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Over the past five years, I have been privileged to get to know several members of the Syrian refugee community around the DC area. I first met these families as a high school student studying Arabic; I was looking for ways to practice Arabic, and they were looking for ways to practice English. Also around that time, I and members of my church community were hosting monthly Arabic language dinners. Soon, we invited these refugee families to join us, and Middle East Friends was born. Middle East Friends (MEF) was a monthly, cultural exchange program in which members of my church community and the refugee community would tour a prominent cultural site in DC followed by a communal meal. We would pay some of the refugee families to cater the meal for us. These monthly dinners, as well as occasions in which we were invited to our Syrian friends’ homes for dinner and an annual multicultural Thanksgiving, are some of the most formative experiences I had in high school. In particular, I was struck by our refugee friends’ incredible generosity and the continual welcome that they extended to us even though they were the newcomers. These experiences of hospitality, of inviting and being invited into homes, of sharing meals, and of exchanging stories and traditions taught me the power of hospitality as a community-building force. Hospitality fostered diverse friendships, integration without assimilation, and an environment of mutual respect and benefit. Based on my own experiences, as well as research, I believe that by practicing hospitality, residents of the United States can move beyond barriers and politicized rhetoric and into community with their neighbors.
In today’s society, immigrants and refugees are often caught in the rhetorical crossfire between polarized political parties and ideologies. A 2018 Atlantic article called immigration “the most prominent wedge issue in America” (Thompson). On one side, many clamor for bans and walls because of fears over job loss and increased drug and crime rates. On the other side, many demand an opening of the country because of the economic and cultural benefits that immigrants and refugees provide. Many still harbor frustration and resentment from the 2008 recession, and Trump’s polarizing presidency only exacerbated this divide. In addition, fear and mistrust toward Muslim refugees and immigrants in particular lingers twenty years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These factors, although by no means comprehensive, have contributed toward the complicated attitudes toward refugees and immigrants in the U.S. today.
In 2018, in the midst of Donald Trump’s presidency and increasing anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe, theologian and professor Dr. Matthew Kaemingk published Christain Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear. In his book, Kaemingk examines varying attitudes toward immigration in the West, from fear-based nationalism to idealized multiculturalism, and argues instead for a new approach: Christian pluralism rooted in hospitality.
Kaemingk begins his book with an overview of the clash between Islam and liberal Europe and the gradual shift in Europeans’ attitudes away from multiculturalism and integration and toward monoculturalism and assimilation. In 2011, politicians such as Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy “began to argue that Europe needed to stand up for secular liberalism and force Islam to a point of deicsion—either integrate or go home” (Kaemingk 30). These politicians voiced the popular public opinion of the day (Kaemingk 10-11):
“Islam—not Europe—must change. Europe is taken for granted. Europe is the end of history. Europe has settled, once and for all, the fundamental questions of sex, family, politics, religion, and the good life. The proper task of the European state is to educate Muslims on the answers they have already found."
Rather than seeking to accommodate the differences that Islam brough to the table, Europeans wanted to either eradicate the difference or exclude Muslims entirely. They lost faith in the rhetoric of multiculturalism and called for complete assimilation.
Over the past several decades, the U.S. has undergone a similar shift in attitude toward Muslims. After 9/11, the U.S.’ goal became the “reformulation of Islam,” as professor of Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad writes in Becoming American? : The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America. The U.S. government sought to “identify, one might even say create, a ‘moderate Islam,’ one that is definitively different from that espoused by those who perpetrated the attacks and justified their actions by reference to the religion of Islam” (Haddad 1). In 2016, five years after Merkel, Cameron, and Sarkozy’s consensus about Muslims in Europe, U.S. president Donald Trump called “not only to halt all Islamic immigration into the United States but to form a national database to register and track all Muslims in the country” (Kaemingk 31). What would have been “roundly condemned by both parties as bigoted and fundamentally anti-American” is now representative of the current opinion (31).
In both Europe and the U.S., popular opinion now calls for hegemony and uniformity, even as people claim to celebrate diversity. Even as Western culture celebrates diversity of color, religion, sexuality, and political ideologies, it seeks to smother the differences presented by those whose beliefs and traditions clash with progressive morality and uniformity. This tension can create a deeply hostile environment for immigrants and refugees who come from very different backgrounds and for whom cultural and religious customs and ideologies are foundational to a sense of identity.
