At the outset of the British Mandate, Zionist and Arab national elites in Palestine embarked on the vital task of educating, and thereby also creating, new national subjects. New schools were established for this purpose by British, Zionist and private interests, but the fact remained that a significant number of Palestine's children continued to be educated in the traditional religious schools, the qutab and the heder, respectively. Through an analysis of representations of these two institutions in the writings of Arab and Zionist national leaders, my paper addresses the dynamics that characterized relations between "modern" nationalist elites--who were well aware of pedagogy's central role in shaping national consciousness--and the network of religious schools that predated these nationalist agendas. My paper addresses a number of questions related to religious schooling in the context of a rapidly modernizing and urgently nationalizing Palestine: How did Jewish and Arab nationalist leaders regard the systems of religious schooling To what extent and through what means did they attempt to influence the traditional curriculum of the heder and the qutab Were the heder and the qutab regarded as appropriate sites for applying the modernizing interventions, scientific management and reformist agendas propagated in other spheres by both nationalist elites and the colonial governmentg I argue that religious schools presented a formidable ideological challenge to both Jewish and Arab leaders, who, on one hand sought to ground their projects in a discourse of religious legitimacy, and on the other, attempted to reform religious schools for the production of "modern" national subjects. In addressing these questions, my paper will contribute to our understanding of education during this formative period in Palestinian history and enter into broader theoretical debates regarding religion in the public sphere, secularism and the imperatives of nationalist modernity. Finally, this paper is theoretically grounded in two approaches: First, in undertaking a comparative study of Mandate Palestine, I hope to contribute to the small but growing number of studies that resist the urge to treat Palestine's Jewish and Arab communities in isolation. Second, my hope is that a study of the role played by religious education in the context of greater national projects will further jeopardize the clear boundaries dividing the religious from the secular and the traditional from the modern.