Suzanne Schneider. Critical Studies in Education. Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2014.
The recent critical turn toward post-secularism, particularly on behalf of theorists working from the perspective of Christian societies, has highlighted the difficulty of approaching the history of the Middle East through the binary of religion and secularism. This article argues that such terms are of little explanatory value in and of themselves, but rather must themselves be explained as unique historical objects. Through an analysis of the Arab public school system created by the government of Mandatory Palestine, this study demonstrates how the transformation of Islamic education occurred within a matrix of colonial domination that promoted its unique understanding of religion as a universal standard. By tracing the emergence of ‘religion’ as a distinct category of knowledge and human experience in modern Palestine, this article draws attention to the factors that distinguish the development of colonial secularism from phenomena observed in the Euro-American context.
“Only that which has no history is definable.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
From a historical perspective, ‘post-secularism’ may not seem to be a particularly useful concept to approaching the history of the modern Middle East. What explanatory power can be invested in a concept developed most immediately to accompany the revaluation of religiosity in contemporary Euro-American contexts? Does the notion of the post-secular illuminate more than it obscures? The realization that ‘the European development, whose Occidental rationalism was one supposed to serve as a model for the rest of the world, is actually the exception rather than the norm’ (Habermas, 2008), seems to offer a belated recognition on behalf of critical theory of the severe limitations inherent in secularism as an explanatory model.
As critics of secularism have noted, the secular is not devoid of its own ideological framework. Rather, as Fitzgerald (2000) has argued, ‘the secular is itself a sphere of transcendental values, but the invention of religion as the locus of the transcendent serves to disguise this and strengthen the illusion that the secular is simply the real world seen aright in its self-evident factuality’ (p. 73). In the same vein, a number of scholars have criticized Habermas’ unstated assumption that secular reason is inherently rational and potentially universal, in contrast to the parochialism of religious reason. As Craig Calhoun (2011) has written, ‘Both religious orientations to the world and secular, “Enlightenment” orientations depend on strong epistemic and moral commitments made at least partially pre-rationally’ (p. 83).
This article therefore begins with the observation that any scholar of the contemporary Middle East must approach the frameworks of secularism and post-secularism only to recognize their theoretical limitations. However, having done so, our task has still only begun. Likewise it is insufficient to retreat the observation that the secular was never truly desacralized, never without its own ideological baggage and hence, that the boundaries between the religious and the secular are often elusive, shifting, or arbitrary. More importantly, critical histories are needed to begin to understand, in Talal Asad’s words (2003), ‘How, when, and by whom are the categories of religion and the secular defined’ and ‘What assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them?’ (p. 201).
The post-secular turn may have highlighted that secularism does not operate the same way in all places at all times, but that still does not answer the question as to what it does do in a particular colonial setting. By examining the curricula used in the newly formed system of Arab public schools, this article attempts to elucidate some of the dynamics involved in the development of secular education in modern Palestine. Considering the secular side by side with the sectarian, I will highlight the tension that existed between promoting secular ‘universalism’ and preserving ‘traditional’ structures of religious authority that were crucial to Palestine’s administrative structure.
My argument here is composed of two related components: first, I argue that we must distinguish between promoting secularism as an ideology and secular education as an instrument to ‘reform’ the native population. In truth, colonial administrators deemed the introduction of secular education as a crucial component of preventing the emergence of a secularized Arab population. ‘New’ subjects were meant to complement, not replace, the existing religious foundation of rural schooling, and the second part of this article examines the form and content of that education. Here I argue that the Government of Palestine promoted a view of religion as a locus of ‘universal’ values that could transcend national turmoil and disavowed any notion of religion tied to a particular political theology. Together these two components gesture at an understanding of religious education as an apolitical force that would act as a source of stability rather than of change, a particular understanding whose prominent feature within colonial contexts has been an attempt to mask its own particularism. I conclude with the observation that secularism in the colonies—or more pointedly, secularism as a tool of colonial domination—has necessarily had its own historical trajectory that distinguishes it from its Euro-American models, and that much more work is needed to understand just what type of history this is.