Here, it is important to note that Kaemingk’s book focuses on Muslim immigration in pariticular. He does not speak as much to the experiences of non-Muslim immigrants and refugees in the West. Because of my interests in Arabic and the Middle East, and because of my connections with several Muslim, Middle Eastern refugee families, I am especially interested in their experiences and Western attitudes toward them. That being said, I want to acknowledge that not all Arab immigrants and refugees are Muslim, and some aren’t religious at all. One of the refugee families that I interviewed for this project comes from a Christian background, and I have met many others with diverse beliefs. “Muslim” refers to an individual that adheres to the beliefs of Islam. “Arab” refers to “all who speak the Arabic language and identify with Arab history and culture, regardless of whether they are Muslims, Christians, or Jews” (Haddad 17). Regardless of an immigrant or refugee’s religious or personal beliefs, however, the importance of extending hospitality does not change; instead, it becomes even more important because it is a demonstration of unconditional welcome.
Because the West has turned to such a binary “assimilate or leave” mindset to cope with difference, Kaemingk introduces an alternative route, calling instead for a Christian pluralist counterculture to question majority opinions and establish a culture of hospitality and welcome.1 He wants his readers to see “what the politics of walls and doors have been missing all along: a table” (305). “Well-functioning tables,” he writes, “will not dissolve our differences, but they will dissolve our hierarchies. Well-functioning tables will encourage both guests and hosts to shed their labels and begin to call each other by a new name, a category unknown in modern political theory—friend” (305).
This concept of hospitality, of well-functioning tables, has the potential to change how Westerners view newcomers, especially newcomers from the Arab world. It is time that this practice with such a rich history in the Middle East integrates into Western culture.
Research today repeatedly points to the benefits of contact between residents of a country and immigrants in terms of public perceptions and attitudes toward those newcomers. In a journal article published after 9/11, author and researcher Kathleen Moore writes that “public attitudes about immigration to the United States as a whole are fairly negative, yet people who can count an immigrant among their friends and family are comparatively satisfied with current levels of immigration.” According to her findings, “inter-group relations will benefit from an increase in opportunities for positive interactions across ethnic and religious boundaries.” A 2018 study published in Ethnic and Religious Studies found that “contact between majority and minority group members reduce[s] prejudice towards minority group members (Allport 1954). Based on this theory greater contact with Muslims reduce[s] anti-Muslim sentiment” (Marfouk). This study calls for “public policies that reduce individuals’ fear of immigration and promote tolerance, anti-racism, multiculturalism and positive attitudes to refugees could help to reduce Europeans’ resistance to Muslims’ immigration.”
Although beneficial, I would argue that policies are not enough. If people rely on policies and political leaders to facilitate change, they will not take action themselves. It is up to individuals and communities to foster an environment in which immigrants, refugees, and citizens alike can build diverse connections and grow in mutual appreciation and trust. In my own experience, supported by my research, and as indicated by the refugee individuals whom I interviewed, hospitality is the best means by which these connections can be facilitated and the barriers of fear and mistrust broken down.
Hundreds, if not thousands of authors and thinkers have developed their own definitions of hospitality. Different contexts can contribute to these different interpretations, and it would be too confusing and take too long to explain them all. The Routledge Handbook of Hospitality Studies might be a good place to start if that’s what you are interested in. But for the purposes of this paper, I am primarily interested in hospitality as it relates to interactions between hosts and guests in a home or homelike setting.
Conrad Lashley, editor of the Handbook, writes in his introduction that in its basic form hospitality in the domestic sphere “involves supplying food, drink, and accommodation to people who are not members of the household” (3). This provision is an “act of friendship” that “creates symbolic ties between people [and] establish[es] bonds among those involved in sharing hospitality” (3). Although an important aspect of hospitality, food, drink, and accommodation are core physical needs, and providing them to people outside the household are, as Kant suggests, a right and a duty due any stranger (Westmoreland 4). According to this interpretation, the only hospitality a stranger should expect is “not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (Westmoreland, quoting Kant, 4). But an absence of hostility, even if coupled with basic provisions, is not hospitality; it is a requirement. Genuine hospitality, that which establishes bonds of friendship and community, extends beyond this fundamental requirement.2 As 18th century lawyer, politician, and food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin puts it, “To entertain a guest is to make yourself responsible for his happiness as long as he is beneath your roof” (Telfer 57). Hospitality requires a degree of emotional engagement in which a host endeavors to make his or her guests feel safe, at ease, and happy — inasmuch as that host is capable of doing so.
