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Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, Vol. 13, No. 4, 2002

‘She Herself was the Ultimate Rule’: Arabicbiographies of missionary teachers and their pupils

MARILYN BOOTH

ABSTRACT Arabic biographies of missionary teachers and their pupils found in magazinespublished in Cairo and Beirut voice an indigenous perspective on missionary activity byeducated women and men. The feelings of the missionaries’ target population reveal a tensionbetween local histories and foreign incursions as well as between female domesticity andprofessional aspirations. This larger imperial discourse informed worldwide missionary agendasfor women at the turn of the twentieth century; however, the individual biographies cited withinthe paper demonstrate the personal interaction and effects on both foreign missionary and localwomen within their speci� c context through insightful Arab sources.

Assessing Arab women’s progress and responsibilities following the First World War, aCairo-based women’s magazine noted that, whereas in Egypt women had been aided intheir quest for education and new ventures by the government and men of knowledge,‘the greatest aid in Syria was foreign missionaries. Were it not for them, Syrianwomen—and, indeed, Syrian men—would be in darkness.’1 This journal, Fatat al-sharq(Young Woman of the East), had been founded and was edited by an immigrant from theOttoman province of Syria, Lab õ ba Hashim. She and many of her Syrian2 co-religionistshad been educated in missionary schools, whether those of American or BritishProtestants, or those of French Catholic orders—or, in the case of Hashim, all three.In Egypt, Egyptian Christians (Copts) were targeted by missionaries who foundedschools in major cities and in the more heavily Coptic south, especially the provincialcity of Asyut. Most foreign schools were run by missionaries.

For the relatively small number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egyptianand Syrian women who had the means and/or family encouragement to pursuelearning, missionary schools were one, though certainly not the only, venue for formaleducation, as the local schools that preceded missionary endeavor focused on boys’education until later in the century.3 Maryam Nah½ h½ as Nawfal, Mariyana Marrash,Yaqut S½ arruf, Maryam Nimr Makariyus, Warda al-Yazijõ —many of the earliest ArabChristian women to write and publish in the press—attended missionary schools. Mostelite Muslim women of the same generation who were educated learned from tutors athome or from their fathers (as did Christian girls as well), though in the nextgenerations some Muslim girls would receive education at missionary schools, amongthem the celebrated thinker on gender politics, Malak H½ ifnõ Nas½ õ f.4 Increasingly, Arabgirls would enrol in locally organized schools whether founded on private initiative, bylocal religious communities or by the government—and increasingly, Arab womenwould teach them.

If early women writers acknowledged a debt to missionary education, it was notalways an easy or politically uncomplicated acknowledgement to make. Nas½ õ f criticized

ISSN 0959-6410 print/ISSN 1469-9311 online/02/040427-22 Ó 2002 CSIC and CMCUDOI: 10.1080/0959641022000016401

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428 Marilyn Booth

missionary schools for instilling culturally inappropriate education in the young.5 In thepostwar nationalist fervor of occupied Egypt, Hashim—like many other ArabChristians—celebrated the heritage of Arab Islamic history that she shared with herEgyptian neighbors, whether Muslim or Copt, as she also celebrated the Egyptianpharaonic heritage. Indeed, she had done so long before making the 1919 reference tomissionary work quoted above. And, as the � rst female Arab journalist to institute along-running biographical series on ‘Famous Women’ in an Arabic-language women’sjournal, she was insistent from the start on featuring Arab women, although—andsomewhat defensively—she also pro� led European women. In a nationalist context, itwas perhaps a sensitive matter to mention the work of foreign Christian missions, andin the article cited above, Hashim’s journal went on to exhort Arab women tocontribute more actively to their societies and to praise those who had become teachers,‘who expend the bloom of youth within the walls of schools and spend the springtimeof life to bene� t their sisters … they are the ones that the homeland should sanctify’.6

To educate teachers who could replace foreigners in the schools—whether religiousmission schools or new government schools for girls—was a major goal of nationalistsin Egypt, among whom were the early feminist organizers behind the creation of theEgyptian Feminist Union. This was also important to nationalists in Lebanon andSyria, struggling in the postwar years against foreign occupation and machination. Itwas a new era, a time of self-criticism among the elite, a moment for calls to action.And one way to enhance an imagined community of the nation was to call on localenergies in the creation of new national institutions. Schools were crucial buildingblocks for an emergent national bourgeoisie; they were also symbolic of a new nation’sability to sustain and govern itself. Finally, they were key to the agendas of reformerswho saw girls’ education as the missing link in national generation and social regener-ation. To educate ‘the mothers of a new future’ was to insure the vital future of thenation—a leitmotif in postcolonial nationalist movements across the globe, from theUnited States to India to Egypt and to the states of sub-Saharan Africa.

