Mustafa D. Siam: Arab Tunes Records, Political Activism, and the Struggle for Palestinian Recognition

Mustafa Siam, 1962. Lincoln Heights Bulletin, Newspapers.com

A few months ago, we can across several 45 rpm and 33 rpm records that sparked our curiosity. The “Arab Tunes” label with its logo of a man wearing a keffiyeh and an agal, is one we’d never seen before, but included a Los Angeles, California distribution address printed on the record and the record’s sleeve. The current note in Discogs.com for the Arab Tunes record label reads “was an American Arab label.” The sparsely vague description of the label and non-existent information about its owner, artists, and history are representative of the gaps in information about Arab American recorded music and music of the Greater Syrian diaspora in the United States that led us to establish Midwest Mahjar back in 2018. A relatively small amount of digging reveals that Arab Tunes emerged in the 45 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm era. The company released most of its re-issue vinyl in the 1960s and 1970s from its location in Los Angeles and Hollywood, California. Original songs by Om Kalthum (Egypt), Fahid Ballan (Kuwait), Farid Al-Atrash (Egypt) and Shukry Ayyad (Jordan), or various ensembles became increasing popular in the United States and a number of Arab Americans including Albert Rashid (Al-Chark), Farid Alam (Alamphon), Djamal Aslan (Cinara-phone), and Anthony Abraham (Alkawakeb) tried their hand in the record printing, re-issue, and distribution business. The same held true of the founder and owner of Arab Tunes – Mustafa D. Siam.

Arab Tunes "Music and Melodies of the Arab World," LP-506A. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. 

Mustafa Daoud Siam arrived at the port of New York on 2 November 1956 with his Ramallah-born wife, Siham Isa, and their son, Mazin. Mustafa was born 12 June 1929 in Jerusalem, Palestine. By age ten, the Great Palestinian Revolt against British occupation ceased, and young Mustafa professed an interest in and desire to go to the United States. Life in British-mandated Palestine seemed uncertain as the British proposed a Palestine divided between Arabs and Jews. Mustafa learned both Arabic and English in school and after he came of age, he served in Jordan’s Signal Corps installing radio equipment in East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. After annexation in 1950, Siam considered his earlier desire to go to the United States. He married in 1954; his wife had their first child in 1955, and by 1956, Siham, Mazin, and he, along with thousands of other Palestinian refugees, left. 

 

Mustafa D. Siam's Petition for Naturalized Citizenship. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

Having loss their home and leaving relatives behind, the Siam family lived in a few different cities before making their way to California. Much of New York City’s Arab American community centered around Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1956. Forced displacement of Manhattan’s Little Syria by construction of the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel meant the lower-west Manhattan neighborhood was then a shadow of its former self. The Siams did not stay in New York for long and they boarded a train and settled in Cleveland, Ohio.  In Ohio, Mustafa put his knowledge of radio electronics to work and learned how to repair televisions. He and Siham had a second child, Murad, born in Cleveland in 1957. After two years of learning everything he could about the inner workings of the television, Mustafa and Siham moved their family to the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. 

 

In Los Angeles, Mustafa ventured into a number of businesses. With business partner Arthur O. Gregory, Jr. he started Art & Sam’s Day and Nite T.V. Service at 239 North Avenue 50. Within a few months, the partnership dissolved and rebranded the business as Sam’s T.V. Service. He joined the local Optimist Club, a service organization dedicated to improving the lives of young people in their communities. Siam was placed in charge of “Youth Appreciation Week” activities including its annual breakfast and award ceremony.  As a separate venture from the same business address, Siam created Silwani & Company, specializing in imported gifts and goods from the Middle East and the Holy Land.  In the midst of the Cold War politics, Mustafa Siam once explained to a reporter, “We are not pro-Western. We are not pro-Communist. We are pro-Arabian.”

