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- W13140071 abstract "Introduction The appeal of the Middle East among black scholarly elites was evident long before the Gaza Strip, jihad, Operation Desert Storm, Saudi Arabian oil, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden entered the popular lexicon. This paper will demonstrate the scholarly attraction and popular fascination African Americans have long had with the Middle East. Given the prominence of Christianity in Blacks' lives one could easily surmise that African American interest and expertise in Middle Eastern history, languages, arts, religions, and politics sprang largely from a fascination with those faraway lands mentioned in the Bible and the places where Christ and his disciples once trod. Indeed, several book-length travelogues like Caroline Bagley's My Trip Through Egypt and the Holy Land (1928), Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s Palestine and Saints in Caesars Household (1939), and numerous religious works such as Benjamin T. Tanner's impressive etymological tract The Color of Solomon--What? (1895) and Charles L. Russell's book of translated proverbs, Light From the Talmud (1942), aimed to enlighten and inspire the growing masses of the faithful who were both black and literate. The motivation of academicians to study aspects of the Middle East was initially related to the emphasis on classical education which was highly regarded by some of the best black minds of the 19th century, many of whom desired to better understand ancient sacred and literary texts. The earliest example of this is provided by George Boyer Vashon, the first African American to graduate from Oberlin College who became a pioneering attorney and the first black professor at Howard University. Vashon, born in Pittsburgh in 1824, was a precocious child with a gift for languages. Not only was he proficient in Greek and Latin, the mark of a high-bred gentleman of that era, but he also knew Hebrew, the Semitic language of the Jews of ancient Israel, and Persian, the language of ancient Iran. This uncommon linguist and epic poet even mastered Sanskrit, the cultivated language of ancient India, French and German. In the mid to late 1800s there were, of course, only rare instances of non-academic types having more than a superficial acquaintance with the Middle East owing in part to tourism and religious pilgrimages mainly in Egypt and the Holy Land. David E Dorr, an educated mulatto who escaped from a Louisiana plantation, authored the recently discovered 192-page travelogue A Colored Man Round the World (1858), believed to have been printed for him in Cleveland, Ohio. Among other places, Dorr accompanied his master to Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Thebes and proudly asserted racial kinship with the peoples of Egypt, ancient and modern. We are reminded by Malini J. Schueller (1999), Dorr's editor and biographer, that members of the black intelligentsia, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and later Pauline Hopkins, used Egyptology to validate the idea of Africans being the originators of civilization (Schueller, 245), and this in tandem with the widely held notion that African Americans have long identified with the ancient Israelites held in slavery under Pharaoh, and their having been intrigued by the affair of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, the wise man Balthazar and other references to dark-skinned people in the Bible, all made for an irresistible attraction to the region There were other noteworthy travelers. In 1866 Edward Wilmot Blyden was tutored in Arabic at the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed American College of Beirut) and inscribed his name at the entrance to the great pyramid of Cheops, experiences he recounted in his book From West Africa to Palestine (1873). The expatriate Henry Ossawa Tanner, the premier black artist of his day, encouraged by a thoughtful benefactor, left Paris in 1897 for a three-month stay in Cairo and Jerusalem to observe the mannerisms of the inhabitants and make mental notes of the sights and settings that would lend greater authenticity to his religious paintings (Matthews, 80). …" @default.
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- W13140071 date "2004-03-22" @default.
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- W13140071 title "African American's Interest, Experiences, and Scholarship in Middle Eastern Cultures" @default.
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