This talk will focus on an Istanbul-based Islamic foundation, called Daru’l-Hikme (home of wisdom), which functions as a cover institution for providing medrese education in contemporary Turkey. Configured as a medrese, which was indeed abolished in 1924, Daru’l-Hikme members claim to stand for a role of ulema in the Republican Turkey. By studying Daru’l-Hikme’s “medrese project”, I aim to understand what it involves to participate in a “tradition” of religious learning in modern Turkey when there are no official institutions (such as medrese) and actors (i.e. ulema) in the “traditional” sense to produce and sanction Islamic knowledge and discipline. With a focused research on written documents, audio and visual materials produced by Daru’l-Hikme circle, I plan to focus on issues of religious authority and knowledge, and the ways in which they have been configured in Daru’l-Hikme’s “medrese project”. I will begin by exploring fragmented and contested nature of religious authority in Turkey, with respect to genealogies of secularism and liberalism. Then, I will argue how Daru’l-Hikme’s engagement with secularism (and the secular) is more than an exhibition of their religious identity, and urges us to focus more on Muslims’ various engagements with secularism apart from being mere politics of recognition as opposed to secular state and its followers. In this respect, we will see how Daru’l-Hikme’s critiques of secularism (and liberalism) are essential for their medrese project, which, for them, requires Islamic methods of learning and constant ethical reflections, disciplinary reworking, and tradition-guided practices/modes (of) to form Muslim selves. As closing remarks, I will question how debates on religious education in Turkey may inform ongoing discussions in social sciences about politics and discourses of medreses. This question has long been neglected due to the subtle assumption of “Turkish Islamic exceptionalism” which comes to stand for the historical specificities of Turkish experience of Islam and strict secularism (and absence of “traditional” religious institutions or authority). I believe that insights provided from Daru’l-Hikme’s scholarly efforts might contribute to this lacuna in the literature.

This paper aims at investigating history teaching in late colonial Sudan against the background of political, ideological and educational developments unfolding in the postwar Nile Valley. Based on a wide range of untapped Arabic and English sources (teachers' handbooks, pupils' textbooks, syllabuses, visual aids, inspection reports, writings of colonial educators), it will highlight significant connections between the “text” and the “context” of Sudanese school history. Firstly, the paper will examine how controversial periods and issues in modern Sudanese history such as the Turkiyya, the Mahdiyya and the slave trade, were dealt with in schoolbooks produced in the immediate postwar years (1945-1950). School historical narratives, it will be argued, were not part of a single homogeneous and hegemonic discourse in late colonial Sudan. Various, sometimes conflicting, perspectives were entwined in school texts. Secondly, the paper will relate these historical representations to the contexts in which they were produced and deployed. In the period 1945-1953, relations between Sudan, Egypt and Great Britain were characterized by heightened political tension. Theoretically ruled by both Egypt and Great Britain under a “hybrid” regime (the Condominium), Sudan had in fact been controlled by the British Sudan Government for half a century. After World War II the country's future became a fighting ground between Sudanese independentists (backed by the British authorities in Khartoum) and Sudanese unionists (supported by the Egyptian government and Egyptian nationalists). Was Sudan heading towards an independent state or a union with Egypt? The outcome of this political and ideological struggle, which was underpinned by strategic, economic and cultural interests, seemed highly uncertain in those volatile times. As British and Egyptian positions on the “Sudan Question” increasingly polarized, the Sudan Government decided to speed up the administrative and political processes leading to Sudanese self-government. In an attempt to thwart Egyptian ambitions and get support from the Northern Sudanese intelligentsia, the British hastily reunited the northern and southern parts of the country and accelerated the Sudanization of the administration (1946-1947). The paper will show how the peculiarities of postwar Nile Valley politics, coupled with a “paternalist-progressive” shift in British colonial policies in Africa, shaped historical narratives designed for Sudanese schools. It will demonstrate that these contexts are crucial for understanding dark representations of the Turkiyya, apologetic depictions of the Mahdiyya (a historical enemy of the British) and ambivalent attitudes towards the slave trade in late colonial Sudanese textbooks.

As much of the literature on the Middle East suggests, patriarchy is embedded in Arab society, abetted by civil society and the state; women must operate under its auspices. While this reality may disempower women and limit their agency in particular situations, patriarchy may also, ironically, be supportive and empowering, especially within the realm of education. This paper explores how the active presence of a family patriarch facilitated and/or supported the attainment of higher education degrees for the Jordanian women in this study. This paper's findings, extracted from a collective case study that explored the completion rates of higher education by women in Jordan, explores how an active paternal presence actually enabled the women's completion of higher education. Eighteen women that, at the time of the study, were at the threshold of completing higher education and ten women, that at one point were enrolled but did not complete higher education, participated in this study. These women represented thirteen different universities (seven public and six private) throughout Jordan. Interviews were conducted with each participant and discussed family’s educational attainment and their familial, social, cultural, and educational experiences. In addition to interviews, observations of the women were conducted on the university campus. Official university and ministry education records were collected to examine enrollment, graduation, and retention rates. Varied qualitative methods allowed for a holistic exploration of the patterns in the persistence of women in higher education. The results indicate that the women’s families are instrumental to their enrollment, attendance, and persistence in higher education. The centrality of the family played a major role in the decision-making and motivation of the women that participated in the study. Interestingly, the results also show that the same factors that inhibit some women from completing higher education enabled others. Such factors include the process associated with the General Secondary School Certificate Examination (or tawjihi), which is required for acceptance to higher education, and the women’s initial intention for attending higher education. The differentiating factor was access to social capital, stemming from their family’s positioning in society.