Equally, the condition of the ‘native family’ and women’s educative role in itcomprised a leitmotif of Western missionary endeavor throughout the colonized world,as they were used by Western imperialists working in secular institutions of governanceto justify their continued control of colonial possessions. The work and the interests ofmissionaries may not have always converged with those of other Europeans and NorthAmericans working in the same colonial contexts, but they were part of that imperialpresence and shared the same general worldview and attitudes toward colonizedpopulations. In the Middle Eastern context, this attitude is evident, for example, in thewritings of Henry Harris Jessup, active for half a century in American missionaryactivities there. In his � rst book, written after he had been in Syria for seventeen years,he emphasizes ‘work done for women and girls of the Arab race’ and articulates a viewclose to that of Lord Cromer and other pillars of the imperial establishment in Egyptand Syria: ‘Ignorant and oppressed as the Greek and Maronite women may be, you feelon entering their houses, that the degrading yoke of Moslem brutality is not on theirnecks.’7 Jessup proudly exhibits the educative work of ‘missionary wives’—unpaidworkers in the mission who, among other activities, held classes for local girls.

Most work on the missionary encounter has focused on the missionary side, oftendue to a dearth of material on the actions and feelings of missionaries’ target popula-tions, as Ellen Fleischmann notes in her contribution to this volume (above p. 411). Myessay examines a tiny corner of that encounter through the writings and lives of a few‘targets’, by focusing on texts in magazines published in Cairo and Beirut that describe

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 429

or allude to missionary activity from the perspectives of educated Arab women andmen. To be sure, these texts are sparse as well as terse; moreover, those who wroteand published them were from a tiny minority population group: educated Arab womenin two capital cities, and—to emphasize their marginal status even more—mostlyChristian women, plus some men (Christians and Muslims) who actively supportedexpanded roles for women in their societies.8 Yet the readership (and listening audi-ence) of these magazines, even though it is impossible to identify with certainty beyondthe undoubted fact that it was limited to a small portion of the populations of the Arabworld, did extend beyond this tiny group of writers.9 And the discussion of missionarieswas part of a larger � eld of discourse that ran through the press, assessing in myriadways the many-layered and uneven relationships between ‘East’ and ‘West’, mostusefully perhaps by adducing the give and take of individuals within a larger historyof colonial presence, economic exploitation and political manipulation, commercialadvantage and ideological parry.

Here I take up the terms of this complicated history by tracing discursive encountersbetween missionary teachers, their Syrian ‘girls’ and authors in the press, both male andfemale. First, I note contexts in which mention of missionary education appears inbiographies of Arab women in the press. Then, I focus more speci� cally on a fewbiographies of teachers—and of students—that appeared in Arabic journals, readingthem against Western missionary memoirs, and always keeping in mind the discursiveproduction of ‘education’ in these and other journals as a central mobilizing idea thatcould link the concerns of early women’s rights activists with various other indigenousreform movements. In four early journals edited by Syrian Christians appear threebiographies of female missionary educators (one American, one Scot and one Briton)and one of an American missionary doctor, and two biographies of Arab women whowere missionary pupils. The biographies of Eliza Everett, Jessie Hogg and Luisa Proctorappeared respectively in the general-interest cultural magazine Al-muqtat½af (1902) andin two women’s magazines, Al-sayyidat wa-al-banat (1905) and the above-mentionedFatat al-sharq (1908). That of Mary Eddy appeared in Al-mar’a al-jad õ da (1923).Those of Maryam Nimr Makariyus and Rah½ õ l ¨At½a al-Bustan õ appeared respectively inAl-muqtat½af (1888) and Fatat al-sharq (1919).

