GIRLS' EDUCATION IN LATE OTTOMAN AND MANDATORY PALESTINE

The history of girls' education in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine can be constructed from several competing visions. It is known that girls from affluent families were educated at home by either male relatives or private tutors or were apprenticed with local women to learn domestic arts, such as embroidery and sewing.⁶

In the mid-19th century, Western missionaries and religious orders began to establish schools for girls; preparing girls for their roles as future mothers and wives was pivotal to transmitting Christian ideals and improving society.⁷ One example is the Sisters of Zion school, founded in Jerusalem in 1865, which taught housekeeping skills, needlework, and French to upper-class girls.⁸ Yet some mission schools had other aims. The Anglican girls' schools in Jerusalem and Haifa, for example, provided upper- and middle-class Arab and Jewish girls with a strong academic education and cultivated their desire to serve society, under a shared civic identity.⁹ Indeed, many graduates of missionary schools became educators themselves, and some formed their own schools, such as Ghara Kabis, a graduate of the Shuweifat School in Lebanon who established a co-educational school in Acre in the late Ottoman period.¹⁰

The growing encroachment of the missionary schools and fear of losing their followers compelled local religious communities to establish their own Western-style, secular schools, including ones for girls. Minority religious communities also opened their own schools out of fear of assimilation or acculturation.¹¹

The Armenian Orthodox community in Jerusalem founded a co-educational school for its members in 1846, which continued to operate at least prior to World War I.¹² Similarly, a Greek Orthodox girls' school was established in 1862 or 1863, attended by seventy-six pupils and taught by two women.¹³ A number of Jewish philanthropic organizations founded several girls' schools that catered mainly to the Sephardi population. The schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle focused on transforming young women into proper mothers, while the Evelina de Rothschild School, which belonged to the Anglo-Jewish Association, had a more academic curriculum. Early Zionist settlers created competing schools and provided a nationalist secular curriculum with Hebrew as the medium of instruction, and not just a language of prayer.¹⁴

The Muslim community used the institution of waqf, the endowment of property for private or charitable purposes, to fund the education of specific groups, and to establish the traditional kuttāb school (pl., katātīb) for teaching the Qur

an and Islamic principles. Although young girls often attended katātīb together with young boys, evidence suggests that waqf-endowed schools specifically for girls, providing instruction in religion, embroidery, and needlework, were founded in large cities throughout the Ottoman Empire beginning in the 18th century.

¹⁵

Toward the end of Ottoman rule, as the dedication of waqf for public purposes began to decline, individuals and newly formed charitable associations began to create Muslim schools with a secular, Western orientation.¹⁶

Although few such organizations championed girls' education, one exception was the Jam

iyat al-maqasid al-Islamiyya, which founded two girls' schools in Beirut and reportedly had branches in Jaffa and Jerusalem by the turn of the century. In the wake of the Young Turk revolution, both Muslim and Christian urban, upper-class Palestinian women recognized that they could advance their daughters' education through charitable groups. The Jam

iyat

add al-yatimat al-urthuduksiyyat, formed in Jaffa in 1910 to help local Christian girls obtain higher education in Beirut, was one such group.

¹⁷

The Ottoman Public Education Law (ma

arif-i

umumiye nizamnamesi), although promulgated in 1869, was only applied during the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), and legislated the establishment of a comprehensive public-school system throughout the empire. The state school system, as embodied by the Ottoman Public Education Law, sought to educate pupils in natural sciences and other secular subjects believed to bring progress to the empire. Primary schools were to be set up at the provincial level, in every town and village. As Benjamin Fortna and Selim Deringil have both argued, Ottoman educational policies were promulgated and carried out as a tactic to defend against the growing competition of foreign missionary schools and the overall failure of the Muslim millet to compete with them.

¹⁸

The promotion of a state school system in the provinces was also intended to thwart local nationalism and separatism.¹⁹

This system, however, was slow to be enacted and not completely fulfilled.

