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Migration: Muslim Diasporas
South America
Contemporary Muslim communities in South
America have been primarily composed of early
and mid-twentieth century immigrants and their
descendents from Lebanon, Syria, and, to a lesser
extent, Palestine. There are, of course, significant
numbers of South Asian Muslims in the circum-
Caribbean nations of South America, namely
Suriname and Guyana as well as recent converts to
Islam throughout the region, but these communities
are not addressed in this entry (see Ahsani 1984,
Bruijne 1979, Manuel 2000, Williams 1991).
Rather than taking shape through their identifica-
tion with a point of origin or source of authenticity
in the Arab and Islamic worlds, the Muslim dias-
pora in South America has been produced out of
the particular histories, everyday lives, and socio-
cultural exchanges of Arab Muslims themselves,
most visibly concentrated in Argentina and Brazil.
Arab Muslims comprised a small but significant
percentage of the total number of early twentieth-
century immigrant waves, estimated at between 10
and 15 percent of Middle Easterners in Argentina
and Brazil. Carrying Ottoman Sultanate travel
papers, Arab men and women were labeled as tur-
cos and turcas (Turks) by South American masses
and elites. By the late nineteenth century, limited
numbers of mostly male immigrants attained a
striking presence in peddling. Yet the turca vende-
dora (female Turk seller) was a particularly shock-
ing sight for belle époque Argentines unaccustomed
to working women, native or foreign (Bertoni
1994, 69). Like early twentieth-century pioneers,
post-Second World War immigrants became store
owners and small-scale industrialists. Women were
crucial to such upward mobility, especially in the
daily affairs of stores and households. Take, for
example, a Sunni Muslim Lebanese woman who
immigrated to help an older brother and his ped-
dling coterie in Brazil in the mid-1940s (cited
in Osman 1998, 51–68): “While the men would
go . . . peddling,” she recounts, “I would say at
home, washing, ironing, cooking, and going to the
farmer’s market.” After marrying one of her
brother’s friends, she “got the taste for business” as
a seamstress, making a dress for a friend who
announced to other Brazilians that it was pur-
chased na Turca (in the female Turk’s [business]).
The entrepreneur concluded: “it was like this that I
got good clientele and a nickname.” In the coming
years, the family business expanded, and she con-
tinued to work in the clothing store, raise children,
and take care of household chores. Women thus
exercised central roles in family accumulation
strategies, but they have been almost ignored by
masculinized (and stereotypical) representations of
the “Arab peddler” in South American plays, nov-
els, and films (see Bestene 1994, Civantos 2001,
Karam 2004).
In the upwardly mobile immigrant generation,
women were limited to store spaces and/or home
environs. Carrying out research among Alawi
Syrian immigrants in the Tucumán province of
Argentina, Assali found that men gained literacy in
the Spanish language due to the public nature of
business while women learned only how to speak,
but not read or write (1989, 38–41). Yet this lin-
guistic and spatial containment of women shifted in
the second generation. In Assali’s study, Argentine-
born daughters and sons in immigrant families
were each taught how to speak Arabic in family and
religious circles – especially through reciting
prayers and verses – but their mother tongue was
Spanish, not Arabic. Though code-switching with
Arabic continues in religious spaces, descendants
have been overwhelmingly educated in public or
private schools whose primary language of instruc-
tion is Spanish or Portuguese. Indicative of
Christian-laden nativism in early twentieth-century
South America, a Muslim female student was once
deemed “heretical” by her instructors (Jozami
1996, 80–1). However, education has been used by
women to practice medicine, law, and other pro-
fessions in the second and third generations.
Especially through educational and professional
mobility, Muslim women have demonstrated an
empowered but private awareness of their dias-
poric and religious origins.
In recreational and romantic affairs, however,
women have been closely monitored. Immigrant
parents granted considerable liberty to sons, but
exerted far more control over daughters out of fear
that they would marry outside the Muslim commu-
nity. Based on a survey with 106 Middle Easterners
in six provinces in Argentina, Adelouahed Akmir
found that exogamy has been a privilege for “bach-
elors, almost never women” (1997, 90). Akmir
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migration: muslim diasporas
reflected that “some Muslim women of this [sec-
ond] generation” did not consider religion an
obstacle in marriage, but “what truly impeded the
matrimony with Christians was the wrong concept
that the community formed around them (women
[sic]), since Islam prohibits the marriage of a
Muslim woman with a person of another religion.”
