“I’m really happy the weather turned out and that everyone came out to support us and that they get to experience this,” said Ruba Farah, an ACS cochair and finance senior. “It gets a lot of people’s attention.”

The dance is the group’s way of showing students that Arabic people are not the serious people often seen in the media, ACS co-chair and advertising senior Mark Joseph said.

“We want people to know who we are and how we celebrate,” Joseph said.

Partygoers joined hands and danced the dabkeh, a traditional Arabic dance, underneath strings of miniature light bulbs as a DJ blasted Middle Eastern dance music.

“With Arabic people, you can really tell when they’re enjoying themselves,” Farah said.

Applied engineering sciences freshman Rami Janoudi only has been on campus a few months, but said he enjoyed being at a school with such a significant population of Arabic people.

If he didn’t go to a school with an active Arabic population like MSU’s, Janoudi said he worried it would be much harder to make friends.

“There are schools where I would feel really lonely,” he said. “Luckily, Michigan is a state where there are a lot of Arabs and there are a lot of support groups and groups to educate people that simply don’t know (about us).”

Janoudi has played the derbekke — a Middle Eastern drum — for three years, and was alongside the dancers for most of the night, providing the rhythm for their movements.

“The drum is a way to connect back to my culture,” he said. “Every time I hear a song it gets me energized to play so it gets me going to remember my culture.”

But what stood out Friday night to Janoudi wasn’t the free food or the variety of hookahs; he said it was the way everyone simply was looking to have fun.

“Overseas, you see the tensions between all the religious groups in the Middle East and here we’re all here having fun together,” he said. “We are a fun people, we do like to have fun, too. We’re not the people yelling all the time, angry. We can chill and have fun.”