From the moment of its discovery in African-American patients in the early twentieth century, the inherited condition of sickle cell disease became a tool for anthropological speculation. American physicians quickly came to believe that the gene for sickle cell disease was a racial trait unique to Africans. When white patients were found to have the disease, physicians argued that this was evidence of African admixture in their family trees. In the 1940s, research on sickle cell disease expanded to colonial Africa, where medical geneticists hoped to discover the evolutionary origins of the gene. However, Middle Eastern scientists suddenly captured the attention of the international sickle cell research community in the early 1950s. Reports that sickle cell disease had been discovered in the “white” inhabitants of Israel, Egypt, Aden Colony, and southern Turkey challenged the assumption that the gene was “essentially African” and a definite indicator of African ancestry. Using scientific publications, archival documents, and oral histories, this paper traces the discoveries of sickle cell disease across the Middle East during the 1950s and 60s. Like in North America, sickle cell research in the Middle East unfolded along the fractured social politics of race. The disease was discovered predominantly in Arabic-speaking populations, and often in religiously or socially marginalized communities. Middle Eastern, British, and American geneticists attempted to create evolutionary hypotheses that reconciled the black-white racial dichotomy ascribed to sickle cell disease with historical and sociological boundaries between Arabs, Turks, and religious minorities. Researchers in some countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, embraced historical explanations of African-Arab admixture. Others, based in Israel, Yemen, and Lebanon, favored alternate racial formulations that posited a non-African origin of the gene. Finally, Turkish researchers accepted any possible hypothesis that erased Arab identity and ancestry from their research subjects. As the parameters of Turkish and Arab nationalism shifted in the Cold War-era Middle East, so did the favored explanatory narratives for the presence of sickle cells in different communities, which assigned different degrees of importance to African ancestry, social segregation, and evolutionary adaptations to malaria.