Arab and Muslim Americans have launched something, and this time, it’s actually good.  What I’m talking about is a new social media campaign to end the use of the word “abed.”  The movement hopes to finally convince Arab Americans that using “abed” (or its plural form “abeed”) is just plain wrong.

The literal translation of “abed” from Arabic is “slave.”  The most common use of the word in Arabic is when it precedes one of the 99 names of God in the Islamic tradition.  First and last names in Arabic commonly start with the term, like Abdul-Rahman, Abdul-Hakeem, and Abdul-Majeed.  In fact, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, African American and Muslim convert Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has the term in his name.

So what’s the big deal? When we Arabs use the word “abed,” we just mean a “slave of God,” right?  Wrong.  “Abed” and “abeed” have come to be used as derogatory, insulting, and belittling.  We should be honest about this.  We should no longer peddle the lie that it’s “no big deal,” or “not that bad.”

Is it as bad as saying the N-word?  That question is, of course, completely irrelevant.  An act need not be as bad as its worst likeness in order to be condemned or done away with.  Zionism need not be as bad as Nazism in order to receive our denunciation.  Israel’s claim that she grants her Arab citizens more rights than Saudi Arabia does is no excuse for her deplorable behavior.  Whether “abed” is better or worse than any other word is of no import at all.

Amer Zahr.

Some in our community use the excuse that we only use the word because we learned it from our parents.  I thought that this was pretty feeble and unconvincing, especially since I have never once heard my father or mother ever use the term, and Arabic is most definitely their first language.  Here in Dearborn, where I now call home, the word is thrown about quite liberally.

So I called my dad, just to ask him why it was never used in our home.  I first asked him if he had used the term as a child as a young man growing up in Jordan.  He told me he had.  I was a little disappointed.  He explained to me that to him, the word simply meant “black,” even when referring to black Arabs who lived in his neighborhood.  In fact, he told me that he remembered a young woman from a black family marrying a young man from a very light-skinned family.  He said no one thought anything of it.  Arabs were Arabs, black or white.  To him, the word carried no bigotry at all, at least not back then.  So if he never saw the word as repulsive at all, why did I never hear him use it?

And this is where I was educated by my father, once again, and surely not for the last time.  He told me that upon his arrival to America in the mid-1970s, where he landed in California and met my mother, also a Palestinian refugee, he learned many new things.  He came to understand that black-white relations were not as simple in America as they might have been in his neighborhood in Jordan.  The discourse of slavery here, especially in the narrative of African Americans, was deep, complicated, and emotional.  Referring to blacks using a word that meant “slaves,” innocently or not, was simply disrespectful and wrong.  It also has the potential to pull us Arab Americans into foolishly seeing ourselves, as many white Americans do, as better than African Americans.

In America today, using the “A-word” is demeaning, under any circumstances.  Perhaps, our parents who grew up back home could say that they didn’t know any better.  But their children should say no such thing.  

— Amer Zahr is an Arab American comedian and writer living in Dearborn.  He is also a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.