Teachers as State-Builders
Teachers as State-Builders

Author: Hilary Falb Kalisman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0691204322

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The little-known history of public school teachers across the Arab world—and how they wielded an unlikely influence over the modern Middle East Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and leading formulators of ideologies. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Teachers as State-Builders brings to light educators’ outsized role in shaping the politics of the modern Middle East. Hilary Falb Kalisman tells the story of the few young Arab men—and fewer young Arab women—who were lucky enough to teach public school in the territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. Crossing Ottoman provincial and, later, Mandate and national borders for work and study, these educators were advantageously positioned to assume mid- and even high-level administrative positions in multiple government bureaucracies. All told, over one-third of the prime ministers who served in Iraq from the 1950s through the 1960s, and in Jordan from the 1940s through the early 1970s, were former public school teachers—a trend that changed only when independence, occupation, and mass education degraded the status of teaching. The first history of education across Britain’s Middle Eastern Mandates, this transnational study reframes our understanding of the profession of teaching, the connections between public education and nationalism, and the fluid politics of the interwar Middle East.

Modern Arab Kingship
Modern Arab Kingship

Author: Adam Mestyan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0691249350

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How the “recycling” of the Ottoman Empire’s uses of genealogy and religion created new political orders in the Middle East In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. These polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on previously unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, in doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Mestyan’s innovative analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

A State of Mixture
A State of Mixture

Author: Richard E. Payne

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0520961536

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Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions. The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints’ lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story, A State of Mixture helps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.