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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/25/2021 11:39:36AM Via Free Access 268 Catherine Le Thomas Funded and Run by Christian Congregations CHAPTER ELEVEN EDUCATION AND MINORITY EMPOWERMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST Catherine Le Thomas Introduction Religious minorities in the Middle East have travelled different historical and political paths, depending on local, regional and international history as much as on their internal evolution. Far from being mere powerless groups dominated by a Sunni or Shiʿi Muslim majority, they have lived through complex economic and cultural conjunctures. Among the events that left a decisive impact on the religious minorities in the Middle East was the European expansion in the region which culminated in the nineteenth century, when the European Powers intervened more or less directly in Ottoman internal affairs under the pretext of protecting the Christian and Jewish minorities. This intervention occurred at various levels—politically, economically, and militarily. As a result, the social fabric of the Ottoman Empire underwent profound changes, not least regarding the economic and social position of the Christian minorities. All over the Empire, increased European involvement in the economy meant an increased demand for services from linguistically and culturally skilled go-betweens, a role Christians and Jews were in a good position to fulfill. In Syria, for example, Christians served as mediators between local agricultural producers and European merchants in the silk trade, as dragomans (translators), or as administrative intermediates. The Christians’ major asset was their greater familiarity with European languages and the European way of life, acquired through their Western education. Western or ‘modern’ education is understood here as a form of education that does not have religious knowledge as its only, or its main, goal, contrary to the traditional teaching provided in the Muslim kuttab or madrasas and the Christian seminaries. Modern Western education aimed at training laymen, through the teaching of subjects like literature, sciences, and languages—the number of subjects depending on the size of the school. Religion became one subject among several others. Although secularized in its content, education remained, nonetheless, faith-based at the organizational level, as most of the schools were missionary schools, © Catherine Le Thomas, 2012 | doi:10.1163/9789004216846_013 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Catherine Le Thomas - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:39:36AM via free access 268 catherine le thomas funded and run by Christian congregations. Modern Western education was brought into the region by the Christian missionaries from the seventeenth century onward. In the wake of European expansion, missionaries enjoyed great freedom to set up schools, an activity that increased remarkably from the seventeenth century onwards and fully blossomed in the nineteenth century. Western education benefited the communities which early came in touch with the missionaries. As time/passed, the local Christians—Arme- nians, Greeks, Copts, Maronites—also opened their own schools throughout the Ottoman Empire and in Persia (Mayeur-Jaouen 1995). By the end of the nineteenth century, the Christians of the Ottoman Empire were far ahead of the Muslims in terms of school enrollment (Courbage and Fargue 1992: 187). For the Christian minorities throughout the Ottoman Empire, whether in Syria, Irak, Armenia, or Egypt, access to missionary education in the nineteenth century often meant empowerment (Mayeur-Jaouen 1995). More educated, more urban, and more influenced by European culture than their Muslim counterparts, Christians had better economic opportunities than Muslims, and emigration as a means to life improvement was a real possibility for them. Modern education also explained why, in the Arab part of the Empire, Christians held a prominent place in the Arab cultural and political awakening (al-Nahda) of the nineteenth century. To a lesser extent, Jews also benefited from European faith-based education, as they had their own schools run by the Mission Israélite. In general, Jews were more educated than Christians in the provinces where modern education was not well spread (e.g. the provinces of Aleppo and Basra), but they were less educated than Christians where missionaries and local actors were more active (e.g. the provinces of Beirut, Mossoul, Baghdad) (Courbage and Fargue 1992: 179). In Irak, both Jews and Christians played the role of ‘agents of modernization’ and ‘transmission belts’ between the local Muslim population and the Western Powers (Tsimhoni 1996: 97). These assets had a negative side as well: because of their privileged educational situation and their close contact with Europeans, non-Muslim minorities were often suspected by the Ottoman authorities of being loyal supporters of European interests. Tensions and upheavals in the Empire in the late nineteenth century resulted in massacres in which minorities were often the first victims. The legacy of this history of unequal development and distribution of modern education in the Middle East can still be seen in the political cultures, as well as in the formation of national and communal elites, in present-day Middle Eastern societies. To account for these processes, we have chosen to focus on Lebanon, where the Ottoman legacy has been especially salient. First we will analyze Catherine Le Thomas - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:39:36AM via free access education and minority empowerment in the middle east 269 the strong impact of modern missionary education on the local Christian communities, especially among the Maronites and, more broadly, on the Lebanese elites until today. We will then focus more extensively on the case of the Shiʿi community, which has experienced the most significant development over the last half-century, and whose relatively recent process of institutionalization and ‘catching up’ is of an exemplary character. We will explore the role played by education in the empowering process the Shiʿis have gone through since the 1960s, and how they opened their own faith-based schools, drawing on various resources and alternative interna- tional networks. The choice of these two communities is motivated by their underprivileged legal or political status as minorities during the Ottoman period, and by some similarities as to their geographic settlement (in rural, mountainous regions) (Khury 1990). Despite very different historical trajec- tories, both communities have experienced rapid cultural and economic changes as a result of internal as well as external developments at some point of their history: the Maronites in the nineteenth century, the Shiʿis in the second part of the twentieth century. These two cases illuminate the different ways in which education intervened in the empowerment process of religious minorities in the region. The Model of Christian Schools: A Still Influential Historical Precedent The Maronite community, a small minority in the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire, has enjoyed a prominent place in the state of Greater Lebanon created by France in 1920. The historical example of the Maronite community illustrates the importance of the educational system in the mobilization and organization of Christian groups and their access to the State: the opening of schools played a crucial role in the community’s mobilization. Starting in the early seventeenth century under the reign of the Emir Fakhr al-Din II (who ruled from 1590 to 1635), the influx of Catholic missionaries, especially from France and Italy (Hanf 1969: 60–74), resulted in the establishment of small schools in Mount Lebanon, led by the Capuchins and Jesuits.1 From the early seventeenth century, the first 1 The Capuchins in particular opened a series of small schools in the mountain, where they taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as English and French. In 1626 they moved to Beirut. In 1645, it was the turn of the Jesuits to start their missionary work in Lebanon, opening small schools whose best students could get a scholarship to study in Rome (Hanf 1969). The Jesuits were replaced by the Vincentians in the late eighteenth century. The missions of the Levant withered away for a period before experiencing a revival from the 1820s onwards (Verdeil-Donzel 2004: 42–43). Catherine Le Thomas - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 11:39:36AM via free access 270 catherine le thomas contingents of Maronites educated at the Maronite College of Rome, founded in 1584 and administered by the Jesuits,2 returned to their home- land and set up schools in Mount Lebanon (Labaki 1988: 17). The Maronite Synod of 1736 at Loueizé represented another important milestone in the history of modern faith-based education in Lebanon, as it called upon priests to follow the example of the Rome-educated clergy and open schools (Hanf 1969: 64). Local educational efforts were pursued in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Hanf 1969: 65), in tandem with the European commercial expansion in the region. A class of educated Maronites arose and soon enjoyed a certain amount of political influence (Salibi 1992: 50). After the disturbances of 1840 in Mount Lebanon, and in the wake of European political and economic interests, Catholic mis- sionary activity was revived. The Jesuits had established a new mission to Syria in 1830, which led to the opening of a series of schools, especially in the Mountain and the Zahleh region. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jesuit schools had
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