One of the important facets of the educational legislation of 1869 was the official recognition of the need for girls' schools and female teachers. The yearbooks of the Ministry of Education showcased the Ottoman state's educational efforts, which included a few state-run girls' schools in Palestine. The yearbook for 1900, for example, shows that a government secondary school (rushdiyya) for girls was established in Acre, in which two female teachers were in charge of thirty-five girls, while a private elementary school (ibtidā

iyya) for girls was founded in Nazareth using local contributions.

²⁰

Vital Cuinet, who visited Palestine in the 1890s, wrote about four rushdiyya schools for girls—in Jerusalem, Gaza, Jaffa, and Hebron—instructing between fifty to one hundred girls each.²¹

Similarly, Justin McCarthy has calculated that the Jerusalem district in 1913–14 had thirty state schools.²²

Although McCarthy does not break down the schools according to gender, he notes that they employed some seventy-five male and eighteen female teachers. Female teachers thus formed 20 percent of the government teaching staff and are likely to have staffed two or three elementary schools.

The transition from Ottoman to British mandatory rule led to several changes in Palestine's educational system. The British assumed control of the Ottoman state schools, placing them under direct responsibility of the Mandate's Department of Education, while Article 15 of the Mandate ensured that each religious community would continue to operate its own autonomous schools. One of the first changes made affected the teaching staff. Teacher-training colleges for men and women were opened, and government teachers were required to have adequate training and certification.²³

As a result, most of the teachers appointed before the British occupation were replaced with new graduates of the teachers' colleges. The number of potential teachers, however, exceeded the number of available teaching posts.²⁴ The British also chose not to construct additional school buildings; instead, they reopened former Ottoman public schools or took control of local katātīb. In the cities, this policy of not opening new schools resulted in overcrowding of many existing schools and in an inability to accept new students. The paucity of schools was felt particularly in the villages, where villagers were expected to raise funds for the construction of school buildings, the provision of furniture, and the payment of teacher salaries. A petition submitted to the director of education by the residents of Maliha village outside Jerusalem was typical. The village raised yearly sums to support its boys' school but could not afford a comparable girls' school, despite a growing demand for girls' education.²⁵

Girls' education was not a high priority of the British Mandate. In his memoir, Humphrey Bowman, director of education from 1920 to 1936, emphasized the importance of educating Arab girls in domestic skills over “book-learning.”²⁶

The British believed that the majority of girls did not need more than an elementary education, with most urban girls' schools offering six or seven years of schooling. The only public secondary school for girls was the Women's Teachers' College, which accepted a small number of pupils each year. The British repeatedly claimed that they could not expand girls' education because of the lack of Muslim female teachers.²⁷ When the number of Muslim women entering the profession increased, the British were unable to increase the number of available posts because of budgetary considerations. The British also differentiated between urban and rural girls' education. Village girls' schools formed a small percentage of all village schools, and offered at most only four years of primary education, as opposed to six or seven. Top pupils in village schools were invited to attend the Women's Rural Teachers' Training Center in Ramallah, where they studied elementary-school subjects in addition to simple pedagogy, domestic science, and agricultural skills.²⁸ Its opening in 1935, seventeen years after the establishment of the Department of Education, also manifests the sluggish speed of the British in expanding girls' education in the villages.

LOCATING THE SCHOOL WITHIN THE COMMUNITY

In 1925, with the permission of the Department of Education, the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) established the Islamic Girls' School in Jerusalem. The SMC already administered several boys' schools, including al-Ahmadiyya in Acre, Rawdat al-ma

arif in Jerusalem, and al-Najah in Nablus. It later opened girls' schools in Jaffa and Nazareth and irregularly funded ones in Hebron and Nablus. Whereas the other girls' schools run by the SMC had difficulty maintaining more than a few grades, the Jerusalem school was able to provide a six-year elementary education; given sufficient funds and demand, one or two secondary classes were occasionally offered. The school attracted some 150–350 pupils annually from all over Jerusalem, including the more distant and more affluent neighborhoods outside the city walls. An additional twenty-five pupils came from the Islamic orphanage; by 1940, this number had doubled as the orphanage accommodated a large number of children whose fathers had fallen during the Palestinian revolt.