The secular peril: ideological limits and administrative necessities
Before diving into this analysis, some general remarks will help elucidate the nature of education in Palestine following the First World War. The Allies conquered Palestine in December 1917 and established an interim military administration that assumed direct control over the former Ottoman public schools and nominal control over a plethora of private schools—ranging from missionary schools to hederim, katatib, and the approximately 40 schools that formed the nucleus of the Zionist school system (Department of Education [DoE], 1929). Authority was transferred to a civil administration in July 1920, and in 1922, Palestine was recognized by the League of Nations as a Class A Mandate under British control. In general terms, what occurred over the three decades of British rule was the large-scale transformation of education from a decentralized practice managed largely by religious communities into formalized systems centrally managed by state or quasi-state institutions.
Apart from various private institutions, the Mandate government recognized two distinct public school systems, the Hebrew and Arab Public Systems, ‘classified according to the principal language of instruction’ (Government of Palestine, 1933, Part I). The former was maintained and supervised by the Education Department of the Jewish Agency and, after 1932, the Va’ad Leumi. The extension of a large block grant beginning in 1927, tied to the proportion of Jews in the population, in theory subjected the Hebrew Public System to closer government supervision. In practice, the Department of Education never posed a serious threat to the autonomy of Zionist schools (Reshef, 1999, p. 153); to the contrary, it helped secure it. Conversely, the Arab Public System—which was composed of former Ottoman public schools, village katatib that were incorporated through grants-in-aid, and a number of new schools opened during the early years of British rule—was placed under the direct supervision of a British Director of Education. Despite Palestinians’ demands for greater local participation in the management of the schools, as was occurring in other Class A Mandates, the British continually rejected these overtures, as implementing the Jewish National Home project against the wishes of the majority clearly foreclosed any possibility of indirect colonial rule.
Turning to the development of modern education systems in Palestine, we must first attempt to define terms, a task rendered difficult by the porous nature of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ as categories of analysis. Defined as the removal of religion from the public space and the creation of political structures distinct from religious authority, secularism was not an ideology that British administrators promoted. As was the case in many colonies, the Indian experience cast a long shadow over governance in Palestine and contributed to a particular understanding of how native populations were best managed. The creation of institutions such as the Supreme Muslim Council and the later recognition of Knesset Israel as the official representative body of the Jewish community in Palestine reflected a desire to render the religious community the sole unit for making political claims. In the educational sphere as elsewhere, sectarian policies offered an effective retort to Arab leaders who wished to exert greater control over education as a national institution, as the only means to gain the control they desired was by organizing at the communal level.
Moreover, administrators were anxious to prevent the politicization of Palestine’s schools, and their anxiety only grew after the school strikes during Lord Baflour’s 1925 visit. In the words of an editorial clipping from The Times preserved in Humphrey Bowman’s, the Director of Education from 1920-1936, personal papers, ‘In the fairness alike of national safety and to the education of the young Arab it is absolutely essential that the first sign of political propaganda in the schools of Palestine should be checked without a moment’s delay’ (The Times, 1925). To this end, teachers in government schools were obligated to sign an oath promising not to ‘introduce any political considerations into my duties as a teacher’ or ‘take any active part in any movement or in any meeting or demonstration which has a political character or purpose’. Thus, while children were to be educated in their ‘native’ language and preserve their ‘national’ culture, administrators nevertheless held that education should never veer into contemporary national politics.
