I finished reading Kitab Al-Gharib fi Al-Gharb (thanks for the colleague who does not want to be identified for alerting me to this book). It was published first in New York City in 1895. It may be the first book I know in Arabic of a biographical account by an Arab in the US. The writer tells the story in poetry and prose: and he is critical of some Western writing on Arabs although his own poems (in the first section of the book) contain racist and sexist elements. Yet, the author has a good (albeit brief) critique of the colonial feminist book, The Women of the Arabs by the American missionary, Henry Jessup, which was published in 1873. Rustum (whose son was also a poet) effectively responds to the references by Jessup to domestic violence: he (basically) said that he heard of beating of women when he was in the East, but that he never heard of shooting of women until he came to the US.