The establishment of the Islamic Girls' School, in part, was intended to counteract the plethora of Christian missionary schools and their efforts at proselytizing among Muslims. In 1923, and again in 1925, six months before the school's opening, the SMC asked every qadi to report on missionary activities.²⁹

A year after the opening of the school, the head of the local educational committee in Jerusalem praised the SMC for its endeavor to “remove Muslim girls from missionary and colonial schools,” and urged the SMC to not consider moving the school to another location, presumably because it was in the heart of Muslim Jerusalem.³⁰ Concern for the growing number of Muslim children in missionary schools and those schools' effect on Muslim girls was expressed at the SMC's Islamic Conference held in Jerusalem in 1931. Providing Muslim children with an Islamic education was one of the goals set forth at the conference.³¹ Records reveal that the Islamic Girls' School had some success in “rescuing” pupils from missionary schools, particularly those from wealthy families who could afford the school fees. The missionary schools, especially the Jerusalem Girls' College, administered by the Anglicans, and Schmidt's Girls' School, run by German Catholics, proved to be difficult competition and pushed the Islamic Girls' School to maintain—at least, initially—a high level of education.

By maintaining a high educational level, the Islamic Girls' School was able to promote itself as an alternative to the traditional Muslim religious kuttāb school. The kuttāb schools were emblematic of the so-called decline of Islamic society and had acquired a poor reputation because of their lack of modern equipment and books, rote method of teaching, and poorly trained teachers. This reputation was expressed not just by government officials and educators, but also by many local Muslims. Muslims in

Ajami, a neighborhood of Jaffa, complained that their local school had gradually “retreated backwards to the level of the local kuttāb” because the SMC had failed to fund it.

³²

Yet despite their image, the katātīb were a strong competitor for the SMC schools: in 1931, twenty-eight such schools in towns throughout Palestine educated 1,023 boys and 148 girls, whereas in the same year, only 844 boys and 200 girls attended SMC schools.³³

Thus, the SMC exerted efforts to elevate its schools above the katātīb by following an extended curriculum, acquiring books and school equipment, and hiring well-trained teachers.

By emphasizing an Islamic and ultimately nationalist character and curriculum, the Islamic Girls' School also sought to distinguish itself from the government girls' schools. Although they catered primarily to the Muslim population, the government schools provided minimal instruction in Islamic religion and Arabic. The Islamic Girls' School competed for the same pupils as the government schools, but it could not have succeeded without the support of the government's Department of Education. The Department of Education gave grants-in-aid to non-government schools, including the SMC schools, based on the number of pupils enrolled; the more pupils enrolled, the greater the assistance. Grants were provided to a school as long as it taught basic reading and writing skills, allowed yearly inspections by the Department of Education, and complied with sanitary regulations. As Gregory Starrett argues, this system created competition for funding among schools, which gave them an incentive to elevate their standards.³⁴

In return, the SMC schools, including the Islamic Girls' School, accommodated a large number of pupils who were turned down by government schools because of overcrowding or because they exceeded the maximum age for admission.

Politics may have played a significant role in the creation of the Islamic Girls' School. Through its establishment, the SMC represented itself as an enlightened political leadership that showed interest in women's issues and, in particular, girls' education. As Ruth Woodsmall remarked, the SMC took an “advanced step” when it established scholarships for Muslim girls to study in Egypt and Syria, as well as for nurses' training in Jerusalem.³⁵

By opening the Islamic Girls' School, the SMC followed in the footsteps of well-known Muslim associations such as the Islamic Maqasid Society in Beirut and the Islamic Association in Haifa, the latter which established a number of schools in the early 1920s. Educating girls also put the SMC on par with its Zionist adversaries. The school records, however, are silent on Zionism and the Zionist school system, thus making it impossible to gauge the degree to which their presence and educational achievements shaped the SMC's policy toward girls' education.

The decision to house the Islamic Girls' School immediately outside the ḥaram al-sharīf, encompassing the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, carried many political and social implications. Its placement within walking distance of the Islamic library, museum, and Rawdat al-ma

arif boys' school gave it legitimacy as one of the SMC's showcase projects. Locating the school near the ḥaram also reminded the Muslim community of the religious obligation to educate its daughters. Moreover, the school's proximity to Jerusalem's former Islamic colleges suggested that it was to carry on their tradition of learning. The decision to open the school on waqf property called al-Dawadariyya also was consciously made. A woman who spent three years in the Islamic Girls' School related that her mother had studied through the fourth elementary class in the same building in a school run by an American woman.