In contrast to the dreaded creep of ‘politics’ into the classroom, colonial administrators believed that religious education could form the basis of universal moral principles that stood aloof from political affairs. In the words of Jerome Farrell (1946), the Director of Education for the second half of the Mandate period, ‘Religion is a full subject in the curriculum and thus the ultimate basis of ethical values in the Government schools is common to Islam and to Christianity’ (Sec. 22). With regard to Zionist education, the most frequent critique leveled at the schools was that they upset the proper relationship between politics, religion, and education. The fact that nearly every Zionist school was administered by one of the three major political parties—Labor, ‘General’ Zionists, and the Orthodox Mizrahi party—represented a direct challenge to the British ideal of education devoid of political influence. Moreover, Farrell’s comments reflected the Enlightenment framework that increasingly excluded Jews from ‘the religious patrimony of Western nations’ because the ‘Hebrews simply could not provide the model of universal humanity that would regulate the new ideology of culture’ (Sheehan, 2005, p. xiv):
Both [Islam and Christianity] accept a theology and moral principles based largely on Greek philosophy, while Islam regards Christ as at least a prophet. But ‘unassimilated’ Judaism after rejecting successively both Hellenism and Christ is now reducing its own traditional faith, so far as it still survives at all as a religion, from monotheism to the older henotheism which leads to that racial self-worship which Albert Rosenberg borrowed from the Jews for Nordic ends and which Andrew Lang might have called ‘a projection of Tuetonic barbarism on the mists of the Brocken’. But most Palestine Jews seem now to be atheists and materialistic ‘ideologists’. (Farrell, 1946, Sec. 22)
Further tainted by the association with communism, particularly as the Labor party dominated the Zionist political scene and many prominent Jewish leaders came from Russia, Jews in Palestine were depicted as having discarded their religious heritage and thus removed themselves absolutely from any platform of universal moral values. As Farrell continued:
The immoral or hypocritical attitude of the Zionist leaders is not that of most Western Jews but few of these migrate to Palestine and those who remain in the Diaspora do not fully understand the differences between their own ethical outlook and that of the Poles, Russians and other Easterners who constitute the larger part of Palestinian Jewry and direct its internal policy. These have not been long, widely and intimately subjected to civilising influences either at home or in Palestine and, having abandoned religious practices are without any basis for the development of moral principle. (Farrell, 1946, Sec. 5)
In contrast, administrators often spoke charitably of Orthodox Jews, particularly those who had been in Palestine prior to the First World War. These were the watani Jews, still cloaked in the familiar garb of religious observance, who granted coherence to the idea of the Holy Land. They were, to quote Farrell’s predecessor, Humphrey Bowman, ‘the most unoffending and inoffensive Jews in the world: holy men and their families, and religious students’ (Bowman, 1929).
As alluded to above, it was not only Zionists who were guilty of trying to turn education into an instrument of political indoctrination, however, they were deemed the most successful. In the same memorandum, the Director of Education continued to state, ‘the attitude of Palestine Zionists to education is essentially identical not only with that of the Nazis and the Russian Communists but also with that of Jamal Hussaini and other Arab politicians who wish to use the Arab schools to inculcate fanatical anti-Zionism’. However, he noted with satisfaction:
the Arab politicians have been less successful and their influence touches in any considerable degree only Moslem private schools …. Thus a large majority of the Moslem and Christian population is still educated in the common principles of conduct which inform Christianity and Islam. (Farrell, 1946, Sec. 6)
As we can see from these examples, if the education imparted by certain communities failed to conform to the vision of education as an apolitical practice and religion as a politically neutral source of universal values, the resulting ‘failure’ was not explained by questioning these dubious assumptions, but rather by arguing this education was not truly ‘religious’ in nature. This raises the question as to what were the supposed contours of religious education and where were the sites of its transgressions? To answer this question, it is perhaps a useful exercise to look more closely at the syllabus created for the Arab Public System, over which the Government of Palestine exercised complete control.
Boundary making: Mandate Palestine and the emergence of secular education
I have argued thus far that British education administrators did not promote secularism as an ideological or political framework in Palestine on account of the desire to govern Palestine through religious units. I have further shown that religious education functioned within this context as a supposedly apolitical source of universal values that could rise above the actual political turmoil into which Palestine was quickly descending. However, administrators were eager to introduce ‘secular’ knowledge into schools and to promote subjects deemed ‘practical’ in nature (as opposed to the ‘literary’ quality of religious textual learning), such as mathematics, history, agricultural instruction, and hygiene. Consequently, it is worthwhile to distinguish between promoting secularism as a social outlook or political structure and adopting an instrumental approach to secular education.
