What brings together – and stands between “Afro” and “Arab” – is not a mere hyphen. History, geography, race, religion, trade, slavery, colonialism, as well as academia’s area-studies have pulled and pushed the “Afro” and the “Arab” to and from each other. While “Afro” usually denotes roots in the African continent, Arab is associated more or less with a spoken language and a loosely defined geography; yet both intersect with each other beyond those demarcations and are not without their controversies in terms of what they can possibly represent, include and exclude. This hyphenated relationship, despite all controversy, reflects hybridity and interconnectedness. These intersections have been overshadowed by several factors, including the politics of identity that demarcate the “Afro” from the “Arab” and vice versa, in an attempt to make exclusive claim to one but not the other.
Notwithstanding the key role played by national and regional politics in Arab and African countries have played in shaping the relationship between the “Afro” and the “Arab,” especially since the era of decolonization and independence, I focus here, not on politics but on academia’s role in fostering this divide through the “area-studies” model, leading to the compartmentalization and separation of the Afro and the Arab. I then look at recent academic trends attempting to reconstruct/restore this relationship, aided by new methodologies and sources. I focus on two current initiatives in the Gulf region, where academia and research centers are paving new ways in recognition of this relationship. I bring attention to the mission of The Africa Institute at the Global South University in Sharjah, as well as to the initiatives of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, and the History Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
Afro-Arab in the Faultlines of Area Studies
Area studies, as they were conceived at Western universities, were conditioned by Cold War competition, and imperial interests in the Global South. The world was divided into “areas” that corresponded to the West’s political, economic, and strategic interests in the Global South: hence Middle East Studies, African Studies, South Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and the like were defined as area studies, but of geopolitical interest. Area studies emerged in Western universities, Anglophone ones more specifically, not only to produce knowledge on those areas but also to support the foreign policies of Western states.[1] The collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat of Communism did not put an end to the area studies model. It remained embedded in the academic structure, tied to government funding, and needed for strategic and political reasons. In the case of Middle East Studies and African Studies - our areas of concern here, and which straddle the “Afro-Arab” - new determinants and urgencies arose, among them “the threat of Islam” and “terrorism”, as well as the West’s perceived mission to aid the spread of democracy worldwide.[2]
No doubt that area studies as fields of scholarly expertise have produced valuable scholarship, and occasionally that scholarship has challenged official policies and narratives towards areas in the Global South. But this model has its shortcomings, including the perpetuation of intellectual practices that have enshrined epistemological and geographic borders that carved up different areas of the developing world. Scholars have been increasingly aware of the implications the area studies model for knowledge production, and of the need for new methodologies and visions to overcome them. Scholars have attempted to reconfigure the area studies model. For example, Middle Eastern scholarship has traditionally revolved around the Istanbul-Cairo-Beirut-Baghdad axis, paying occasional lip service to the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf, and North Africa. This is not to lessen the importance of these metropoles, but we need to think in terms of multiple centers if we are to write a comprehensive narrative of societies strongly connected with one another. The same critique can be applied to African Studies: scholarly attention is often directed towards sub-Saharan Africa, sidelining North Africa and the Sahara. Only when we acknowledge the parochial nature of area studies can we seek ways to overcome it.
Scholarship on one particular region, the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, showcases the limitations of the area studies model. Sitting on the periphery of Middle East Studies, and considered outside of African Studies, the Gulf region was until recently marginalized in the scholarship, and studied without considering its historical and geographical connections.[3] My focus here is largely on the Anglophone scholarship. As for the Arabic scholarship on Afro-Arab relations, I believe it is still fragmented and has not yet formed a scholarly tradition whose trajectory one can follow across the Arab region. However, one does observe monumental efforts such as the edited collection al-ʿArab wa Ifriqya: buḥūth wa munāqashāt [Arabs and Africa: Research and Discussions] published in 1987, by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies (Markaz Dirāsāt al-Wiḥda al-ʿArabiyya.)
The Emergence of Afro-Arab Scholarship
The first scholar to address this issue and to reframe our understanding of the importance of the Arabian Peninsula, in African Studies in particular, was Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan scholar of Omani origin. Mazrui’s central argument was that Africa’s civilization consists of a “triple heritage:” indigenous, Muslim, and colonial European. In 1992, Mazrui coined the term “Afrabia,” arguing that Arabia belongs to Africa more than to Asia, underlining the historical relationship and connections between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, including the Gulf.[4] Mazrui urged us to re-imagine that relationship beyond what might be perceived geographical barriers deceivingly isolating Africa from Arabia, adding that the “the Red Sea has no right to divide Africa from Arabia.” He urged us to envision the African continent’s borders stretching over the Red Sea to include Arabia. “Afrabia,”as he put it, encapsulates the Afro-Arab, in both its historical and present dimensions.
