The emergence of educational projects in the Middle East and North Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed several foundational changes. Questions around the purpose of the state education project developed as independence movements burgeoned with the end of formal colonialism and each new nation-state across the region underwent significant political and economic transformations. The role of Islam in schooling became a central topic of debate in these post-colonial contexts from Egypt to Iran. Simultaneously in this same period with an increase of Middle Eastern, North and West African migrants to Western Europe, Islamic education for the diasporic community became a topic of amplified attention. With an increasing number of Islamic schools in Western Europe, issues related to the state, identity, and the role of religion in schooling, have taken center-stage.
This panel is interested in the intersections of education, gender, identity, and nationalism in the twentieth century. Each paper will interrogate the position and instrumentalization of varied education projects, albeit Islamic or secular in the creation of gendered identities, “modern” ideals, and the nation-state. The panel is interdisciplinary and brings together diverse approaches exploring the role of the state, women’s participation, variations of Islamic schooling, imagining nationhood, and new interpretations of modernity through historical, ethnographic, and architectural methods.
The first paper will explore how Islamic schools in France have grappled with these questions of citizenship, nation, identity and gender. A second paper will discuss how women seminarians in Iran have used the howzevi schooling system to impose their own voices on nation and religion. The third paper focuses on how the state education project offered both new possibilities and new forms of control for women during the period between 1958-1961 when Egypt and Syria were united under the United Arab Republic. The fourth paper will focus on modernity and nation-state building looking at architecture and institution building of the Mubarakia schools in Kuwait. The fifth paper explores the role of mothers in their children’s’ education in communities at the margin of society in Jordan.
-
Dahlia El Zein
This paper will explore the educational project of the United Arab Republic, the period of unification between Egypt and Syria 1958-1961, as a study of the intersection of gender, class, and nationalism. Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria’s Baathist regime were notorious for quashing Islamist opposition and co-opting local feminist movements. Yet the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt and Syria is still remembered as an era of women’s “liberation.” My paper aims to complicate this picture and parse out what a progressive vision of universal education actually meant and for whom.
The UAR constitution established compulsory universal education for both boys and girls. The educated citizen would be of service to the nation and the nation of service to the greater pan-Arab cause. But those who did not fit into either the pan-Arab cause or believe in the goals of a secular nation were excluded from both vision and reality. At the close of the union in 1961, the lip service paid to women’s progress yielded different results for women in Egypt and Syria, depending on social status and region.
Using previously unexplored primary sources from the United Arab Republic Ministry of Education and Public Information archives, oral history interviews, and newspaper articles, this paper will show how the women of the UAR were conscious benefactors of the new possibilities the state educational project offered them and not only subjects of control. The employment of state feminism in educational planning produced an urban middle class unique to the period which was driven by the need for more working bodies for a growing economy. More women were educated and entered the public workforce, and the state’s progressive credentials were validated among other Arab states and globally. The educational plan privileged the vision of an urban, educated Arab woman, fashioned from a hybrid of the secular European and Soviet woman. This vision marginalized rural and non-Arab populations and non- “formal” forms of education. Some women in Syria and Egypt embraced this vision of secular urban progress, while others saw the union’s educational program as one more example of an externally imposed imperial system of education.
-
Full-time Muslim K-12 schools are a very recent phenomenon in Metropolitan France. It dates back to 2001 with the opening of two separate schools: a middle school (La Réussite) and an elementary school (La Plume), though the will to do so can be traced back a decade earlier. The geographical locations of Muslim schools in France maps with immigration from Muslim countries, with strong concentration in the Paris, Lyon, and Lille areas. The number of these schools has been growing exponentially: from 11 schools opened in September 2010 teaching 1,100 students, to 74 schools teaching 7,778 students in Fall 2017. This surge is widely seen as a threat. While the increase in the number of Muslim schools is happening at the same rate as non-confessional schools and Evangelical schools, only Muslim schools are the ones who are raising the bell and specters of communautarisme/ethnic separatism and radicalization.
