In a 1951 interview, Kulthum Barbir, who studied at the Maqasid girls’ school in Beirut in the late nineteenth century, remarked that her generation of school-going girls felt they were staging a “rebellion” against elders who opposed their attendance. What was the shape of this rebellion? What were these schools and others like them aiming to accomplish, what ways of knowing did they intend to teach students, and what epistemological and professional tools did they unwittingly open up?
Scholarship mostly holds that institutionalized forms of education and learning utterly transformed what it meant to be educated in the modern Middle East. As literacy, surveillance, domesticity (for girls), and professional credentialing (for boys) became the hallmarks of a modern education, other forms of knowing--the memory-practices of blind shaykhs, the wandering adibs of the 18th century Levant, the women who oversaw birth and death in rural villages--were disciplined, transformed, and rendered obsolete. This panel complicates this narrative by reconsidering the history of missionary schooling—often portrayed as the archetype of the “modern” educational experience—in modern Lebanon. It asks: what ways of knowing persisted or emerged under the aegis of "modern education" that aren't easily legible within this well-known story? What do existing narratives in the history of education, i.e., of modernization/enlightenment or discipline/destruction, obscure or occlude? What ways of knowing the world have sustained Lebanese who do not fall into the categories of efendi, priest, notable, or shaykh?
This panel addresses these questions through alternative histories of missionary education in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Beirut, Tripoli, and Mount Lebanon. In so doing, it constructs a history of epistemology in modern Lebanon that encompasses not just the worlds of male elites but also of girls, women, rural students, and racialized others. The first paper considers the educational world invoked by a strange astronomy textbook written in Arabic by an American missionary for the girls’ schools of Ottoman Mount Lebanon. The second paper probes the introduction of racial knowledge and hierarchies in the education of young men in Jesuit missionary schools. The third paper uses the case of the Tripoli Girls’ School to question how girls’ education, women’s personal and professional opportunities, and notions of nation and citizen intertwined during the interwar period. The fourth paper unpacks the lesser-known curricula at the Beirut College for Women, an institution that was famous for its as home economics and social service programs.
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Dr. Susanna Ferguson
“To a utilitarian age astronomy seems a somewhat worn-out, useless science.” So declared American astronomer Harold Jacoby in 1911, after more than a decade of marked decline in astronomy teaching in American schools. Prior to about 1900, astronomy was considered one of the most important subjects in American curricula, a lynchpin of mental discipline pedagogy, which held that what was taught in schools was important not for itself but for what it trained the mind to do. So seductive was astronomy as a subject for training the mind that Catherine Beecher recommended it for the idealized girls’ academies she described in her influential 1841 tract, A Treatise on Domestic Economy. By the early twentieth century, however, mental discipline pedagogy had paled before a perceived need for children to learn “content” in American schools, even as professional American astronomers became among the best in the world.
In Ottoman Lebanon, however, astronomy education took a different course. Eliza Everett, American Protestant missionary and headmistress of the Beirut Female Seminary, published an Arabic-language astronomy textbook for girls, Principles of the Study of Heavenly Bodies, in 1875 which remained in use at least until 1903. By the 1920s, American girls’ schools in Lebanon would become increasingly focused on training women for childrearing and domestic work—perhaps reflecting a transnational move towards Jacoby’s “utilitarian age.” Before the first World War, by contrast, women like Eliza Everett were clearly out to teach Lebanese girls a host of other things. This paper reads Everett’s textbook in light of transnational changes in girls’ education and the politicized trajectories of astronomical knowledge in the Ottoman Empire to ask what kind of educational vision had girls learning astronomy in Ottoman Lebanon, and what unexpected outcomes this vision might have produced given ongoing debates about knowledge, science, and faith in the Ottoman world. It argues that nineteenth-century girls’ education in Lebanon was not a mere precursor to the now-familiar projects of forging “mothers of the future” or of the nation. Rather, it was a wild west in which demands, desires, and pedagogical approaches circulated across empires and oceans, making it important that Lebanese girls learn about the stars. In the end, these competing epistemologies and pedagogies opened up unexpected professional and intellectual arenas for girls in Lebanon as in the United States.