Almost a decade after Mazrui advanced the “Afrabia” thesis, a new generation of scholars, particularly historians, began to challenge, yet again, the boundaries of American area studies model, putting together the Afro-Arab parts. My own academic journey, straddling both Middle Eastern and African Studies, took that path as I was becoming more and more mindful of the shortcomings of the area studies model. Trained in Arab history as an undergraduate student at the American University of Beirut, and in both Middle Eastern and African histories as a graduate student at the University of Alberta in Canada, I saw how such a model was providing us with parochial histories and overlooking larger ones. I was exposed to the history of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf due to my training in African history, and not Arab history, which is still centered on the Mashriq. That exposure came via my work on East Africa. Likewise, my exposure to North Africa was also due to my study of Saharan history. I encountered the Afro-Arab zones of interaction as I was researching the politics of identity of the Omani intellectual elite in the Zanzibar Protectorate, discovering the various connections between East Africa and Oman, and beyond it to the Mashriq and the Maghrib. My doctoral dissertation, then turned into a book that examined the intellectual and political ties between Zanzibar, Oman, Algeria, Egypt, Istanbul, and the Mashriq and the ways those connections shaped the politics of identity of the Omani elite in Zanzibar as a British Protectorate. Out of those connections emerged an Omani intelligentsia strongly tied to the Nahda, the Arab cultural movement of the late 19th an early 20th centuries, and to movements of Islamic reform and pan-Arabism. My work analyzed how Zanzibari nationalism that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s was formulated by the Omani intelligentsia tapping these cross-border connectionns.[5] The book, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s-1930s), was foundational in, and representative of, writing a cross-regional history that incorporates Oman’s and Zanzibar’s modern history into the larger Arab political and intellectual history. That cross-regional history was an Afro-Arab continuum.
Cross-regional and trans-regional research reveals the importance of the network as a historical methodology, and as an alternative to the traditional model of siloed area studies. ّIn this usage, the network is an analytical tool used to “trace connections and interactions across areas and disparate spaces,” and “establish cross-regional links and chart the movement of ideas and people across both physical and historiographical borders.”[6] It consists of interrelated groups with common interests and goals, adhering to the same intellectual lineage and committed to the same causes, with their own system of communication. The growing interest in the field of Indian Ocean Studies and the use of the Indian Ocean littoral as an analytical space stitching together East Africa, South Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula has allowed for the integration of the Arabian Peninsula into the wider region of the Western Indian Ocean, unearthing Afro-Arab dimensions long concealed by the area studies boundaries.
As scholars had started to reconfigure geographic spaces, a few cross-regional research initiatives emerged. The first was by the now defunct MIT Journal of Middle East Studies, with a special issue entitled “Frontier Geography and Boundless History: Islam and Arabs in East Africa – A Fusion of Identities, Networks and Encounters.” The issue examined the marginality of Arab communities in East Africa, describing how those communities “have fallen in the cracks of both Arab geography and African history.” The contributors delineated “new intellectual paradigms that defy existing boudaries of scholarship on Islam and Arabs in that region.”[7] About a decade later, the Journal of Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, published a roundtable on “The Indian Ocean and Other Middle East.” The essays, as the editorial explained,
challenge the traditional frame of Middle East specialists that has tended to foreground the history and politics of the core Ottoman provinces of Egypt, Turkey, and Greater Syria at the cost of other Middle Easts. By taking into account the Indian Ocean, this new set of modern histories centered on the Arabian Peninsula manages to escape the narratives of the “oil curse” by grounding the study of the region in a deeper nineteenth- and early twentieth-century past.[8]
Two years later, The International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) featured a roundtable titled “View from the Seas: The Middle East and North Africa Unbounded,” re-examining disciplinary boundaries through a focus on oceanic turns within Middle East studies. Noting the historic connections between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, “the essays invite us to recalibrate our analytical vision to see a host of different geographic scales.”[9]
In 2020, the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) organized a workshop exploring “the origins of the disciplinary divide between the study of Africa and the Middle East,” and another in 2021, along with the Program on African Social Research, also “centered around the need for a genuinely transregional scholarship, one which rejects artificial divisions between ostensibly autonomous regions…”[10]
These recent initiatives have created a continuum between Africa, the Indian Ocean with the Middle East, and recognized the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf’s historical role as a critical node between the Middle East and the Indian Ocean and thereby centered the Afro-Arab continuum in the scholarship.[11]
The Afro-Arab at Gulf Institutions: A New Paradigm
The writing of Afro-Arab history requires efforts beyond those of individual academics. Fortunately, new institutional initiatives have been launched in the Gulf region (specifically in Sharjah in the Emirates, and in Doha, Qatar.) These projects aim to re-shape the epistemological relationship between “Afro” and “Arab.” The Africa Institute in Sharjah, the Unit for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies are generating new scholarship on Afro-Arab relations. The Africa Institute is breaking new ground by introducing African studies as part of the heritage and larger history of the Gulf. In bringing Africa into the academic landscape of the UAE and the Gulf, this initiative is writing the “Afro” into the “Arab.” The idea of “Afrabia” is at the heart of the Institute’s mission, which understands the Gulf region as “one of mixed populations, in which cultural exchanges manifested in an impressive variety of processes and patterns pertaining to borrowing and assimilation, forced and voluntary migrations, and adaptive strategies, none of which can be fully understood without incorporating Africa into the analysis.”[12] The Africa Institute currently offers an MA in Global African Studies, with three tracks: Museum and Critical Heritage Studies, Diplomacy and Africa’s International Relations, and Afro-Arab relations. Students in three tracks are required to enroll in immersive language courses in one of four African languages: Arabic, Amharic, Hausa, or Kiswahili, thus focusing on the Horn of Africa, West Africa, and East Africa.