This talk is excerpted from the first book-length study dedicated to this phenomenon. In France, Islamic practices (such as wearing a headscarf) are excluded from public schools and Muslim students’ culture is either absent or presented in slanted, biased perspective in the curriculum. I starts by raising the issue of the toll that obvious and pernicious exclusions can take on parents and students. I then examine the curriculum used by some Muslim schools for the subject not offered in public schools, namely Islamic Religious studies, drawing on field work conducted in Fall 2016 and Spring 2018, during which I observed Arabic and Islamic education classes, and talked with school administrators and teachers.
The stated goals and mission of these schools make it a top priority to help students reconcile their identity as Muslim French. I examine how the schools’ objectives translate into practice, focusing on how school administrators and teachers endeavor to achieve those goals, particularly through the religion and Arabic classes. I show how the traditional field of Islamic education has been adapted to build both national and religious identities among French Muslim students, and how these classes participate in the making of a French Islam.
-
The 1979 Iranian revolution enabled conservative women previously limited in mobility to partake in building a Shi’i revolutionary state by expanding access to the women’s seminaries unparalleled in the history of Shi’i Islam. I lived in Iran for 15 months to explore what the consequences have been for some of these women, the howzevi. I draw on their ethnography as students, mothers, daughters, wives, as developers of the social and educational programs for a post-revolution society, and as vanguards of a state with the maxim to derail western political domination in the Middle East. Five howzevi were students of the Supreme Leader and Chief Justice of Iran, and over 21 were Basij (volunteer paramilitary organization). This work is positioned at the intersection of state, Islamic education, and the Iranian women’s movement, currently characterized by women’s work to undermine patriarchal state policies using Islamic text. I pose an alternative look by moving analysis away from women either failing to attain a universalized ideal ‘good life’ as autonomous will or exhibiting false-consciousness. In this work, I have found that the howzevi were both facilitated and limited at once by self-imposed practices, such as being cautious about their social visibilities outside the home or observing deference towards their husbands and fathers. And, because their experiences with the ‘rule of men’ were diverse, success was not always measured against the effort to eliminate patriarchy or about vying for leadership positions. Instead I argue that the howzevi were changing their sociopolitical conditions by working to strengthen the state via increased availability of Islamic jurisprudent research concerning women, by their continued presence among clerics as researchers, authors, or teachers, and by bridging Islamic text to practice as teachers of the Basij, as university counsellors, and as pioneers and developers of the seminaries.
-
Ms. Afaf Khoshman(Alkhashman)
In this paper, I will discuss variations in the methods and approaches by which the mothers I interviewed and observed socialize their children into participation in new, non-traditional educational models in a peripheral city in southern Jordan.
Dealing with new realities imposed by globalization, economic liberalization, and a volatile labor market, youth in Al-Rawda enroll in a myriad of private education programs in topics outside those of the established public schooling, such as ‘life skills’, robotics, social innovation, and foreign languages.
My paper discusses four areas where mothers influence and guide the behavior of their children and facilitate or impede their children’s participation in these programs. These areas include a changing value system around the role of families in education, the issue of raising and socialization of boys in a changing society, the response to discourse on religiosity and respectability, and lastly the drivers for more women’s presence in public spaces and how it is facilitated in the new models of education and the spaces they create.
I argue that families, especially mothers, play a central role in elucidating and making sense of the aims and possible outcomes of education. I also argue that in the case of informal education, the more youth enroll in these programs, the more control families will have over education outcomes, however this is mainly led and facilitated by parents of middle-class families with higher education-attainment. Throughout this change, more women are taking part in leading the public sphere and gender roles in society are gradually shifting. My future work in al-Rawda will further investigate these conclusions and examine the content of these programs, their reception, and how young people and their families are making sense of the changes taking place in the city and its labor market.