Mustafa Siam's Shop, August 10, 1958, Highland Park News Herald and Journal Sun. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

As a second-wave Arab, Muslim, immigrant, Mustafa Siam joined and helped develop a number of Muslim cultural and political institutions in Los Angeles and southern California. Founded in 1949 as the Los Angeles Moslem Association of America, Siam joined and rose through the ranks of the Association to become president by 1963. Membership was approximately 200 and made up of members from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Siham and Mustafa Siam joined the Islamic Center of Southern California, founded in 1953, and became one of its most dedicated families. Absent from this membership in the Association and the Center, of course, were African American Muslims who were members of the Nation of Islam. When Los Angeles police shot and killed Nation of Islam member Ronald T. Stokes and wounded seven others Muslims on April 27, 1963, Siam, as head of the local Moslem Association of America, disassociated himself from the Nation and its members referring to them as source of “embarrassment and distress” to Muslims in Los Angeles and globally. Ironically, it was the Ronald Stokes killing by police that politicized Malcolm X in such a way that his discussion about the criminalization of African Americans as a rationale for police and state violence against black people resonates to this day. Siam also became a member of a group called the United Arab American Congress, another called the Federation of Arab American Organizations, and he edited The Palestinian Voice. Eventually, in 1976, Mustafa Siam sat down with Adbul Karim Haddan of Muhammed’s Mosque on Channel 12’s “Black Perspective on the News” to explore that varied differences and similarities in how Islam is practiced by various Middle Easterners and African Americans. 

Arab Tunes "Music for Belly Dancers" record. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. 

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Arab Tunes "Authentic Arabic Music Solo Oud," Uncredited Musician. 45 rpm Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection.

https://youtu.be/XAbe_Y9pVmk

Arab Tunes "Authentic Arabic Music Solo Naye," Uncredited Musician. 45 rpm Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection.
https://youtu.be/cE8SIgK1-qk

Arab Tunes records label emerged as the brainchild of Mustafa Siam and seems to have operated between 1962 and 1974. It appears to have been a reissue label featuring the music of Umm Kulthum, Farid Al-Atrash, Fahd Ballan, Mohammed Abdel Wahad, Abdel Halim Hafez, Shukry Ayyad, and a host of other Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, and Jordanian musicians. Although some of the re-issue albums on Arab Tunes spotlight certain musicians several of the albums on this label include instrumental songs by uncredited ensembles. Arab Tunes released music on both 45 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm vinyl. The combination of the dub quality and the condition of the discs in our collection suffers, yet it remains important to preserve what the technology allows. That we can determine, they did not issue 78 rpm records. Siam’s Silwani & Company distributed all of the musical content and some of the releases not specific to a particular musician included titles like Music for Belly Dancers and Music and Melodies of the Arab World. In October 1973, Silwani & Company hosted, “A Night To Remember” at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium featuring Lebanese/Palestinian singer Mohamed Jamal, Egyptian actress and singer Sharifa Fadel, and the dancer Nadia Fuad. 

 

Silwani & Company ad for musical event, Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1973. Courtesy of Newspapers.com 

Although changes to US immigration policy precipitated a third wave of Arab American immigrants after 1965, many charged that the FBI launched surveillance campaigns against Arab Americans in the 1970s and 1980s that amounted to witch hunts, among those leveling these charges against the FBI was Mustafa Siam. Over forty years after the Immigration/Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 limited the number of Syrians who could enter the United States in any given year, Congress changed the immigration quotas for the number of people who could now enter the country. Members of several groups, including American Syrian Lebanese Clubs celebrated and hailed these newer, non-ethnic or non-race specific, legislation. Within years however, President Richard M. Nixon and the FBI initiated sweeps of Arab American communities under the name “Operation Boulder” to question Arab Americans in the immediate aftermath 1972 Olympic hostage crisis. Palestinian members of Black September killed eleven Israelis athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. Siam emerged as one of several Arab Americans to criticize such sweeps. The FBI targeted Siam as one of the first it interviewed and spoke to, Siam maintained, “every active Arab in the country, whether citizens, resident or non-immigrant students [had] been visited by either the FBI” or Immigration and Naturalization Service. Three years previously, writing on behalf of the United American Arab Congress, Mustafa Siam and Issa Marcos reminded President Nixon of the former Presidents Johnson's and Truman's pledged support to independence and territorial integrity consistent with the United Nation’s Mid-East Resolutions. Moreover, they reminded Nixon of the Arab world’s historical significance in Morocco being the first nation to recognize US independence, yet failure of the US to complicity in “creating Israel on Arab soil, the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland, and [it’s] continued partiality to Israel” which drove Arab countries toward dependence on Soviet Union. The result in Middle East conflict, they warned, could draw the United States and Soviet Russia into World War III. 

