Journal of Islamic Studies Advance Access originally published online on July 8, 2009
Journal of Islamic Studies 2009 20(3):317-351; doi:10.1093/jis/etp024
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Educational Divide across Religious Groups in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon: Institutional Effects on the Demand for Curricular Modernization
University of Southern California
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Abstract |
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In nineteenth-century Lebanon, while the Christians attended the newly established ‘modern’ schools the Muslims continued to enrol in ‘traditional’ religious schools. This discrepancy is usually attributed to difference in the supply of schools: missionaries and local Christians establishing new schools on the one hand, and the Muslim ulema's resistance to change on the other. This paper adopts an institutional historical approach and studies this educational divide by shifting focus to demand, to parents’ and pupils’ incentives. Approaching education as an economic investment, it studies the interplay between educational needs and the job market that each community faced. Four factors are pointed out as accounting for the difference in the choices made: military service, appeal of the civil service, existence of parallel institutions—courts and schools, and restrictions on Muslims’ commercial interaction with the West. Such factors maintained the demand for traditional schools by providing job opportunities for their graduates. Those jobs were both economically and socially rewarding so that an immediate shift to ‘modern’ education was unnecessary.