The American University of Beirut has long been regarded as a crowning jewel of American education in the Middle East while also a hub of Arab nationalism and cultural identity. Among its diverse student body in the first half of the 20th century were hundreds of Jews who arrived at AUB from Europe and the Middle East, including European immigrants to Palestine. This paper traces the experiences of these Jewish students – who constituted about 10 percent of the student body – at a time of rising Arab nationalist sentiment on campus, a growing Zionist movement worldwide, and mounting Jewish-Arab violence in Palestine. In what ways did Jewish students at AUB engage with these nationalisms? How did rising tensions in Palestine affect their interactions with fellow students? I focus on three spheres of interaction: intra-Jewish relations; inter-religious encounters; and transnational networks. Through analysis of AUB annual reports, student journals, newspaper articles, memoirs, and photographs, this research builds on excellent recent scholarship on AUB, Arab nationalism, Jews in the Arab world, and Jewish-Arab relations. It seeks apply the ‘relational’ approach used by historians of Palestine to shed new light elsewhere on Jewish-Arab encounters in the early 20th century.

This paper examines notions of civic participation taught at and instilled by the American School for Girls (ASG) and its teachers in Beirut, Lebanon, during and immediately following the French mandate period. The ASG, founded in 1835 under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.’s (PCUSA) Syria Mission, was the flagship of American educational institutions for girls in Lebanon. The period 1919-1951 was marked by significant changes at both the mission and national levels. For the Mission during this period, the PCUSA and its missionaries debated the purpose of its educational mission and saw greater diversity in their schools’ student bodies and an increasing number of the teaching staff hired from the local population; at the national level, Lebanon moved from Ottoman province to colonial possession to independent nation-state. What, then, did these changes in the institutional and national arenas mean for the education the students received in the ASG? Making use of the PCUSA’s mission archival records housed in the United States and Middle East and institutional records of other local schools, I argue that while the message of civic participation was often steeped in the language of Protestant Christianity, the changing political realities and demands of students and teachers meant that mission education came to serve increasingly secular, civic educational ends. The result was that the ASG played an important role in notions of civic participation and citizenship among its graduates. Ultimately, this paper examines the complex relationship between colonial institutions and local realities and the individuals who shape and are shaped by both.

This paper is part of a book project that investigates whether full-time private Islamic schools participate into the much decried communautarisme (or ethnic/cultural separatism) that the Muslim community is often accused of in France or whether their founding is a sign of intégration (or assimilation) into the French Republic given the State funding of most of private education in France. While the focus in the media has generally been on Muslim secondary schools, there is a clear recent trend to open elementary rather than secondary schools. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Fall 2016 and Spring 2018, I present two elementary schools, both of whom follow the same curriculum as public schools, with the addition of Arabic language and religious/Islamic values classes. La Plume, established in 2001 in the city of Grenoble, was the first primary Muslim school, and as such is a precursor of the current trend even though it was established in a different social climate. Its request to go under contract with the State in 2015 was denied. In contrast, Eva-de-Vitray in Mantes-la-Jolie, which opened in 2012 in the infamous quarter of Val Fourré, received a contract with the State on its first try. Eva-de-Vitray is notably the only school among the ones I visited that enrolled a non-Muslim student, despite the availability of a private Catholic school near-by. In this talk, I highlight the similarities and differences between the two schools, particularly their mission and curriculum in Arabic and religious or Islamic related subjects, in addition to quality education and choice of name. These schools make it a priority to help students reconcile their identity as French Muslims, or Muslim French, something that is more often than not considered to be an oxymoron by Islamophobes. Therefore, the religious education component does draw from traditional religious instruction offered in majority-Muslim countries, but is specifically targeted to the French context. I also draw parallelism with Jewish schools, which have a longer history in France. The founding of these schools can be seen as a sign of maturity of the Muslim community, which has now mustered the education and the means to claim the benefits the French state has to offer to religious communities. In addition, Muslim parents who are registering their children in these schools have assimilated one of the long-held views of the French who resort to private schools: the quality of education first.