Courses within the track of Afro-Arab relations, “offer a critical assessment of the historical socio-cultural relations between Africa and the Arab world.” They address “their diverse historical connections and overlapping histories of solidarity and cooperation, such as the common struggles against colonialism and the emancipatory philosophies and movements that Africa and the Arab world shared.” In a critique of area studies, and political science, the program is described as “[d]eparting from the disciplinary methods of political science that divide African studies, which evolved from the legacies of European colonialism, and Middle Eastern studies, which grew out of European Orientalism…” The Institute offers three types of fellowships, including a senior one named in honor of Ali Mazrui. Reflecting the vision of the Indian Ocean as an Afro-Arab space, the Africa Institute publishes an interdisciplinary journal titled Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, which addresses “a glaring gap in the extant literature on the Indian Ocean rim, which has sidelined African and Gulf societies falling within the region.”
Another initiative that aims at closing the Afro-Arab divide is based in Doha, at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS) and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. In 2022, ACRPS established the Unit for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. While the Unit’s official vision does not include a direct reference to Africa or Afro-Arab relations, it identifies research topics to explore, it publishes research papers,, organizes confences, translates into research on the region into Arabic, and collects oral histories pertaining to the region.[13] Complementing the work and the vision of the Unit is the History Program at the Doha Institute, a sister organization for the Arab Center. It has hired two specialists in Gulf history, one of them is a specialist on the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, thus incorporating the Indian Ocean into the larger vision of the Program whose mandate is training in Arab history.
Initiatives held at the Unit and the Doha Institute have brought the Indian Ocean and Africa into conversation with the Arab region. For example, in April 2023, Ulrike Freitag presented in April 2023 on “Jeddah: An Indian Ocean Port, from the 18th to the 20th Century,” making the case for Jeddah as an Indian Ocean port and arguing that the “Red Sea is historically part of the Indian Ocean.”[14] She demonstrated how the Indian Ocean manifested itself in Jeddah’s urban space and cosmopolitan population. In February 2024, the Doha institute and Rubaiyyat Qatar hosted the conference “Water Ways: Epistemologies and Aethetics,” largely focused on the Indian Ocean. Omran, one of the ACRPS journals, has recently published a special issue based on that conference, featuring articles on Gulf’s maritime history and connections to the Indian Ocean.[15] Moreover, in September 2024, the Doha Institute, in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University, held a conference on “Materiality of Migration in the Indian Ocean and Global Asia,” looking at “connectivities, shared affinities, and art practices that link the Arabian Gulf, Asia and Africa.”[16]
The Way Forward
The Gulf region is undergoing rapid changes, including an expanding university system that is attracting top academics to its universities, who are in turn producing scholarship on Afro-Arab relations. A new public conversation is emerging on Afro-Arab history, as seen for instance in the establishment of such as Bin Jelmood House in Doha, also locally known as the Slavery Museum. The House “provides space for reflection on the story of slavery and how it has evolved into modern forms of human exploitation...”[17] The presence of Bin Jelmood House is in itself an acknowledgement of one particular layer of Afro-Arab relations, albeit a most controversial one. Equally important is the range of discussions that this museum’s presence generates on those relations in the context of the Gulf. All of the initiatives mentioned, whether museums or research and academic institutions, serve to raise awareness of the Afro-Arab continuum in the Gulf, and to write “Afro” into “Arab.”