The paper explores how a field of discourses, images and practices directed towards the Middle East and, later on, Middle Eastern immigrants emerged in Brazil between 1860 and 1940, and how this "Brazilian Orientalism" informed the process of institutionalization of an academic field Arab Studies in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late nineteenth century there was the emergence of an intellectual Orientalism, which had its major figure in Brazil's Emperor D. Pedro II, who was inspired by European sources. This first Orientalism portrayed Arabs and Muslims as exotic and distant figures that belonged to the realm of intellectual erudition or aesthetic fantasy. Between 1915 and 1940 another kind of Orientalism, an "Applied Orientalism", emerged under the impact of the growing Middle Eastern immigration to Brazil. The discourses and representations about Arabs and Muslims that were elaborated by the Brazilian social thinkers of that period aimed to entice politics to deal with the Middle Eastern immigrants, who were seen as culturally and racially threatening. From the 1930s to the 1950s the Middle Eastern immigrants appropriated many elements of the Brazilian Orientalism in order to communicate their belonging to the nation. In this process emerged the myth of the self-made "mascate" (peddler), who contributed to the development of the host country and happily joined the flux of cultural assimilation. This narrative centered on the economic aspects of immigration together with the cultural assimilation of the immigrants and their descendants became the model for the studies of Midle East immigration in the Arab Studies programs that were created in the universities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were Arabic language was studied as something linked only to the past glories of classical Arab civilization. Therefore, the intellectual agenda of academic Arab Studies in Brazil remained linked to the discourses and images that were created by the various traditions that configured Brazilian Orientalism throughout the twentieth century. The sources of this paper are the paintings of Pedro Américo, the writings of D. Pedro II, Roquette-Pinto, Gilberto Freyre and Camara Cascudo; the books written by Arab intellectuals in Brazil, such as Tawfik Duoun and Tawfik Kurban; and the academic studies of Middle Eastern immigration to Brazil produced in the twentieth century.