During the mid-1970s, Mustafa Siam's monthly newspaper, the Palestinian Voice, became a target of the Jewish Defense League. On February 18, 1975, an unidentified member of the Jewish Defense League deposited a bomb consisting of a timer and three sticks of dynamite outside the offices of the Palestinian Voice on Hollywood Boulevard. The building's manager believed the unmarked plastic bag was rubbish and carried it to the curb, looked in to discover the bag's contents, and notified police. The LAPD bomb squad cordoned off two blocks surrounding the building and safely removed the bag - fortunately no one was injured or killed. Mustafa Siam held the Jewish Defense League, which had bombed the Lebanese Consulate in Los Angeles in June 1973 and April 1974, responsible for the attempt.

Mustafa Siam mentioned in a news brief in the 20 October 1963 Highland Parker News. Courtesy of Newspapers.com 

By 1980, Mustafa Siam counted himself among the twenty-nine who forged solidarities between the Federation of American-Arab Organizations and the Arab People To American People who penned “An Open Letter to Senatorial Candidates Alan Cranston and Paul Gann and the People of California” in opposition to American military aid to Israel and the selling of instruments of war to Arabs in the Middle East. As head of the Arab American Civil Rights Committee of Los Angeles, Mustafa Siam opposed the “manhunts on television and radio” of person in his community of over 200,000 Arabs in and around the city he called home. Dearborn, Michigan resident Ismael Ahmed, co-founder of ACCESS government efforts to terrorize Arab Americans by labelling “all Arabs as terrorists” who were part of a “Libyan hit-squad out to get Ronald Reagan.” In 1988, Mustafa Siam stood amongst those in the Arab American Democratic Club of Los Angeles advocating for a “Palestinian state in the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.” The California Democratic Party leadership rejected this recommendation.

 

Siam no longer distributed Arab Tune Records by the 1990s, as United Arab Congress President and owner of the Arab News Agency in Northridge, California, he vocally opposed the proposition that the United States police the Middle East or interfere in Iraqi affairs related to Kuwait. Over the centuries, Kuwait went being part Sassanid Empire to Rashidun Caliphate to Portuguese control to an autonomous Ottoman district and British protectorate. Previous to British-mandated unification of its three provinces and Iraqi independence in 1932, Iraq was part of Mesopotamia. The British, Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis struggled for control of Kuwait and much of the Kuwaiti population fought against British separation of Iraq and Kuwait in the 1930s. Since 1961, Iraq refused to acknowledge Kuwait’s independence and following war between Iraq and Iran from 1980-1988, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait using military force.  Whether this was an attempt to not repay debt, attempted reunification, depressed Iraqi revenue, all of these or something else, remains the subject of speculation and debate. Iraq was one of the charter members of the United Nations and Kuwait joined the UN in 1963. This is largely why Mustafa Siam argued, “The United Nations is the place to mobilize what should be done. The US is the bully of the world, they should work through the U.N.” According to Siam, many people in Iraq viewed Saddam Hussein as “savior-like figure” with a level of reverence and respect reserved for eleventh-century Arab leader Saladin. In the end, the United States-led coalition of 35 countries prevented the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. 

 

As Mustafa Siam entered his 60s, he either slowed down and attracted less press coverage or his community work drew less of the press’s attention, so he faded from the public spotlight. Newspapers say nothing about him as the Gulf War coverage disappeared from headlines in the United States. He and Siham became grandparents and eventually had five grandchildren.  Mustafa Siam died May 31, 1999. The brief announcement in the Los Angeles Times said nothing about his years of political activism, community organizing, or his life as a business man. Siham lived almost another twenty-two years. In the city's Arab American Muslim community, she had come to be known as “Um Mazin.” Her years working as a breakfast-shift cook at Valley Hospital Medical Center in Van Nuys, her regular attendance at Islamic Center of Southern California, and her work with the Palestinian American Women’s Association speak to the various ways she remained committed to her community. 

 

Had we not come across our first Arab Tune record, the story of this politically active and dedicated family would have continued to be unknown to us. Their story serves as a reminder that phonograph records not only posses the voices, music, and stories related to a song’s content, but information about how our friends, relatives, and neighbors of Arab descent have contributed to and shaped our larger cultural, social, and political landscape.

 

Richard M. Breaux

 

 

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