To begin this discussion, it is necessary to underline the shadows that haunted colonial administrators. Scarred by the experiences of India and Egypt, where an overemphasis on ‘literary’ education was thought to have led the natives into revolt, creating the ‘right kind’ of education in Palestine was a crucial component of not repeating past mistakes:
The danger of giving too literary a bias to village education has been one to which the authorities are keenly alive. The consequent ill effects seen of recent years in other countries of the Near and Middle East, due in large measure to the provision of an unsuitable type of education, of tempting the village boy to the town where he may become unemployed and unemployable, have resulted in the directing by the authorities of efforts to provide him with an education alike attractive and suited to his own and his country’s needs. (DoE, 1929, p. 7)
The overarching goal was not thus the creation of secularized subjects but rather the utilization of secular knowledge to preserve the ‘customary’ structures of political, social, and religious authority. Administrators grasped that it was only with the rationalization of agricultural production and the improvement of rural sanitary conditions that ‘traditional’ life could be inviting enough to prevent the dreaded migration of villagers to Palestine’s urban centers. It should therefore come as no surprise that the ideal teacher was described as ‘a Moslem Arab wearing native dress, trained in agriculture and in several crafts, an excellent teacher, though without a word of English, an enlightened, loyal and devoted servant of his village and of his country’ (Bowman, 1939, p. 407).
The official syllabus for town and village schools, based largely on the Egyptian model, was first published in 1921. It included detailed instructions regarding the number of hours devoted to each subject in each grade, the topics to be covered therein, and additional directions to the teachers regarding the proper conduct of students. In addition to introducing secular studies, administrators afforded religious education a privileged place in the new school curriculum. However, this preservation was actually an act of recreation, as there was much about customary forms of Islamic schooling that were deemed archaic, misdirected, or pedagogically unsound. The village kuttab was a favorite target of colonial administrators and religious reformers alike. ‘Old-fashioned and often inefficient’, according to the DoE (1942), the kuttab was accused of multiple misdeeds.
First among them, an emphasis on memorization was thought to come at the expense of true comprehension, which was presumably only to be gained by developing ‘a facility for and a habit of rapid silent reading (DoE, 1925, p. 10)’. Thus, oral recitation and memorization was to be used only sparingly in teaching ‘religious’ subjects, but expunged from all other parts of the new curriculum. Even within this limited context, these methods required tweaking. Thus, ‘the Qur’an should be memorized perfectly and read with the intonation practiced by the early Moslems’, a feat which required that ‘the affected method of reading the Qur’an followed in the old maktabs [katatib] should be discarded’ (DoE, 1921, p. 32). In this instance, religious authenticity came to depend precisely on abandoning contemporary traditions in favor of reconstructed classical models.
Additionally, the subjects learned in the kuttab were seemingly devoid of ‘practical’ application and indeed, an overexposure to religious texts was thought to produce children who were alienated from the necessities of village life. The Palestinian educator, Khalil Totah, offered the anecdote of overhearing a peasant exclaim, ‘What! Do you expect my son to work—he can read!’ Echoing the viewpoint of the British administrators, Totah identified this alleged distaste for ‘practical education’ to be at ‘the crux of the educational problem in the Holy Land, where education, elementary as it is, seems incompatible with manual work’ (Totah, 1932, p. 165).
The reconstituted Arab public schools therefore reflected an ambivalent relationship with the traditional institutions of religious education. Rural schools in particular were anchored by subjects that were commonly found in the katatib they were meant to supersede: namely, Arabic, religious instruction, and Arithmetic. To these subjects were added geography, nature study, history, hygiene, drawing, and manual work (DoE, 1921, p. 6). Yet, the manner in which ‘old’ subjects were taught, and the addition of ‘practical’ ones like manual work (primarily agricultural training) were meant to distinguish the new village school from the kuttab of old.
In order to assuage the Muslim population ‘that the importance they always attached to the moral and religious basis of education was not to be neglected’, the curriculum for religious education was created by a ‘classical scholar of well-established reputation in the Arab world’ (Tibawi, 1956, p. 149). This scholar was possibly Sheikh Hussam al-Din Jarallah, a modernist sheikh who tied in the election for Grand Mufti before the British infamously appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini to the newly created position. Jarallah was a former student of the famous Egyptian reformer, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and later served as an inspector for the Department of Education (Hamada, 1985, pp. 133-134). Muslim reformers of Jarallah’s ilk had been deeply invested in creating a new form of schooling to supersede the kuttab, and at first glance the new Palestinian public school seemed to represent a great success in this effort. At the very least the diversification of subject matter and the inclusion of ‘practical’ subjects deserve mention.