All of these ‘Famous Women’ biographies are to some extent formulaic, in particularsince most appear as obituaries and because they were read within the context of aproduction of exemplary biography that encouraged local readers to take up positiveexamples and eschew negative ones. Yet their lineaments hint at how missionaries werereceived by one target population, the local ‘nominal Christians’—as missionary textsreferred to them—to whom European and American missionaries had most directaccess. If missionaries in the Arab world enjoyed less ‘success’ than they had hoped inthat most direct measurement of their impact, conversion to evangelical Protestantism,they were also concerned with—and perhaps more successful at—cultural conversion,for these texts suggest local appropriation of notions about ‘the Christian home’ thatwere integral to missionary activity.

Much of the recent scholarly work on missionary impact around the world addressesthe communication of ideas about domestic organization that infused VictorianEngland and, if somewhat differently, North America in the same era. Taught thatdomestic order was integral to the educated woman’s outlook, a few young Syrianschoolgirls grew up to communicate that message by teaching in the same schools inwhich they had been educated—and by writing biographies for other schoolgirls,readers of the Arabic press, Muslims as well as Christians. This was but one seed

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430 Marilyn Booth

implanting ideas about a ‘modern’ middle-class domesticity as crucial to the ‘healthybody’ of the independent nation (and the concomitant possibilities for economicorganization along capitalist lines) as part of local modernities. Yet, as bothgirls’ education and the female-oriented press expanded after the turn of thetwentieth century, conveying a strong if ambiguous message about women’s domesticresponsibilities, perhaps that early missionary schooling had been a fertile seed.

In pro� les of prominent Arab Christian women of the turn of the twentieth centuryand before, missionary education is recalled as part of a history and of an identity,especially, but not only, of a Syrian Christian new educational, service and businesselite. In biographies this element of identity was recalled and invoked, most often as awarm recollection and as a positive and necessary step toward a professionally, famil-ially and morally illustrious adult female life. Yet the expressed warmth must be seenwithin a larger discourse of double ambivalence surrounding identity and exemplarityfor middle-class Arab girls: the tension between local histories and foreign incursions,and that between domestically de� ned lives and non-domestic professional aspirations.Within this discourse surfaces recognition that the missionary presence was not anentirely innocent intervention, but it is on the positive elements of personal interactionthat biographies focus. Yet, even if they do not tell us about possible con� icts ordisquieting trajectories, these texts give local voice—at least a murmur—to those whohosted the missionary presence rather than obliging us to envision that presence solelyfrom a missionary perspective.

From childhood to adulthood, missionary presences appear brie� y in biographies asone of many strands in a girl’s formation. For example, Mary ¨Ajam õ (1888–1965), whofounded Damascus’s � rst women’s magazine, ‘loved to read from an early age,beginning with the illustrated booklets that the American missionaries distributed’.Later, missionary schools provided her employment; she taught in the American schoolin Port Said and a Russian school in Syria before heading a Coptic girls’ school inAlexandria.10

As I have already suggested, we must read these texts in the context of the priorityplaced at the time among local elites on education for both boys and girls. Girls’education, whether accomplished by tutors at home or by teachers at school, wasreceiving strong if carefully quali� ed support from many as a crucial foundation instrengthening the nation. The rhetoric of training girls to be ‘good’, educative motherswas widely deployed in the press, while ‘bad’ mothers were targeted as sources ofnational shame and national weakness.11 This rhetoric � ts well, of course, into mission-ary agendas that emphasized a ‘civilizing’ mission to justify both conversion campaignsand the support that missionary institutions gave, explicitly or not, to imperialiststrategy. Local elites did not accept this multi-pronged agenda passively. Acceptance ofmissionary education was unevenly ambivalent. Although Syrian Christians, with theirties of faith and often of family—through widespread emigration—to societies inEurope and the Americas, might be expected to support the presence of missionaryschools unproblematically, their adherence to local nationalist goals and heritagescomplicated the outlook of many. Though as a group Syrian Christians (especiallythose present in Egypt) have often been branded ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-British’, theyhad varying perspectives as well as, of course, varying origins and different (oftencompeting) religious allegiances. Maronites tended toward a sought allegiance withFrance, but this was variable; they patronized the Roman Catholic missions. Within theMaronite population it appears that some disaffected groups used the Americanmissionary presence to protest their clergy’s hold.12 Eastern Orthodox groups were

