In the effort to understand the role and lives of women in the medieval past, is important to rely on multiple modes of sources. In examining several types of contemporary primary sources, as opposed to a chronological assessment of a single type, a more holistic image of medieval history involving multiple facets of society can be put together. The approach that I will be taking in my paper will be to examine multiple source types from the same period to paint a better picture of women’s participation in education in Mamluk Cairo. The sources that I will be using range from awqaf (records of endowments in the form of various assets), tabaqat (biographical dictionaries), tawarikh (contemporaneous histories), fataawa (legal rulings), and social critiques. I will be specifically highlighting the ribat (female religious establishments), and khanaqah (sufi convent), and discussing their role in the religious education and participation of women in the 15th century. I argue that the power of patronage allowed women to found and create institutions to serve their specific needs, creating a crossroads for both the high class and commoners in search of the same goals of religious education. Although many male religious scholars of the time have commented on women refraining from the public sphere, I argue that this was an ideal that was advocated but far from the reality at the time. Biographical dictionaries such as al-Sakhawi, indicate that not only did women patrons fund institutions, but mentions examples of women teaching mixed congregations in mosques. In addition a variety of social critiques highlight the particular interest of women during this time period to visit the Qarafa of Cairo, and thus the surrounding khanaqahs in the area. These conclusions challenge current scholarship that argues that the Middle Periods of Islamic History decreased the accessibility and participation of women in the public sphere. Today, we see an enormous uproar regarding the Women’s Mosque of America, many who argue that it is unprecedented in Islam. However, my research suggests that women have created institutions for seeking religious knowledge centuries before 2015.

France’s presence in Algeria, however uneven it may have been in practice, lasted over a century. In administering this vast territory from the 1830s into the 1960s, the French adopted tactics ranging from military conquest to the so-called “civilizing mission.” Each of these methods sought to establish forms of colonial order, from a settler society to extractive exploitation, but all faced an array of challenges from colonized populations. That most Algerians were Muslim presented particular tactical and intellectual dilemmas, as the voluminous colonial discourse of politique musulmane, or “Muslim policy,” suggests. In this paper, I consider French colonial approaches to Algeria’s Muslim populations. In particular, I examine the case of the French médersa, an institution that provided specialized training in Islamic law to colonized subjects throughout the colonial period. Three médersas were founded in Algeria (in Algiers, Constantine, and Tlemcen) in 1850; they closed only in the 1950s at the dawn of Algeria’s liberation war. By sponsoring a particular form of “juridico-religious” education for colonized Muslims, the French administration sought to extend its authority over local Islamic legal systems in northwest Africa. The addition of French curricula in the 1870s fostered the notion of a “double culture” for students to act as ideal intermediaries in the colonial system. Colonial administrators considered the médersas to be products of a process of “domestication” (in French, apprivoisement) resulting from French ethnographic mastery of Muslim communities. Through this lens, I suggest, scholars can re-evaluate the relationship between Islamic societies and colonial institutions. How was the médersa “domesticated,” and through what means? How did this long-lived institution change over the course of its century-long operation? How did the graduates—relatively few in number but outsized in their impact—guide the practices of French imperialism in Algeria and elsewhere? Based on archival research in Algeria and France, I present the médersa as anomalous to dominant interpretations of French rule in Algeria. It demonstrates the importance of ethnographic knowledge and legal pluralism to French strategies of rule. Furthermore, the prominent roles played by médersa graduates in anti-colonial movements suggest a different interpretation of “domestication,” one entailing the exploitation of a colonial institution for anti-colonial ends. As such, I argue for a reconsideration of the linkages between education, Islamic law, and colonial authority in Algerian history.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, intellectuals in places such as Egypt, Istanbul, Beirut, and Tehran saw a strong tie between national (and imperial) success and female education. As World War I drew to a close and countries such as Lebanon and Syria were assigned borders and mandatory governments, questions about the role of female education and nation continued. This paper contributes to the scholarship on girls’ education, nationalist movements, and the women’s press in the Middle East during the interwar period as it examines the rhetoric on girls’ education as seen in the women’s press in Beirut, Lebanon from the Paris peace talks in 1919 to the formal establishment of the French mandate in 1922. While much has been said (and much was made) about calls for female education as a means to create modern wives and mothers for the new nations, less attention has been given to the relationship between girls’ education and their subsequent role in the national project outside that of wife and mother. Through a close examination of al-Fajr (The Dawn), a representative women’s monthly magazine published beginning in 1919, this paper argues that girls’ education, as seen in the pages of the press, was a key site in the creation of the new nation. By examining the women’s press in the context of the nation and nationalist movements, this paper suggests that not only were women’s magazines primary sites in nationalist discussions, but that the debates contained within their pages related, implicitly and explicitly, to a larger nationalist cause. Further, gender was a key component in constructions of national identity and the physical space of the school was a site for the creation and propagation of nationalist ideologies. Indeed, through an examination of the rhetoric on girls’ education in the contents of al-Fajr in the years between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French mandate, one sees the important place gender held in constructing national identity, as well as the role of schools and education in furthering nationalist agendas.

The Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), a French-Jewish philanthropic organization founded in 1860 and dedicated to spreading secular education to Jews around the world and especially the Middle East, opened its first school for girls, which later came to be known as the Laura Kadoorie School, in Baghdad in 1895. Although the school thrived over the next two decades it was forced to close shortly after the outbreak of World War I and was not to re-open until the British occupied Baghdad toward the end of the war. This paper seeks to analyze how the school’s headmistresses, teachers, and students adapted to the shift from Ottoman to British rule and then to quasi-independent Hashemite rule during the inter-war period in Iraq. The main question this paper aims to answer is, how did a school/organization with the initial goal of helping Baghdadi Jews better integrate into and contribute to Ottoman society adapt to the changes brought about by British colonialism in the late 1910s and early 1920s and the rise of Iraqi Arab nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s? This paper is based almost solely on the letters of the female headmistresses and teachers of the Laura Kadoorie School from 1918-1939. Although there has been a good amount of research in recent years on the history and writings of Iraqi Jews in Hashemite Iraq, this paper is the first to both utilize the writings of the female teachers of the Laura Kadoorie School and to analyze the school’s activities during the inter-war period. Thus, this paper makes original contributions to the fields of Iraqi history, Iraqi-Jewish history, and both Jewish women’s history and Middle East women’s history.

Ironically, the French Muslim headscarf affair, culminating into the 2004 law that bans certain religious signs in public schools on the ground of secularism, spurred the establishment of private Islamic schools that eventually receive government subsidies. The first Muslim school to enter a contract with the state, the Averroes High school in the suburb of Lille, made headlines in 2013 when it was named best high school in France. This talk investigates whether 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 private education in France. This talk starts with an analysis of the two terms that are at the foundation of the debate: communautarisme, which in the French context carries a negative connotation, because it is deemed as incompatible with the values of universalism promoted by the French model of the nation, and integration, which is the goal that the nation fosters for all immigrants and their descendants, but that Muslim minorities claiming their identity are faulted for eluding. It then gives some background about the history of private education in France, where private schools can get substantial subsidies from the State provided that the school teaches the nationally mandated curriculum, accepts all teachers, and does not make religious instruction mandatory. The second part examines two Muslim schools that receive funding from the State, and draws some commonality in their mission and curriculum in Arabic and Islamic studies, in addition to quality education. The religious component is specifically targeted to the French context, and a priority is to help students reconcile their identity as Muslim French, something that is most often than not considered by mainstream society to be an oxymoron. The conclusion surmises that the 1989-2004 affair of the scarf simply accelerated the establishment of Islamic schools, witness the recent trend in opening elementary schools. These schools can also be seen as a sign of maturity of the Muslim community in France, which has now mustered the education and the means to take advantage of benefits the French state can offer to religious communities.