³⁶

The description and location of this school at the northern wall of the ḥaram al-sharīf matches Bertha Spafford Vester's recollection of the state-run “Moslem girls' school,” which she managed for some six years beginning in 1897.³⁷

In using the same building as its Ottoman predecessor, the SMC made a conscious attempt at some continuity between the two schools. Similarly, several of those who applied to teach in the Islamic Girls' School were graduates of the former school, and the SMC may have continued to employ some of its teachers.

Initially, the Islamic Girls' School was able to attract a large number of pupils, particularly those from the Muslim elite, because of its cast of local and foreign Arab female teachers. The first headmistress, for example, was a Muslim woman from Sidon accompanied by her sister, who also taught in the school, and her successor was a Christian woman from Beirut. The early staff was composed of several women from Jerusalem's Christian families: Anstas al-Shammas, Marta al-Khuri, and Melia al-Sakakini.³⁸

Employing Christian women as teachers in Muslim schools was not unheard of, and perhaps was even desirable in the context of Christian–Muslim cooperation in the early days of the Mandate. The Islamic Maqasid Society in Beirut already had set a precedent for the SMC, having hired a Christian woman as headmistress of one of its schools before World War I.³⁹

In the early 1930s, however, the composition of the teaching staff began to shift. By 1938, the school had an entirely Muslim and mostly local female staff, including some of the first graduates of the school. Although dismissals, marriages, and expired contracts enabled the SMC to remove Christian teachers from their positions, the weakening of Christian–Muslim cooperation surely dissuaded qualified Christian women from seeking employment in the school. The increasing entry of Muslim women into the teaching profession by the late 1930s also allowed the school to restrict its search to Muslim female teaching candidates, with dozens of Muslim girls all over Palestine and Greater Syria competing for single teaching positions.⁴⁰

In addition to the religious shift, the teaching staff also underwent a process of localization. The position of headmistress, however, was (with one exception) always given to a non-resident Arab woman. The exception was Ruqiyya Khalil Hadaye of Jerusalem, who held the position for no more than three months in 1938. The preference for foreign headmistresses may have related to their relatively higher educational backgrounds, but it was more likely a conscious decision by the SMC to hire headmistresses who were outsiders to local factionalism and favoritism. Moreover, foreign teachers seem to have provided the school with greater prestige.

The attendance records also indicate a transformation in the student body concurrent with that of the teachers. Girls from elite and middle-strata families with religious or political standing dominated the student body during the first few years of the school's existence, while the number of poor students, not including orphans, formed a small percentage of pupils.⁴¹

By 1939, however, the headmistress reported that 90 percent of the pupils were from impoverished families and could not pay tuition fees.⁴² Among them were daughters of shoemakers, peddlers, and unskilled laborers whose fathers wrote to the school's headmistress requesting that their daughters be admitted gratuitously, as they were unable to pay the two pounds yearly tuition out of their meager salaries.⁴³ Several of these letters were written in exactly the same handwriting, presumably of professional letter writers, attesting to the parents' illiteracy. Petitions from local neighborhood leaders also confirmed the poor economic status of many students.⁴⁴

The shift in the socio-economic composition of the student body can be attributed to several factors. The choice of where families educated their daughters reflected individual political leanings as well as intellectual concerns. Many of the early pupils hailed from families politically aligned with the SMC, both inside and outside Jerusalem, and they often studied free of charge. Providing educational opportunities and funding existing schools was one means by which the SMC gained support. The pupil register reveals, however, that in the early 1930s many families moved their daughters to other schools when the SMC reduced the school's budget. The problem of overcrowding and lack of space in the neighboring government schools, which tended to cater to the Muslim non-elite, also had an effect on the Islamic Girls' School.⁴⁵

The Islamic Girls' School eagerly enrolled many children who were not admitted to government schools, as more pupils guaranteed additional government funding. The growing number of pupils from non-elite families clearly pushed away the daughters of more elite families. Finally, most of the missionary schools were well established in Jerusalem, having already educated several generations of pupils by the time the Islamic Girls' School was founded. The fact that many missionary schools offered secondary studies proved difficult competition for the Islamic Girls' School, which, because of budget considerations, could offer only the first two years of the secondary curriculum. Thus, many Muslim parents chose to send their daughters to a particular missionary school rather than enroll them in the Islamic Girls' School.

