Jonathan Curiel is a journalist in San Francisco and the author
of Al' America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots
(The New Press). As a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, he
has had his journalism on Arabs and Muslims honored by Columbia
University's Graduate School of Journalism. He has taught as a
Fulbright scholar at Pakistan's Punjab University and researched
the history of Islamic architecture as a Thomason Reuters
Foundation Research Fellow at England's Oxford University. He lives
in San Francisco, California.
Amid a heightened wave of xenophobia directed at Arabs and Muslims,
San Francisco Chronicle writer Curiel reminds readers of a rich
store of cultural borrowings and relationships that have gone deep
into the very fabric of American society, including its most
precious symbols and artifacts. While many will readily recall the
Arabic strains in 1960s rock groups like the Doors, less obvious is
the formative personal background at work in a classic like
Miserlou (Turkish for The Egyptian) by Dick Dale. Still fewer
Americans are likely aware of the blues' significant debt to Arab
and Muslim musical traditions (imported by Muslim West Africans
kidnapped into slavery). While the relative interest and import of
these and other examples varies, Curiel's cultural odyssey moves
swiftly and engagingly across time and geography, as he excavates
everything from the Moorish architecture of New Orleans and the
Alamo to the stories of the Arab and Muslim victims among the 9/11
World Trade Center dead. His research and focused interviews with
leading scholars and musicians yield many surprises and leave
little doubt about a crucial historical connection too easily
forgotten in facile appeals to American identity.
Jon Curiel author of Al' America: Travels Through America's Arab
and Islamic Roots wins 2008 American Book Award.
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