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Ms. Johanna Peterson
In the 1929-30 annual report of the Tripoli Girls’ School (TGS), the principal wrote the following of the four graduating students for that year: “One of the four won the respect of all who knew her…one of the class expects to sail in the early fall to take a position in South America; one may enter the Junior College; and a third is hoping to arrange for secretarial training.” While girls’ education has typically been framed, both at the time and in much of the scholarship since, as a project of modernity aimed at creating good wives and mothers for the nation and of the nation’s men, the above quote complicates that narrative, showing the multiple futures available and of interest to the school’s graduates: esteem among classmates, world travel, further studies, and professional endeavor. Using the TGS as a case study, this paper asks what this apparent discrepancy can tell us about how girls’ education shaped women’s professional, educational, and personal opportunities during and immediately following the French mandate period in Lebanon. Further, by centering schools as sites where various forms of knowledge production, the interaction of diverse actors, and the seeming divergence of the “foreign” and the “local” contexts come together, this paper interrogates how these opportunities shaped conceptions of nation and citizenship in this period of nation-state formation and colonial occupation.
Based on yearly reports, curriculum, and publications of the American mission in Syria, this paper makes a twofold argument. First, it argues that girls’ education as the creator of good wives and mothers of the nation was not the only, and possibly not even the main goal. Instead, professional and educational development, civic participation, and personal and social uprightness are highlighted. Second, this paper argues that girls’ education facilitated the movement of women, and the ideas they learned in school, around the region, from rural areas to urban, and between schools, cities, and countries. Thus, as the students, alumnae, and teachers of girls’ schools moved around Lebanon and the larger Middle East, in the very fact of their movement and in their professional and personal choices, they shaped discourses on nation and citizenship and women’s place in both. Such an analysis forces us to rethink the meaning and purpose of girls’ education in the modernization and national projects to which it is so often tied.
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Dr. Edward Falk
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Beiruti playwright and political activist Chekri Ganem pleaded to the leaders of the Great Powers that the inhabitants of Bilad ash-Sham were “Syrians not Arabs,” noting that their “race is as distinct as it could possibly be in this theatre of invasions.” A nationalist graduate of the French Lazarist Collège Saint-Joseph of Antoura, Ganem shared the challenge of both his mostly Syro-Lebanese Christian classmates and their French missionary teachers of attempting to unite the Phoenician coast, Lebanese mountain, and Syrian interior, while living under Ottoman rule. Reconciling their European racial and national education with the Arab-Muslim majority of their homeland would prove an enduring challenge.
The Jesuit and Lazarist missionary curriculum in Ottoman Lebanon drew upon both classic theology and early Orientalists like Ernest Renan, who the Lazarists hosted on his Mission de Phénicie. French, Belgian, and occasionally Italian missionary teachers and their students collaboratively created an archaeological and philological record to support national identity and ideology, elevating pre-Islamic Phoenician, Biblical, and Greco-Roman elements. With a pedagogical focus on classical history and the establishment of the Bibliothèque Orientale at l’Université Saint-Joseph, the French missionary institutions in Ottoman Beirut and its hinterlands academically legitimized Syro-Lebanese national aspirations throughout their curriculum. The European national ideal was accompanied by its contemporary racial science and hierarchy, fostering non-Arab racial origins for the non-Muslim population of the region.
In spite of their sometimes divergent political allegiances after the during the First World War and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, I argue the students and graduates of the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut and Lazarist Collège Saint-Joseph in Antoura shared a hybridized understanding of nation and race in their analysis and imagining of their homeland. Lebanese, Syrian, and Arab nationalist graduates including Ganem, Michel Chiha, Charles Corm, and Khaïrallah Khaïrallah followed similar curricula of theology, the classics, and racial science. In school and after graduation, they composed both history, poetry, and policy in service of their nations, inscribing their causes onto Biblical, classical and crusader themes.