The transformation of the teachers from a mixed staff in terms of religion and origin to a local Muslim staff may have directly affected the enrollment of the pupils. The school's initial reputation, according to a former pupil, Nuzha Darwish, was built on its having a foreign Arab teaching staff, primarily from Syria and Lebanon, as well as on being known as a nationalist (waṭanī) school.⁴⁶

In her memoirs, former pupil Serene Husseini Shahid remembered the foreign teachers as contributing to the school's fame for its academic standards.⁴⁷ The decision to hire local women may have tarnished the school's image, particularly when the Muslim community was still reluctant to accept teaching as an occupation for Muslim women. The poor representation of Muslim women in the Women's Teachers' College until the mid-1930s is indicative of this trend.⁴⁸ Moreover, most of the missionary schools continued to maintain primarily foreign staffs, which added to their prestige. The Jerusalem Girls' College, for example, consistently had a staff that was 70 percent British and 30 percent Arab.⁴⁹

Finally, the student composition was affected by the changing socio-economic context of Mandate Jerusalem, coupled by notions of gendered public space—where girls could and could not go. A study of the pupil registers reveals that many students lived close to the school, suggesting that parents preferred their daughters to study nearby, without having to traverse the city quarters and busy streets.⁵⁰

Muslims from the middle and lower strata inhabited primarily the neighborhoods around the school, while many of the Muslim elite no longer lived around the ḥaram al-sharīf, having moved to more exclusive neighborhoods in the new city where many of the missionary schools were located.⁵¹ To attract girls from elite families, the Islamic Girls' School opened a boarding section in 1929. A house in the elite Bab al-Zahre neighborhood outside the city walls accommodated several teachers and two dozen girls from all over the city, as well as from Jaffa, Haifa, Gaza, and Ramleh.⁵² Financial deficits at the SMC finally led to the boarding section's closure in 1931. The closing of the boarding school, the financial difficulties of the SMC, and the proximity of the school to the Wailing Wall riots of 1929 drove away some elite families. Serene Husseini Shahid, for example, who boarded at the school, was transferred to the Friends School in Ramallah in 1930.⁵³ Thus, the SMC had little choice but to open its girls' school to those who applied.

CONVEYING THE IDEAL WOMAN

One of the main goals of the Islamic Girls' School was to shape its pupils into modern Muslim women. The school's curriculum sheds light on this ideal. Inspired by the curricula of Iraqi, Palestinian, and Turkish government schools, it was applied uniformly to all SMC schools in 1928.

⁵⁴

Its objectives were outwardly nationalist, to be achieved through study and discipline. The curriculum sought “to create courageous, honorable, active, nationalist working youth trained in Islamic and Arabic culture” by instilling a devotion to Islam through studying the Qur

an and religious principles; to impart a love for the nation by emphasizing the Arabic language, Arab history, and geography; and to train pupils to adhere to the loftiest manners and highest morals, including ideas of order, cleanliness, and discipline, through scouting, sports, and educational outings.

⁵⁵

Students wore school uniforms to give the impression of unity and solidarity, and girls who wore coats over their jumpers or cut their hair were criticized as distorting this cohesiveness. For the instructive and disciplinary role of the school to be successful, teachers and students had to behave as members of an “honorable family.”⁵⁶

The school's character and curriculum reflected a dual, perhaps even contradictory, vision to which Muslim girls should aspire. Students were expected to follow a religious lifestyle. Prayers were incorporated into the daily routine; the teachers and pupils adhered to Muslim rules of modesty and maintained complete separation from men by holding all-women events for themselves and their female relatives. The curriculum had a heavily nationalist and religious component, including nine to eighteen hours weekly of Arabic-language instruction and five hours weekly of instruction in Islam. Yet it also provided a similar number of hours devoted to secular subjects such as algebra and English. Although the study of English seemingly did not fit the school's nationalist character, the local community perceived the study of a foreign language as a sign of enlightenment and modernity. French and later English were taught in other nationalist schools such as Rawdat al-ma

arif.

