The Troubling Persistence of the “Arab Sheikh”

How a tired—and offensive—cliche shines a light on the West’s perception of Arabs

by J.D. Harlock

Dressed in a dishdasha, keffiyeh, and dark aviator sunglasses, a rotund man gyrates his way onto a scene of gross opulence. You need not know his social status, nor his ethnicity, nor even the source of his ample wealth—because as soon as you take one look at him, you know that this is an Arab Sheikh, and his money comes from oil.

The Arab Sheikh is one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable stock characters in Western media, appearing in everything from action thrillers (Taken) to sitcoms (The Nanny) to video games (Hitman: Blood Money), and even finding a comfy home for himself in children’s entertainment (Tintin: Land of Black Gold). This particular depiction of Arab men was popularized by the 1919 romance novel The Sheikh by E.M. Hull, in which an English noblewoman is “romantically” kidnapped by a North African sheikh and “romantically” raped by him, before finally “romantically” running for her life, being recaptured, and ultimately coming to realize that she loves The Sheikh just as much as he loves her. After some more trials and tribulations, the two of them live “romantically” ever after for the rest of their days.

Although controversial even in its own time, The Sheikh was an instant bestseller (selling around 1.2 million copies by the end of the decade) and inspired a slew of imitators. This surprising popularity led to a silent film adaptation in 1921 that made some efforts to temper the more extreme aspects of the material, while making other changes that resulted in their own unfortunate implications. The film was itself a major success, attaining blockbuster status and helping to solidify the American public’s appetite for Arabesque assault, battery, and rape, while launching the career of its star Rudolph Valentino (who played the titular Sheik) as one of the first Hollywood sex symbols. The film even inspired a hit song, “The Sheik of Araby”, a verse of which appears in The Great Gatsby of all places:

“I’m the Sheik of Araby.
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re asleep
Into your tent I’ll creep—”

The cultural impact of The Sheikh was so widespread that by the Twenties, “Sheikh” had become slang for young, hip lotharios, albeit ones who presumably did not indulge in kidnapping and rape, unlike their fictional namesake.

This early-20th Century stereotype might have remained just one of many similar and equally racist narrative devices in the history of film and romance fiction were it not for a series of historical events that dramatically shifted the West’s perception of Arabs, taking it from one rooted in Arabian Nights-derived cliches to one more focused on uniquely 20th Century geopolitical bigotry.

The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia transformed it into a focus of geopolitics.

In 1938, an American-owned oil well in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was found to have tapped into the largest known source of petroleum at the time. This was a discovery that would fundamentally change the social, political, and economic order of the kingdom, the Middle East, and the world at large. The revelation of vast mineral wealth transformed what had once been one of many objects of colonial dominion into something else entirely: a central focus of global geopolitics. Ten years later, the beginning of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict saw America staunchly backing Israel as the Arabs stuck by their Arab brethren. This was followed by the Saudi-led oil embargo in 1973—a move which targeted nations that the kingdom perceived to have supported Israel in the Six Day War—and the Islamic revolution and subsequent hostage crisis in Iran in 1979.

Taken as a whole, these historical events further molded the image of the Arab sheikh in the Western mind. It also fed into a popular conspiracy that Arabs were “buying up America” with the intention of somehow destroying it with both their wealth and culture.

Nowhere was this paranoia more prominently featured than in the 1976 Sidney Lumet film Network, in which unstable TV anchor Howard Beale rises to superstardom through his fiery on-air rants. The most damning of these targets Arabs explicitly, going so far as to ask the American people to stop them from buying his network:

“We all know that the Arabs control $16 billion of this country. They own a chunk of Fifth Avenue, 20 downtown pieces of Boston, a part of the Port of New Orleans, an industrial park in Salt Lake City, they own big hunks of the Atlanta Hilton, the Arizona Land and Cattle Company, part of a bank of California… […] Right now, the Arabs have screwed us out of enough American dollars to come right back and—with our own money—buy General Motors, IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, U.S. Steel, and 20 other American companies. Hell, they already own half of England! So, listen to me. Listen to me, God damn it. The Arabs are simply buying us!”