However, I would like to suggest that the introduction of new subjects into the curriculum was arguably less significant than the divisions created between existing types of knowledge. Analyzed through the categories of religious and secular, the syllabus in fact reflected an effort to remove ‘religion’ from sites it formerly seemed to subsume: among them were the Arabic language, the historical record, and the human body.
The Arabic language, long studied in the kuttab and madrasa as inseparable from an Islamic religious context (indeed, many of the great treatises on the Arabic language were published by Muslim theologians), was now treated as a distinct subject that aimed at helping the child acquire permanent literacy. Thus in a manual prescribed for Palestinian teachers, alongside affirmations that the Qur’an represented ‘the most important academic material in primary schools’ from which the awe of God and a commitment to religious principles were devised, the Qur’an is also identified as ‘among the greatest means that develops in children a sense of good writing’ (Ministry of Public Education [MoPE], 1920, p. 15).
Further departing from the traditional order of the kuttab, the revised version of the syllabus, published in 1925, stated that the aim of Arabic language instruction was to develop interest in classical and modern Arabic literature. Memorization was to be avoided and ‘vulgarisms and provincialisms in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary must be carefully eradicated’ (DoE, 1925, pp. 8-9). The revival of the Arab national spirit had been a familiar trope in British intellectual circles and the purging of ‘correct’ Arabic of its colloquial corruptions was a natural extension of this narrative. This argument was not merely a colonial creation, but rather formed a crucial component of the late nineteenth-century Arab nahda, in which intellectuals degraded Arabic dialects and demanded that the new Arabic literature be produced in fusha to establish its connection with the classical heritage. Thus, educators attempted to disassociate Arabic with an Islamic religious context while simultaneously arguing that the language should be taught in such a way that stressed its classical forms. That this emphasis on Arabic as the carrier of national identity was not deemed incompatible with keeping national politics outside of the school was one of the many inconsistencies of Mandatory rule.
In lieu of the Qur’an, typically the only ‘textbook’ found in katatib, teachers were directed to use a ‘standard reading book’ that included stories geared for children. Here also it is possible to detect a tension in the reformist agenda, which argued that the religious text that should anchor the school curriculum was not compatible with a child’s sensibility. The idea that children could not grasp—and thus should not begin their education with—certain parts of the Qur’an or the Bible was coterminous with the development of ideas about the distinctiveness of childhood and the necessity of creating pedagogic tools that catered to children. Later in the Mandate period, textbooks appeared that reflected this pedagogic position, for example, featuring elementary dialogues between a young boy and his mother in which she explains basic precepts of Islam.
Continuing our discussion of the curricular distinctions reflected in the syllabus, hygiene offers a rich example because it represents a subject that could have quite easily been subsumed under the category of religious education. Indeed, children did study ‘practical knowledge of the principles of ablutions’ as part of the class dedicated to Islamic religious instruction (DoE, 1925, p. 72). In fact, the inclusion of hygiene in the syllabus reflected the larger trend whereby everyday rural activities were transformed into forms of knowledge that were only acquired by removing the child from the home in which they were usually taught. This was true not merely of hygiene, but also poultry keeping, agricultural work, or embroidery (in girls’ schools)—skills with which no child in rural Palestine was truly unfamiliar. The result was an educational paradigm in which corrupted village conditions were thought to necessitate the academic training of children in an idealized ‘traditional’ life. Therefore, schools should be located outside of the towns they served, ‘away from the dust, noise and (might I add?) smells, which are invariable concomitants to the Eastern village’ (Bowman, 1939, p. 403). In sum, we might say that only by shielding the next generation from traditional modes of rural life could ‘tradition’ be saved in Palestine.
Turning to the history syllabus, this may be thought to represent a genuinely new and secular subject within the school curriculum. Yet, as was the case with Arabic language, it is worth stating that a certain amount of history was in fact taught in katatib. The problem was that it was intertwined with personalities and events now deemed ‘religious’ in character and therefore not recognized as ‘history’ in the modern sense. With this background in mind, it is worth exploring where the new syllabus fixed the boundaries between sacred and secular history.