Genuine hospitality requires responsibilities on the host’s part, but what makes a good host? According to Elizabeth Telfer in “The Philosophy of Hospitableness,” a good host is someone with appropriate motives. Telfer writes (61),
“[H]ospitable motives are those in which concern for the guests’ pleasure and welfare, for its own sake, is predominant, or where hosts and guests freely exchange hospitality for mutual enjoyment and benefit. And hospitable people, those who possess the trait of hospitableness, are those who often entertain from one or more of these motives, or from mixed motives in which one of these motives is predominant.”
Hospitality can involve “mutual enjoyment and benefit” — this, I would argue, makes practicing hospitality more compelling — but primarily it involves a selfless consideration of the guests’ needs and wants. A good host will rank his or her wants and self-interest secondary after that of the guests.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose ideas I discuss more extensively in “Digital Hospitality,” favors unconditional, unreciprocated hospitality and dismisses notions of “mutual enjoyment and benefit” as “common”. Westmoreland describes Derrida’s philosophy this way (4):
“The host must not even ask for a proper name or any sort of identification like Darwish’s identity card. Should one demand that his guest be able to communicate in a foreign language, which is usually ‘the first violence to which foreigners are subjected? [...] Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language… in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country?’”
I am intrigued by Derria’s assertion that having to speak in a foreign language is “violence” and something that makes hospitality “conditional.” Speaking in one language or another should not be a prerequisite for hospitality by any means, but it becomes more difficult for a host to anticipate and meet needs if basic communication is stripped away. Furthermore, although hosts should not expect reciprocity, communication is an important element of hospitality because it can help foster community. Learning a guest’s name makes him or her feel welcomed and known. Basic communication, if only hand gestures and facial expressions due to language barriers, can “convert strangers into friends” (Lashley 4).
In summary, genuine hospitality in the domestic sphere involves a host with predominantly selfless motives welcoming guests into a home or homelike space, providing food, drink, and accomodation, and endeavoring to ensure the guests’ safety and physical and emotional wellbeing so long as they are in his or her care.
Such a definition of hospitality may seem altogether too demanding, especially when a host is entertaining strangers who come from completely different backgrounds and do not even speak the same language. I have felt overwhelmed at times myself. Because of this, it is important that hospitality is practiced in community. Matthew Kaemingk, drawing from Dutch-Canadian theologian Hans Boersma, writes that bounded communities make it possible to practice hospitality because internal structure, solidarity, and security enable people to turn outward and offer hospitality to others (182-183). Kaemingk and Boersma refer primarily to the importance of boundaries in distinguishing insider from outsider, but a strong community also provides the support and encouragement that individuals need in order to pour into others. And perhaps one day, those outsiders may join that community. In time they, too, will be able to turn outward to welcome others in.
Hospitality at its core involves “food, drink, and accommodation,” accompanied by an emotional element. But how does that look in practice? Below, I outline several ways that hospitality can be embodied, along with the challenges and benefits that accompany it.
In Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity, Adam Seligman and Robert Weller argue for the value of ritual practices and experiences in a pluralist world. “Ritual allows us to live with ambiguity and the lack of full understanding,” they write. “In slightly different terms, it allows us to live with the other, with what we do not fully know or understand— as indeed, we can never fully know or understand any other” (94). Ritual experiences, albeit mundane ones like visiting the same dentist, riding the same train, teleworking from the same coffee shop, and cheering for the same sports teams can promote a sense of solidarity and shared identity between a diverse group of people. Although ritual is not overt hospitality, it can be; build shared traditions around holidays, or plan regular picnics or dinners or neighborhood potlucks to establish these common experiences.
Extending welcome to newcomers is “more than simply political activism—it is a way of life” (Kaemingk 237). Practicing hospitality is taking action, but that action can appear in many forms. It could be as simple as listening to people’s stories and demonstrating curiosity about their experiences. In order to be vulnerable, a person must feel safe, and giving someone the space to share about themselves can be an act of hospitality. Hospitality could be, as mentioned above, engaging in traditions and cultivating shared experiences in any form. As Luna describes in her Epilogue, hospitality could also look like taking the time out of a busy day to help someone else. To Nadia, hospitality involves exchanging visits with friends. To Hana, hospitality looks like preparing and sharing a meal with guests. All of these actions require time, intentionality, and presence. But they are not without their merits; engaging in such hospitable activities can make people feel seen, known, and appreciated.