In the 1980s, Zia-ul-Haq justified his martial law by embarking upon the Islamization of laws, educational institutions, and the society. Politically, the policy translated into the production of Jihadis for the anti-Soviet fight in Afghanistan in support for the Reagan regime’s Cold War policy. However, the simultaneous privatization boom in Pakistan allowed the middle and upper class urbanites to resist their transformed educational and political environment by patronizing private secular schools, where quality education with minimal religious education often delivered through the prestigious British O-level system, guaranteed professional success and allowed for the construction of moderate religious and social subjectivities. Under Musharraf, the scenario in 2007 was much different. The government was ignoring the “Go Musharraf Go!” demonstrations of lawyers, liberals and conservatives justifying the prolonged martial law as a means to crack down on madrasas to control religious extremism—the Enlightened Moderation policy—thus finding support with the Bush regime by supporting its War on Terror. This was the environment in which I saw the emergence of a new form of private schooling in the country, the private Islamic schools. Private Islamic schools combine the traditional curricula of the madrasas with the secular curricula of the private secular schools. Using data from my long-term, participant-observation based anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2007-2008 with students, teachers, administrators, and parent patrons inside the schools in Pakistan’s most professionally competitive and ethno-religiously diverse city, Karachi, and borrowing from the post-9/11 ongoing theoretical debates in anthropology on Islamic education and practice, in this paper, I will examine the extent to which private Islamic schools reflect the educational response of middle and upper class urban Pakistanis to state’s fluctuating domestic policy toward Islamic education, practice, and institutions and to the country’s association with religious extremism in the post-9/11 international environment. Questions central to my paper will be: How have the Zia’s Cold War support to Musharraf’s support for America’s War on Terror transformed the political environment in which middle and upper class urban Pakistanis make professional and religious educational choices for their children? If private secular schools were the intellectual response to the politico-ideological and educational environment under Zia’s Islamization, to what extent are the private Islamic schools a response to the political, ideological and educational environment under Musharraf’s Enlightened Moderation policy?

When the Turkish parliament passed legislation in November 1928, adopting a new Latin-based Turkish alphabet to replace the “old” Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on Arabic/Persian letters, Turkish citizens found themselves in a process of change concerning their reading and writing abilities, skills, and habits. The Law required a rapid transition into the new alphabet in all areas of reading, writing, education, and publishing. Whereas earlier scholarship generally focused on the political, institutional, and ideological dimensions of this nationalist reform project, more recent scholarship has begun to move away from a state-centric approach and has considered the actual social processes and effects at the individual level of this ambitious reform act. Recent research (including my own) has demonstrated that alphabet change ushered in a wide range of responses and that it required adaptation on an individual level that was distinct from an ideologically or politically motivated opposition. The current paper contributes to this evolving line of scholarship by examining how the religious education of Turkish children in the old letters became an area of everyday contestation between the state and families and communities in the late 1920s and 1930s. Since children were seen as the nation’s future, state authorities were adamant about teaching the new generation the new alphabet and were equally interested in preventing them from learning the old alphabet. While schools began using the new Turkish alphabet in the 1928-1929 academic year, the informal neighborhood Qur’an courses held in mosques and private homes became a fiercely contested site between a state determined to socialize children into secular nationhood (in part) by preventing them from learning the Arabic letters, and families and imams who were committed to give children religious education (a process that involved the study of the Arabic alphabet so that the Qur’an could be read and studied in its original Arabic). Combining primary source data from previously untapped Ministry of Interior documents concerning the monitoring in Anatolian towns of these informal courses and their providers with insights from the subaltern school on everyday forms of resistance as well as the recent scholarship on secularism in Turkey (such as the works of Umut Azak and Gavin Brockett), this paper sheds light on a dimension of the 1928 alphabet reform that ties together questions of alphabet change, national and religious identities, education, and childhood. It thus contributes to the scholarship on the social processes of secular nation-building in Turkey.

This project identifies the particular strain of humanism animating Marshall Hodgson’s scholarship and traces it through his departmental and administrative functions at the University of Chicago, where Hodgson played a major role in the building period of Islamic Studies between 1956 and his death in 1968. This project makes substantial use of Hodgson’s papers at the University of Chicago, along with the archives of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Ford Foundation Cultural Studies Program, and faculty members with whom Hodgson had contact. Hodgson’s extant departmental and personal correspondence and notes record a profoundly felt obligation, which Hodgson connected to his status as a humanist and a Quaker, that historians should be “architects of community.” This view is synthesized in every mode of Hodgson’s expression: from his Doctoral exam responses to his Christmas letters; from his recommendations on grading policy to his writings in the Quaker House newsletter. This paper focuses on the way that Hodgson’s unified sense of his mission as a scholar and person played out in his professional life. As the creator of the first interdisciplinary Islamic History and Civilization course in the United States, as a founding member of the new Committee on Near Eastern Studies, as Chairman of the Committee on Social Thought, Hodgson stressed true cooperation across disciplines (including with scholars from the natural sciences) and the teacher-student relationship. These preoccupations are reiterated over ten years of his professional actions. Among these, Hodgson was instrumental in founding the New Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, an interdisciplinary fifth division of undergraduate study that partially reflected Hodgson’s ideal vision of the university laid out in his notes and letters. In Hodgson’s fantasy, classes were done away with and the foundation of study was the individual relationship between tutor and student. Hodgson imagined a university as a place where visiting tutors and students of all ages and disciplines interacted outside of prescribed programmatic structures (the doctorate would be abolished), coming and going as they pleased, with progress measured by a series of exams and certificates awarded. The profound impact of Hodgson’s scholarship on the fields of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies is well-documented. This project examines the notable unity of Hodgson’s preoccupations as they extended to his professional life, and provides a new perspective on the humanistic activism of a singular scholar and man.