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 431

rooted in overlapping local histories and allegiances; more accepting of the earlyAmerican missionary presence, the leadership were not wholeheartedly in its favor.13

Thus, even in a text that celebrates the educated status of a Syrian Christianwoman—and does so in a magazine run by a Syrian Christian woman in Egypt—therole of missionary-led education may be carefully de� ned and circumscribed. Afterjournalist Alexandra Khur õ Avierino attended the Lazarist Nuns’ School in Beirut andthen the American Girls’ School in Alexandria, and ‘perfected her knowledge of Frenchand Italian’, she was not satis� ed: … love of the homeland prevailed in her, and she didnot want to neglect the language of her country or to prohibit communication amongher � ne sisters, famous women of the east. So she brought a tutor to teach her theliterary arts of the Arabs and return her to their eloquence and strengthen her talent inpoetic and prose writing.14 The text goes on to emphasize Avierino’s many activities—writing, editing a magazine, speaking publicly and often addressing schoolgirl audi-ences, and even traveling—as motivated above all by an activist concern for banatjinsiha, ‘the girls of her kind’. Her adult life, in a sense, provides a counter-narrative tothat of missionary and other foreign intervention in local lives, for she sought to help‘her own’. The emphasis rings somewhat ironically in this life history, because Avierino,far more than many, was very well connected among European elites, and was thelegatee of a European aristocratic title. She was not particularly anti-colonialist in herpolitics.

Thus, biographies of local women do question the lineaments of missionary edu-cation, if gently, particularly in the issue of language training. If foreign languagetraining was in demand for boys as their families considered future employmentopportunities, it was a matter of suspicion and worry for parents of girls, concerned thattheir daughters might thus conceive new ideas about their own futures, spend theirleisure time reading French novels or develop expensive ‘European tastes’. This was asensitive issue; articles abounded in the press criticizing girls, their parents and schoolsfor teaching them to read and write in French or English but not in their own tongue.15

While this issue was linked to that of staf� ng—over time, anger grew about colonialgovernments’ tendency to hire their own nationals to teach in local schools—it was alsolinked to controversy over the presence of missionary schools, and the fear that learningEuropean languages would also lead to religious conversions. Perhaps above all,though, it was a matter caught up in the formation of a modern nation partly throughcelebration and maintenance of its ancient cultural heritages, as well as throughpractices of economy and allegiance to local customs (and products). Repeatedly,biographies enact the widespread critique in these magazines and others of a femaleeducational program that produced girls who could not read or write Arabic properlyand who learned, allegedly, to scorn their own societies, languages and histories. (Thesubtext was that they would teach their children to do the same.) Indeed, some textssubtly construct an opposition between missionary teaching and nationalist pride.Salma Qusat½il õ (1870–1917), native of Damascus, writer, teacher and gynaecologist,received her earliest education in St Paul’s School, run by English missionaries. Shemoved on to Greek Orthodox and then Irish schools. But, said the biographer, it washer brother who instilled ‘the spirit of the awakening’—the reformist impulse thatpervaded early Arab nationalism and the formation of a modern Arab identity—inSalma.16 A similarly cautious, even ambivalent, rhetoric surfaces in a biography ofH½ anna Kasbanõ Kuran õ (1870–98), a native of the Lebanon. Her earliest schooling wasin a state school; perhaps, said the biographer, ‘she acquired there that which provi-sioned her with patriotic fervor, even though she did not stay longer than two months

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432 Marilyn Booth

before entering the American missionaries’ school … in Kafr Shõ ma’, her birthplace.Transferred to the English school at Shamlan, two years later she moved to the ‘bigAmerican girls’ school in Beirut, where she spent four years’.17

The biography goes on to praise Kuran õ ’s facility at giving rousing speeches inEnglish on ‘the eastern woman’ when she traveled to the United States in 1892 toattend the Chicago Exposition on behalf of ‘the daughters of Syria’. But it is her‘patriotic fervor’ and her ‘efforts for the bettering of her sex and the good of her nation’that are primary here, linked back to her two months in a state school.18