He added that some asked their non-Muslim suit-
ors to pretend to be Muslim while others accepted
the religion of their husbands and “saw themselves
obligated to diminish their contacts with the
Muslim community or . . . definitively cut them”
(Akmir 1997, 94). Women, and not men, were thus
forced to marry within the Muslim diaspora, and if
doing otherwise, could risk being marginalized by
patriarchal standards.
Such patriarchy has been upheld by the Brazilian
state as well (see Karam 2004a, 193–5). A federal
immigration official, for instance, explained that
most Muslim Lebanese men are granted residency,
and later citizenship, through their marriage to
Brazilian-born Muslim Lebanese women. But the
state official qualified that he has never personally
spoken with any of these women, rather, their
fathers or brothers have customarily come to speak
with him about the details of a given visa applica-
tion. When not obligated to wed South American-
born Muslim men, women have been married to
co-religionist migrants with the implicit support of
Brazilian state powers (2004, 193–5).
Today, this gender hierarchy has shifted to a lim-
ited degree. Among the majority of third genera-
tion Argentine Arabs who have wed non-Arabs,
Akmir notes that there are “cases of Muslim
women married, by way of civil ceremony, with
members of other religions” (1997, 97). It is, how-
ever, doubtful whether exogamous Muslim women
take up positions within community institutions,
such as mosques, clubs, charity leagues, or schools.
In Brazil, Muslim men who marry non-Muslims
are welcomed and sometimes desire to participate
in such entities. In addition, non-Muslim wives of
Muslim men who convert to Islam are welcomed
by male leaders (Karam 2004, 202–4). But this
inclusion has not been afforded to Muslim women
who marry non-Muslims or who reject male
standards of Muslimness, such as wearing the
headscarf in certain circumstances. This double
standard seems unlikely to change, especially given
its long history. Since the majority of Muslim immi-
grants since the late nineteenth century have been
men, male exogamy has been endemic to South
American Muslim communities, a tendency ac-
knowledged by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars
alike.
7
This politics of gender is evident in Muslim char-
ity institutions founded in the first half of the twen-
tieth century. In Brazil, the Muslim Beneficent
Society was established in 1924, and began con-
structing South America’s first mosque in 1929
(Hajjar 1985, 81–2). Only men, however, have
been recognized as founding the mosque (Duoun
1944, 221–2, Delval 1992, 217–18). In Argentina,
the Pan Islamic Association was founded in 1923,
the Druze Society of Beneficence in 1927, and the
Pan Allawite Islamic Association of Beneficence in
1929 (Bestene 1992, 119). According to a Arab-
run Argentine newspaper in 1932, such entities
aimed to strengthen the “union and friendship of
resident Muslims in Argentina, to present a defen-
sive front against propaganda averse to their beliefs
and [to promote] the protection and assistance of
orphans, widows and all needy in their commu-
nity” (Bestene 1992, 119). Such self-help organiza-
tions were useful both to new arrivals and to the
upwardly mobile strategies of more established
individuals in these communities.
Especially since the 1970s, numerous mosques,
clubs, and centers have been established by Sunni
and Shi≠i Muslims in Argentina, Brazil, and
Venezuela, often with aid from Saudi Arabia and
other Middle Eastern states (Ahsani 1984, Islamic
Studies Center 1992, Delval 1992, 218–32,
251–69). In these institutions, men have regularly
controlled public and material affairs while women
have been relegated to female departments or com-
mittees. This containment of women is evident
in day-to-day affairs as well. In a country club
founded by Sunni Muslim Lebanese immigrants in
São Paulo, second and third generation women
have criticized the invidious comparisons made by
club members, and more specifically, the liberty
given to male youth in clothing and sports while
they themselves have been expected to dress and act
in “modest ways” (Osman 1998, 149, 175–6,
195–6). This club, Sunni Muslim owned and oper-
ated, thus serves as a space for second and third
generation young men to negotiate their autonomy
as well as for second and third generation young
women to be monitored and encouraged to marry
within the community.
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John Tofik Karam
Keywords
professional mobility, diasporic institutions, Argentina,
Brazil, trade, immigrants, Arab Diaspora, benevolent
associations, modesty, small businesses