Part of the observed interest in all things American in the Arab World today is the relatively recent phenomenon of the treatment of the American academic world in Arabic literary texts. Musings and reminiscences about the American academic setting have always formed part of memoirs by authors who lived or studied in the United States at one point of their life. This can be seen most recently in the autobiographies of some major Arab writers like Abdul Wahhab al-Mesiri in “My Intellectual Journey in Seeds, Roots, and Fruits” (2001) and Jalal Amin in “What Life Has Taught Me” (2007), both dedicating whole chapters for the discussion of “their” American experience. Others chose to write about their experience in well-circulated Arabic journals such as the piece “My Journey to America” by Dr. Jaber Asfour in al-Arabi magazine (2006). Still, the more intriguing portrayal is to be found in the fictionalized rendering of the American academy by some leading Arab novelists. Among the most prominent are two best-selling authors who chose the American university as the setting for their stories and conflicts: Sun’allah Ibrahim in his “Amrikanli (à la American)” (2004) and Alaa al-Aswany in “Chicago.” This paper examines the portrayal of the American academic locus in recent Arabic literature, comparing those texts that approach the American university as an experiential lived-in reality with those that provide a fictionalized envisioning of the world of the “learned other.” It hypothesizes that the choosing of the American academic world as a fictional setting is not merely occasioned by the authors’ familiarity with the setting as much as a desire to explore what many Arab intellectuals regard as the institution standardizing/legitimizing Western political and cultural ethos with which they find themselves locked in an enchantingly adversarial inexorable relationship. The paper seeks to shed some light on this rather recent phenomenon in Arabic letters by studying its literary, historical, and political contexts and the main causes behind its rise, pointing out the cultural and civilizational outlooks and perceptions that underlie the texts’ images, motifs, and patterns.