Missionary schools, as well as schools run by local religious charities, providedemployment to educated Arab women when no other kind of professional work wasopen to them, unless they could afford to found and run a magazine.19 Salma Qusat½il õtaught in two missionary schools in Damascus before pursuing her studies in medicinein Beirut.20 H½ anna Kuran õ was invited to teach at the American Girls’ School in Tripoli,also run by missionaries, after � nishing her education at the Beirut American mission-ary school. This was a typical trajectory: local girls were trained not only to be wives,mothers and household accountants, but also in some cases to bear the teaching loadin the network of missionary schools where they had been educated. The missionariescould thus be con� dent, it seemed, that these girls would convey their messages ofcultural conversion along with elementary math, Arabic, English and needlework. Toemploy their own pupils satis� ed the need for a hierarchically organized ‘native’ schoolsystem in which they could maintain ultimate authority and control the interpretationof Christianity that would be taught. At the same time, the system potentially offeredprofessional ful� lment to young Arab women who were not ready to sit at home aftercompleting their education. Whether this structure produced tensions among those ondifferent rungs of the authority ladder remains for now an open question. Perhaps itdid, for ironically, the Mission Board also worried about the effect of teaching girls toread English rather than Arabic, warning the missionaries in Beirut of the imperative of‘securing the pupils from adopting Frank manners and customs to such extent that theywill be rendered un� t by their expensive tastes and habits to become the wives of thenative preachers and pastors living on small salaries’.21

Beirut’s American Mission School for Girls: pupils and teachers

Like Kuran õ , several subjects of biography in the Arabic women’s press attended theAmerican mission school for girls in Beirut, the pinnacle of the American Protestantmissionaries’ network of schools for females in Greater Syria. Begun informally in 1833in a missionary home, and preceded by similar attempts in the 1920s, ‘The FemaleSchool’ soon had a classroom on the premises and later became ‘The Female Seminary’with its own building. Though without a headmistress for some years after the death ofits � rst head, and closed or nearly so through part of the 1840s and 1850s, theAmerican missionaries’ girls’ school was revived in 1862 and from 1868 was called theAmerican School for Girls.22 In a biography of Rah½ õ l ¨At½a al-Bustan õ (1823–94), theauthor notes a list of distinguished alumni, many of whom were involved in earlyeducation for Syrian girls:

Many Syrian women emerged as outstanding in this school, among themRah½ õ l ¨At½a, wife of al-Bustan õ and subject of this biography; Sayyida MariyaAbkariyus, sister of H½ anna and Ya¨qub Abkariyus and spouse of Filibi-dhus; … the two sisters of Dr Wortabet; Rifqa and S½ a¨dõ Karkur; Sayyida Lulu,

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 433

Madame Mõ kha’ õ l ’Araman; two Druze daughters from the family of al-Wit½wat½, and others, at a time when the entire population of Beirut was nomore than eight thousand.23

Another early student was the famous poet Warda al-Yazijõ (1838–1924), daughterto the scholar and poet N½ as½ õ f al-Yazijõ . Her father, ‘in 1840, when she was two yearsand some months old, moved his family to the city of Beirut, where the Americanmissionaries had opened a school for girls. And when she had grown, he entered her inthat school to learn the rudiments of reading and writing’, before he began to train herin the arts of poetry at the age of twelve.24 She is one of the individuals whom themissionary Henry Jessup mentions proudly as a product of the missionaries’ work.25

Rah½ õ¯l ¨At½a and Sarah Smith: one household, two narratives

According to the biography of Rah½ õ l ¨At½a al-Bustanõ published in Fatat al-sharq, thisnative of Shuwayfat, Lebanon, was born in Beirut in 1823. When a group of Americanmissionaries settled in Beirut in 1827, said the biography, among them was SarahHuntington Smith (1802–36), who had recently married the missionary Eli Smith.