⁵⁷

The significance given to foreign languages is revealed in a letter from the inspector of Islamic schools to the headmistress of the Islamic Girls' School in which he asked whether a candidate for teaching sewing knew any foreign language, indicative of her level of education and cultural sympathies.⁵⁸

English was clearly the favored language of study in British-controlled Palestine. Acquiring English-language skills would qualify graduates of the Islamic Girls' School for jobs in teaching, the social services, and as secretaries. It would also enable them to continue their secondary studies at the Jerusalem Girls' College, as well as at the American Girls' School in Sidon, where English was the language of instruction.

Recognizing the need to train the wives and mothers of the future, headmistress Matilde Sa

ad added domestic science to the sixth and seventh classes.

⁵⁹

The inspector of Islamic schools even visited the American Girls' School in Sidon, which had a six-year program to train teachers of domestic sciences, in the hope of creating a similar program in the Islamic Girls' School; the visit, however, failed to bear fruit.⁶⁰

Instruction in domestic skills had always been part of girls' education and was reintroduced as a science at the turn of the century. Domestic science was emblematic of the notion of modernity that the Islamic Girls' School sought to convey: to care for her home, the woman had to be educated and knowledgeable. Acquiring domestic skills also would enable pupils of the lower stratum to earn their own livelihoods as seamstresses, laundrywomen, or cooks. As part of the nationalist rhetoric, domestic skills would make upper-class women self-sufficient and independent rather than reliant on household help. The press, for example, regularly encouraged women to discard their servants and depend on themselves instead as a metaphor for Palestine to seek independence rather than allow others to determine its fate.⁶¹

While banners inscribed with hadith inspired pupils to idealize

Aisha, the wife of the Prophet, images of Zenobia, the pre–Islamic Arab queen also adorned the walls.

⁶²

The message was bifurcated: to be a devoted wife and Muslim like

Aisha and to aspire to public, even political, positions, as Zenobia did. Although a large number of pupils left school early to marry, a number of pupils were encouraged to continue their education and acquire careers. With the agreement of the Egyptian government, four girls were sent to the Primary Teachers' Training School in Helwan to train as teachers for SMC schools. Several of these women returned to teach in the Islamic Girls' School.

⁶³

Others continued their studies at the Jerusalem Girls' College or at the American Girls' School in Sidon.⁶⁴

The Islamic Girls' School may also have provided candidates for a nurses' training program, established by the SMC with cooperation from the government's Department of Health.⁶⁵

This dual vision, however, often met with obstacles. The teachers could not understand how the increasing number of poor and orphaned pupils, whom they charged with a lack of cleanliness, lice, contagious diseases, and low grades, could become enlightened mothers or educated career women. Headmistress Su

ad al-Asir al-Husayni, for example, questioned the aims of educating and training Jerusalem's less fortunate, whom she disparaged as being capable only of paring vegetables.

⁶⁶

Some attempts were made to camouflage the differences—by imposing school uniforms and by forcing pupils to buy identical school supplies. In the 1940s, the creation of a sewing section, independent of the school's academic studies, was one means of separating the impoverished from the more affluent pupils. Girls from elite families studied academic subjects toward fulfilling the ideal of the educated Muslim woman, while pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds would learn sewing in preparation for an eventual livelihood. This distinction, however, broke down as graduates of the academic track, as well as from other schools, began to join the sewing section, where many of them stayed for several years, enabling them to postpone marriage proposals and avoid family burdens.

The school's interactions with various organizations and bodies representing colonial and Western interests also complicated its identity. Despite the SMC's stand against missionary schools, the Islamic Girls' School actively sought and employed graduates of those very schools. Throughout the school's history, most of the teachers—Muslim and Christian—were graduates of local missionary institutions. Moreover, the school's administration sent some of its better pupils to complete their educations at local missionary schools, despite students' complaints about required lessons in Christianity and a lack of religious tolerance.⁶⁷

The school also developed ties with the Young Women's Christian Association, which oversaw the creation of girl-scouting troops. Miss Talbott-Rice, district commissioner of the Jerusalem Girl Guides, approved the appointment of scouting teachers to the Islamic Girls' School.⁶⁸ One can only surmise that the Islamic Girls' School sought to develop ties with such groups to raise its reputation within the community and to prove to potential pupils that the school offered all the same amenities that the missionary schools did.

