections, it is also obvious that archival commons related to MENA communities are being established across the United States.

These examples show that partnerships across institutions are not only beneficial to researchers but also provide archivists with an exercise that is intellectually satisfying and good for developing collections. They are also crucial for ensuring that a greater number of records from various communities are properly preserved and exhibited, especially when discussions of limited resources in archival repositories are fairly commonplace. As it pertains to those of MENA descent, in an era of increasing Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, identifying these relationships and thinking of more community-centered ways of collecting and providing access will offer the key to understanding and preserving the long and diverse history of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.