Arab men. There’s a lot to say about them.

Whether they are doctors, engineers, IT guys, artists, entrepreneurs or ordinary guys with ordinary jobs living ordinary lives, often or not the media has portrayed them as toxic, masculine, misogynists. Terrorist soldiers’ followers of dictators. Fanatic sexist, playboys, sons of oil tycoons driving Ferraris, eating hummus and smoking water pipes.

Negative stereotypes are nuanced if you study the narratives long enough, but all have one common thread. Arab men are terrible, terrible people.

It’s hard to understand, define or categories the identity of the Arab man. What makes him? His history, culture, his experience? Or simply how he is presented to the world?

It’s our ethos at The Arab Edition not to prove points but to discover things. Exploration and research is important to us. We are also the first to put our hands up and say, we’re learning about ourselves along with you.

The issue and topic of Arab men and Arab masculinity is one we are committed to understand, discover and share. It’s a story of many facets.

On one of our research journeys we came across an interesting collection of photographs scattered across the internet of the Arab world in the late 18^thcentury and early 19^thcentury. Though many of us have seen some of these images online we were particularly taken with some of the early photographs ever taken of Arab men.

Bedouins, shoe makers, warriors, soldiers, guides, musicians, sheiks and apparently nobodies – when we collected the images taken by Arabist explorers, wartime photographers and amateurs, they started to make some sense.

Here were the first visual indicators of how Arabs and particularly Arab men were presented to the world.

Although it can be argued that from the images we’ve collected, the photographers behind the camera may not have had a particular intention or narrative in mind, they were simply documenting what they saw (sometimes in a more staged manner), these are, for better or for worse, the start of Arab men in the photographic medium.

Despite who these men were and what their roles in their perspective tribes or in world wars they were photographed to look strong, noble, proud, humble, unassuming and authentic.

Ahmed-ben-Kilgassem, Algeria, 1860s

Bedouin, Warrior, 1898

Warrior on carrying a traditional Az-Zayah hunting spear on horseback. Photo: Frederic Duriez

Palestinian Bedouin, Jerusalem, 1898

A Palestinian in traditional clothes riding a horse at an American colony in Jerusalem, sometime between 1898 and 1914.

Bedouin Man, 1898

Photo: Frederic Duriez

Bedouin men, Jerusalem, 1898

Photo: Frederic Duriez

Bedouin, 1898 to 1914

Soldier, Morocco, 1913

Photo: Stéphane Passet

Bedouin of Sudan, Aba el Lissan, 1918

French photographer Paul Castelnau met this Bedouin of Sudanese origin in 1918 in Aba el Lissan which was the site of an Arab Revolt battle the year before. Photo: Paul Castelnau