THE TEACHER AS ROLE MODEL

One source of inspiration and imitation for all pupils, wealthy and poor, was the school's teaching staff. The school's administration certainly recognized that its staff of well-educated Muslim and Christian female teachers not only would attract new pupils to the school, but that it would also represent one vision of womanhood that the school sought to convey. Most began teaching in their late teens and early twenties, with several continuing well into their fifties and sixties. Some never married, instead sharing households with family members or even living alone. The teacher Melia al-Sakakini, for example, reportedly lived alone in a house owned by her family. The teacher Hind al-Husayni and the headmistress Su

ad al-Asir al-Husayni also lived alone and regularly had to move because of expired rental contracts.

⁶⁹

Mobility was essential: many qualified women did not find jobs because of their refusal or inability to leave families who resided in towns other than Jerusalem. Relatives, usually their mothers, accompanied those teachers who came from outside Jerusalem, as in the case of the teachers Hadaye and Mariam Lutfi from Sidon.⁷⁰

The average teacher usually taught in several different schools before moving to the Islamic Girls' School. The school also absorbed former government schoolteachers who had been dismissed from their jobs, such as Melia al-Sakakini, who previously had taught at the Alawiyya Girls' School in Jerusalem.⁷¹

In some cases, the Islamic Girls' School provided a springboard for obtaining a job in the government school system, which was considered more desirable because of its pensions for female teachers.⁷²

Ra

isa al-Khadra from Safed acquired three years of teaching experience at the Islamic Girls' School before embarking on a seventeen-year career in the Mandatory government girls' schools.

⁷³

Su

ad al-Asir al-Husayni was probably typical of many female teachers at this time. Born and raised in Beirut, she completed six years at the Teacher's College in Istanbul.

⁷⁴

Her father was an Ottoman official, having acquired the “bey” status, which may explain why she was educated in Istanbul.⁷⁵

At age twenty, al-Asir al-Husayni began teaching in a government school in Beirut, and after five years she became headmistress. With one year's experience as a headmistress, she left Beirut to manage the girls' section of the Islamic Orphanage in Jerusalem. When that position was eliminated, she was transferred to a teaching position in a waqf-supported kindergarten in Jaffa for one year. In 1926, she joined the staff of the Islamic Girls' School in Jerusalem, where she taught Qur

an and religion, despite reportedly having difficulty with the Arabic language. In 1932, after seventeen years' work in education, al-Asir al-Husayni became the school's headmistress, a position that she held, with a brief interruption, until 1948.

Su

ad al-Asir al-Husayni, like many teachers, did not marry. Marriage in particular posed a problem for most female teachers, regardless of where they taught. The British legislated that female civil servants retire upon marriage, and those who served at least five years would receive a marriage gratuity instead of a pension. This regulation was relaxed slightly in the 1940s because of the shortage of manpower during the war, enabling married women to hold on to their positions if they desired. Married women, however, were prevented from applying for employment.

⁷⁶

The Islamic Girls' School, however, did not make any such stipulations. The notion of combining marriage with work in the community was one of the ideals that the school sought to sow. Most teachers who married, however, chose to leave their careers; only one teacher announced her intent to marry and retain her job, which she was allowed to do as long as her marital life did not interfere with her teaching.⁷⁷

Women engaged in teaching for a variety of reasons. Although the majority of teachers at the Islamic Girls' School were from prominent religious and scholarly families, they were not necessarily prosperous; many needed to work to support parents and siblings.⁷⁸