Commensality, eating together at a shared table, is one of the key ways that hospitality is embodied. Eating is described as the “primary biological function,” and eating together is the “primary social function,” as French social scientist Claude Fischler writes in “Commensality, Society and Culture.” Eating is also “the most self-centred, most individual thing [people] can do,” because “each morsel they take in is one that will necessarily be lost to everybody else” (Fischler). It is both strange and wonderful, then, that sharing a meal turns the “exclusive selfishness of eating” into something so communal.
Sharing a meal across cultural, religious, and linguistic divides can be challenging, however. As Hana told me, “When I go somewhere, people want to be hospitable, but they don’t know what to serve me. Cultural differences can sometimes make hospitality complicated.” So, Hana likes to serve others instead. “When I know someone is coming,” she says, “I like to make their favorite food to make them happy.”
Serge de Boer, co-founder of a regular communal gathering between Christians and Muslims in Amsterdam, describes in an interview with Kaemingk the importance of making space for people to share their gifts and culture in a hospitable setting. When the group first began, many of de Boer’s immigrant neighbors would not come even though de Boer promised that a meal would be provided. But everything changed when he began asking his neighbors to cook for them. “They don’t want to be served by a community,” he said; “they want to be a part of a community” (Kaemingk 251). The ability to serve others and to share one’s culture through cooking is, for many, an honor and a joy. Hana described the way she feels when cooking for others simply: “I am happy when [my guests] are happy and eat well.”
One of the most valuable products of hospitality is community. Many refugees and immigrants, like Nadia, Hana, Luna, and Mrs. J., had to leave loved ones behind when they fled their home country. Hana has not seen her family in ten years, and she doesn’t know when she will see them again. But she describes her experiences befriending one American family in this way:
“One [American] family in particular has been very hospitable. They were the first family we got to know after we came to America, and now they feel like family. When we visit, it feels like we are going to see our family. I always bring them food. When I know that they are coming to visit, I plan for days in advance what I will cook for them. It makes me happy to see them.”
It was through hospitality that this friendship developed, and it is sustained through shared meals and experiences. Even though Hana could not speak English when she first arrived, and even though she does not always enjoy American food, she was able to develop meaningful relationships by extending and receiving hospitality and by sharing her own food and culture with her American neighbors. So, open up your home. Visit others. Serve food. Eat food that others prepare. Drink coffee. Share your story, and listen to those of others. Practice hospitality, and strangers will become friends.
Practicing hospitality is not always easy. It requires sacrifice and selflessness, and appreciation is not guaranteed. As such, it is important to be hospitable in community and to bear in mind how easily your circumstances could be reversed.
Personally, my faith plays a central role in my motivation to extend hospitality. I follow a God who, in the ultimate gesture of hospitality, gave his own life for the sake of his guests to make them his friends. As Kaemingk writes in his epilogue (303),
“His hospitality is not abstract, it is not theoretical; it is embodied [...] The hospitality Christ embodies at the table demands more than the opening of a door or the sharing of resources; it involves the offering of one’s very self to a group of people who may well reject and abandon the offer.”
As I endeavor to follow Christ’s example, surrounded by a supportive community, I have experienced the joy of giving and receiving hospitality firsthand. At one of our largest Middle East Friends gatherings, we had as many as 100 guests from almost every continent. Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Muslims, citizens and immigrants, people with PhDs and middle school educations all gathered together to share a potluck-style Thanksgiving with the most assorted international cuisine the holiday has ever known. As memorable as the meal was, however, the friendships forged at that dinner and others like it have had the most lasting impact.
Regardless of your beliefs, your background, your political views, no matter how busy your schedule may be, set aside some time in this season to practice hospitality with newcomers near you. You may be surprised by how quickly your giving becomes receiving. Along with Ivan Illich, I believe that the best word to which hope can be tied is hospitality because of its power to transcend barriers and build diverse yet durable communities.
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1. To learn more about Kaemingk’s concept of Christian pluralism, please read his book. Even if you’re not interested in Christianity or pluralism, please read his book. It is excellent. My focus in this essay is hospitality, not pluralism, but the two are closely tied. ⏎