The general structure of the new history curriculum narrated a teleological story at whose apex sat European modernity, its commercial triumphs, scientific advancements, and political conquests. Lower grades were introduced to the study of history through the biographies of great men, including ‘the principal characters in Bible history’, Socrates, Josephus, the rightly guided Caliphs, Charlemagne, Richard the Lionheart, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, and Ibrahim Pasha, to give only a small sampling (DoE, 1925, pp. 30-37). Thus the child’s first introduction to history was a mixed one, where Biblical figures could inhabit the same historical space as al-Ghazali and King Alfred. In later classes, the curriculum covered the family of Muhammad, ‘his mission and life in detail’, the spread of Islam, and the decay of the Caliphate (pp. 40-41).
The obvious question for our purposes is, How do prophets, jurists, and religious leaders migrate from sacred history to a ‘secular’ one and what are the interpretive consequences of this migration? On the one hand, this movement reflects the modern notion that sacred texts could be used as sources for deriving both historical lessons and ethical values. As Jonathan Sheehan (2005) has argued, the Enlightenment attempt to transform the Bible into a source of universal humanistic values offers ‘a different vision of secularization’ that ‘focuses less on the disappearance of religion than on its transformation and reconstruction’ (p. xi).
But beyond the mere treatment of religious texts as historical sources, the removal of characters and events from sacred history can be read as an attempt to naturalize the historical record, wherein the rapid spread of Islam, for example, is attributable to the ‘organisation of the Arab Empire’ and its ‘fiscal system’, rather than divine providence (DoE, 1925, p. 40). Similarly, lessons should stress ‘the effect of climate, physical conditions, means of communications, and environment on the development of the different races’ (p. 16). As such, the history curriculum posited a new interpretive framework for explaining familiar episodes from the human past. What occurred within the ‘old-fashioned’ kuttab, on the other hand, was not recognized as genuine history not on merely on account of what was studied, but how the march of historical time was encountered and explained.
Emerging against the backdrop of the kuttab and its undifferentiated curriculum in which reading, writing, and historical tales were inseparable parts of learning the Qur’an, the Arab Public System claimed to offer a new and improved form of education. As I have argued, in addition to introducing new topics—say, Themistocles and the battles of Artemisium and Salamis in the second class—the syllabus repackaged existing forms of knowledge into new categories and expanded the realm of subject matter to include ‘practical’ knowledge that was usually acquired through everyday living. What then was left to religion and religious instruction?
Given the popularity of ‘Protestant’ approaches to Islam within both European and Muslim reformist circles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it should serve as no surprise that what remained was primarily the text of the Qur’an itself. ‘The Qur’an should be the source of authority in deducing doctrines, ritual, moral axioms, and civil transactions’ (DoE, 1921, p. 32). ‘Mohammedan’ (in the 1921 syllabus) or ‘Moslem Religious Instruction’ (in the 1925 version) commanded a relatively large share of the curriculum, topped only by the extensive time spent on the Arabic language.15 The syllabus further divided the material covered in each class into two segments: ‘Qur’an’ and ‘Religious Instruction’. The former consisted of an ordered timetable for reading the Qur’an in its entirety by the end of the final year of schooling and prescribed which ajza’ should be read and which committed to memory.
The creation of a large system of public schools in which each child learned the same portion of the Qur’an at the same time must itself be appreciated as a novelty. As such, the incorporation of religious education into the school curriculum was not the mere continuation of the past but a significant attempt to create a uniform approach to the teaching and interpretation of the Qur’an. In the same vein, the introduction of an official textbook for the upper grades reflected the urge to ensure teachers followed a standardized curriculum. This necessarily stripped the teacher of some of the autonomy he possessed within private katatib, and the development of detailed curricula and textbooks can in fact be read as an attempt to mitigate the uneven influence of individual teachers. In this, the British did nothing that was not already envisioned decades earlier by the great reformer, Muhammad ‘Abduh, who argued that only a uniform approach to religious education, purged of its irrational elements, could combat the creep of jahl (ignorance) among Ottoman Muslims (‘Abduh, 1993).