Others took up teaching as a means of contributing to the general welfare of the country.⁷⁹ Not all families approved of their daughters' careers. Nuzha Darwish recalled that many people, including Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the head of the SMC, and Hilmi Pasha, president of the Arab Bank, had to convince her father to allow her to attend the Primary Teachers' College in Cairo in 1929.⁸⁰ The school records suggest that teaching either created strong personalities or attracted them, often to the chagrin of the school administration. When the headmistress and another teacher were dismissed from their positions because of budget constraints, they hired a lawyer to negotiate their demands to return to their jobs—or, at least, receive adequate compensation.⁸¹ Likewise, a homesick young teacher Widad al-Bamya, who had been transferred to a school in Jaffa against her wishes, threatened to shut down the entire school if she was not returned to her previous position in Jerusalem.⁸²

Having strong personalities, the teachers also influenced the curriculum. Although the school's curriculum initially championed an Islamic identity, by the early 1930s it began to reflect the Palestinian nationalist views of the teachers. The teachers began to discuss Palestine and Syria as separate entities, each with its own history and geography, contrary to the instructions of the administration, which still perceived Palestine as an integral part of Greater Syria. The inspector of Islamic schools complained that the history teacher of the first-grade class chose to adapt the curriculum to her own liking by replacing the text about Harun al-Rashid with that of Salah al-din al-

Ayyubi.

⁸³

Another teacher reported that time constraints forced her to skip over Umayyad,

Abbasid, and Fatimid history, as well as the geography of modern Syria, Egypt, and Algeria, in favor of local Palestinian history and geography.

⁸⁴

A letter from the headmistress, Ruqiyya Hadaye, wondering whether she still had to teach Islamic history, is telling.⁸⁵

Her letter also indicates that the teachers were not always familiar with the curriculum imposed on them by the school's administration. The changes in the curriculum not only manifested the independence and freedom evidently felt by the teachers; it also coincided with the shift in the teaching staff from mostly non–Palestinian teachers to primarily local women whose political identities reflected the interests of the local population.

The changing curriculum corresponded with the gradual politicization of the school. At the school's annual party in 1929, attended by women only, pupils delivered politically charged speeches and sang nationalist songs.

⁸⁶

In October of that year, demonstrators in the first Arab women's congress in Jerusalem stopped at the boarding house of the Islamic Girls' School, where teachers and pupils served them food.⁸⁷

Some of teachers did join the Arab Women's Association (Jam

iyat al-nisa

i al-

Arabi). Melia al-Sakakini, who taught at the school from 1928 to 1939, was active in the early years of the Arab Women's Association.

⁸⁸

Widad al-Muhmasani moved in feminist circles in Beirut and contributed to the woman's journal al-Mar

a al-jadida before joining the staff of the Islamic Girls' School in the late 1920s. Like their teachers, the pupils were active. Some joined the women's branch of the Union of Arab pupils (Ittihad al-talibat al-

Arabiyya). In May 1936, members of this association, representing private, government, and missionary schools, met at the Islamic Girls' School to express their continuing support for the strike and their intention not to attend school until Arab demands were answered. They also declared their intention to boycott foreign goods, including Jewish-made products, and to promote local Arab goods.

⁸⁹

During 1939, the headmistress often had to close the school because many pupils and teachers chose not to attend because of strikes in the city and in the rest of Palestine.⁹⁰

In the school records, however, it is not clear whether pupils chose to stay home from school because of an awakened political consciousness or because their guardians feared for their safety as they walked to and from school.

In many ways, the teachers and pupils of the Islamic Girls' School had freedom to engage in political activities, as they were not subjected to the same regulations that their peers in government and missionary schools had to follow. Government teachers were subjected to strict censorship rules imposed by district education inspectors. They were forbidden to engage in any kind of political activity, including signing petitions, distributing literature, expressing political opinions in the press, or joining any kind of partisan associations or gatherings.⁹¹

Before giving public lectures on any subject, teachers had to forward a copy of the lecture to the Department of Education for approval.⁹² School principals carefully guarded their fellow teachers and reported suspicious behavior and political involvement to the appropriate authorities.⁹³ Similarly, the teachers in missionary schools often tried to cultivate an a-political atmosphere, based on co-existence. At the Jerusalem Girls' College, for example, the teachers, who were mostly British women, and their pupils, of all denominations, attended school during the strikes and refrained from joining the nationalist movement.⁹⁴