Beale’s audience responds with one of the most famous scenes in film history, in which the American people begin shouting at the top of their lungs from their balconies, calling on their government to stop the “Arab buyout of America”.

Within the film, this stunt raises the ire of a force even more powerful and toxic than racism: capitalism. Shortly after Beale’s broadcast, network chairman Arthur Jenson summons Beale to his office and proceeds to simultaneously salvage the buyout and summarily dismantle the anchor’s ludicrous notions, albeit by replacing them with his equally ludicrous “corporate cosmology”:

“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Especially unusual for the era in which the film was released, Network makes it clear that Arabs are merely convenient scapegoats towards which to direct America’s anger. But decades later, little has changed: the media is awash with stories featuring seedy Arab sheikhs shaking their flabby hands in back rooms with rogue far-right generals or greedy industrialists who have betrayed the true spirit of American international relations. The video game industry in particular has kept this archetype alive and well, managing to feature it in everything from platformers (Mega Man 6) to hack and slash (Maken X) to JRPGs (Mother 3), as well as countless American games, from first person shooters to military strategy games—and the fact that the examples I listed are neither American nor even Western shows just how pervasive the stereotype has become.

The sheik reveals Western writers’ attitudes towards the Arab bourgeoisie.

That’s because the Arab sheikh is one of the first images conjured up by westerners of Arab men, a grotesque amalgamation of decadent wealth and ethnic vulgarity. Western viewers are meant to gawk in awe at the “exotic” lifestyle they lead while at the same time turning up their nose at the spectacle. Take for example the second episode of Showtime’s Homeland. Though the Arab sheikh in question, Prince Farid Bin Abbud of Saudi Arabia, does not appear in person in the scene that introduces his arc, his “consort”, American informant Lynn Reed, interviews young girls in Washington, D.C., for the Prince’s harem—it’s a scene that’s meant to both entice and repulse the American viewer, slowly building moment after moment of “outrageousness” until finally culminating in the chicly dressed consort lightly groping the crotch of a topless interviewee dressed only in her underwear to inform her that the prince prefers his women shaved. The scene ends with the informant making contact with Homeland’s protagonist, and serves little narrative purpose other than to exoticize the sheik.

The fact that the sheikh is the only depiction of the Arab upper class that Western media ever shows implicitly reveals Western writers’ attitudes towards the Arab bourgeoisie. The Arab bourgeoisie is seen by American media to be undeserving of its wealth, for no other reason than not adhering to a Western standard for the upper class—even though the stereotype is based on the conspicuous consumption of Western symbols of wealth (golden Ferraris, Prada sunglasses, Rolex watches, etc.). And it is telling that that this indulgence on the part of Arabs is never portrayed as a sign of progress or even openness to other cultures, but as a means to reinforce the inherent corruption of wealthy Arabs who are either portrayed as bumbling, incompetent buffoons lusting after sexually promiscuous Western women or vile, lecherous schemers with nefarious intentions for the West and its allies. If a writer is being particularly ambitious and wants to imbue this character with some depth, he’ll have them be both, and call it day.

But the Arab sheikh is only one side of the dinar. Muslims are either dirt poor or dirt rich—the “simple poor folk” advancing the west’s interests, as in Rambo III and its dedication to the “gallant people of Afghanistan,” or wealthy villains and buffoons, or both, gorging themselves on the finest food, drink, and women the Western world has to offer, oblivious and/or indifferent to the socio-economic and political situation outside of their flimsy tents.

This simplification is also a neat trick, which serves to shift the blame for the ever-deteriorating state of the Middle East away from the West and on to the shoulders of this stereotyped Arab bourgeoisie. Neither the military-industrial complex nor the West’s aggressive support of zionism are ever to blame for the state of the Arab world; only the lazily-written gyrating sheikhs, dehumanized by being made cartoonish or cartoonishly evil. The Arab bourgeoisie as a whole is thus elevated to the role of conspirators or even architects of Arab and Western decline, all while multinational oil corporations vie for oil fields from which the average Arab will never see even one dinar or lira, and the military-industrial complex transforms the Middle East into a perpetual battlefield that the transnational arms and security elite are more than willing to cater to.

Of course.