In addition to stipulating the Qur’anic passages the child would read and memorize each year, the syllabus reflected a long-standing anxiety that the practice of rote memorization left the child bereft of true comprehension. This concern was not a mere pedagogic one, but rather emerged from the idea that a religious text must contain some ethical core that is distinct from the ritual practices and performances that surround it. Therefore, teachers were to give ‘the meaning of difficult words and a resume of the general sense’ of each juz’ that was memorized. Furthermore, ‘the verses selected for the various years of study should be explained so that they may become firmly rooted in the minds of the pupils who should be led to act in keeping with the principles and precepts embodied therein’ (DoE, 1921, p. 32).
Finally, we must account for the other component of the curriculum, subsumed under the heading of ‘Religious Instruction’. The first three classes were centered on the life and attributes of Muhammad, his family, migration to Medina, death, and burial. These were, significantly, all topics that appeared in the history syllabus as well, though here particular stress was paid to the prophet as a moral guide, ‘his self-abnegation and humility’, ‘his interest in the well-being of children’, and ‘his refraining from revenge when revenge lay in his power’. The upper grades combined the earlier emphasis on Muhammad’s biography with the reformist emphasis on the Qur’an as the sole authoritative source through the incorporation of ‘moral training’—namely ‘virtues whose practice is inferred from verses in the Qur’an’. These included, for instance, ‘respect due to parents’, ‘obedience due to rulers’, ‘the etiquette of visiting’, and ‘giving right measure and weight’ (DoE, 1921, pp. 34-35).
The logic that dictated this emphasis on biography was similar to the secular rationale that history offered a means to convey ‘moral lessons derived from the lives and actions of great men and women’ (DoE, 1921, p. 16). How then are we to make sense of the division between sacred and secular history? What criteria qualified a lesson as of historical rather than religious importance, and vice versa? These are not questions to which any exact answer can be given but in this immediate instance, the curriculum points to the definition of Islamic religious knowledge as largely limited to the text of the Qur’an and the ‘universal moral values’ that were thought to represent an ethical core shared by Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. In contrast, many Muslim ‘religious’ thinkers and leaders appeared not within the syllabus for religious instruction but within that for history. The logic of this division gestures toward the notion that history is the subject charged with teaching the child about the rise of and fall of nations, including the Arab one. Thus, al-Ghazali takes his place in the history curriculum along other heroes of the classical Arabic tradition in much the same way that Socrates is used to demonstrate the brilliance of the Greco-Roman heritage. To speak somewhat anachronistically, it is history and not religion that is allowed to be national.
How can we tie all these disparate strings together? I have argued that it was not the secular but rather the religious nature of the school curriculum that was identified as a source of ‘universal’ values. Echoing the earlier transformation of the Bible into an ethical text of neo-humanistic heritage, ‘religion’ was meant to function in Palestine as a moral common ground that could rise above the political clamor. In contrast, the school syllabus suggests that if any degree of particularism was allowed to creep into the classroom, it was through the historical study of the great men of the national past. Prominent Muslim figures and important political events may have migrated from sacred to secular history, but this movement seems to further facilitate the approach to religious education as an apolitical practice. Purged of most of its political leaders and cultural heroes, Islamic religious instruction could thereby be reconstituted as part of a ‘universal’ moral system rather than as a particular political-theological tradition. Yet this understanding of the proper content and function of religion was itself quite particular, a fact that the language of secularism has helped to obscure (Anidjar, 2006).
In conclusion, it is worth reiterating that this understanding of religion as a depoliticized entity was directly at odds with the actual administrative structure of Palestine, whose governance through religious communal units obviated the emergence of a ‘secular’ public space. This is hardly surprising given the contradictory desires expressed in administrator’s approach to Arab and Islamic education: they desired secular education without secularism, national education without nationalism, religious education without sectarianism. Though this case study is limited to one particular site of Palestinian history, I believe it nevertheless suggests that there is no escaping the question of secularism during the Mandate period, and yet what is most noteworthy about it is the ways in which secularism in the colonies charts its own path. It is only with more attention to these distinct histories that we can begin to understand not merely what secularism ‘failed’ to do, but what it did instead.