Smith seems to illustrate the yearning of some women for a life outside the expecta-tions engendered by, in this case, a well-heeled genteel life in Connecticut. She workedamong the Mohegan Indians; thus, her interest in missions long preceded her marriage,and indeed her choice of husband may have been dictated by her growing yearnings,from early in the 1820s, to try the missionary life abroad, as expressed in her memoirs.26

She notes in 1830 that members of ‘� rst families’ should join the missions, to show theimportance of sacri� ce and the urgency of working with ‘the present generation ofheathen’.27 Was marriage a means to an end? Her editor simply comments: ‘It appearedthe design of Providence, that through the Rev Eli Smith, of the American Mission atBeyroot, Syria, should be brought before her mind the subject of entering upon thatgood work, as the wife of a missionary.’28 Her letters to family at the time show a certainimpatience with her life; she and Eli Smith married, and two months later, embarked.This impatience is perhaps unwittingly echoed in her husband’s later, eulogisticcomments, reported as the epilogue to her edited memoirs:

Entering thus upon her sphere of labor, she devoted herself to missionarywork as her leading business. Every thing was made secondary, and as far aspossible, auxiliary to it. This principle pervaded and regulated all her domesticarrangements. To be a mere housekeeper and mistress of a missionary’sfamily, and thus to spend her time in ordinary domestic occupations, she feltwould be degrading to her calling.29

Yet the same passage extols her perfect housekeeping. The missionary wife was to bea paragon of ef� cient and gracious domesticity: yet the memoirs reveal how missionarywork could answer the need to ful� l other ambitions.

Though her memoirs articulate the blend of racism, moral superiority and paternal-istic sympathy common from the writings of Victorian-era Westerners outside of theirown societies, at this early point, when she is just becoming acquainted with life inBeirut, they also suggest an excitement and an openness mingled with weariness,depression and a disillusionment that she is not slow to express as she realizes that herfaith may not be suf� cient to carry her forward. She also confesses the allure of ‘styleand company’, and the attraction of people who are ‘so social and free’.30 Her sense of

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insecurity is clear. Perhaps, then, she sought both discipline and solace—as well asbetter language skills—in surrogate motherhood. On June 30, she writes:

I feel somewhat thoughtful, this afternoon, in consequence of having heard ofthe ready consent of the friends of a little girl, that I should take her, as Iproposed, and educate her. I am anxious to do it, and yet my experience andobservation in reference to such a course, and my knowledge of the sinfulheart of a child, lead me to think I am undertaking a great thing. I feel, too,that my example and my instruction will control her eternal destiny.31

According to the biography in Fatat al-sharq, Mrs Smith adopted Rah½ õ l (tabannatha)at the age of four:32

In the home of the woman who had adopted her, Rah½ õ l became a member ofthe family, loved by her parents and those who frequented them. They raisedher on the � rmest of principles and entered her in the girls’ school in 1834.Rah½ õ l stood out among her classmates. She gained the � nest of morals andlearned thoroughly the English and Arabic languages and their literatures: forshe was the � rst woman who learned to read and write in school in nineteenth-century Syria.33

This biography erred in chronology. While the � rst, informal classes for girls werebegun in 1827 by two missionary wives, Sarah Smith did not arrive in Beirut untilJanuary of 1834.34 If Rah½ õ l was indeed born in 1823, then she was eleven when shejoined the Smith household—a very different age indeed to begin a new life. Accordingto Eli Smith, writing after his wife’s death, the girl was about eight.35 What is moresigni� cant, though, about the missionaries’ version is the explanation of desire, concernand activity that led to, and then undergirded, Rah½ õ l’s ‘adoption’ into the Smithhousehold.

In various mission � elds, this was common practice. Because missionaries viewed thefamily as key to conversion, and women as keys to the family, it was thought that themost ef� cient means of instilling the missionaries’ brand of belief in the � eld was totrain young girls in missionary homes. An indication of how central a certain conceptof domestic organization was to evangelical Christian practice—and, concomitantly,how pivotal was a certain kind of gendered training into new social roles—this practicewas as accepted in Beirut as elsewhere. According to Tibawi, ‘in missionary sourcessuch an arrangement is regarded as boarding school education. Daughters or relativesof native converts were selected from the pupils in schools controlled by the mission,and after further training in missionary families were employed as native helpers’.36

Jessup remarks that a number of Syrian girls were ‘boarding’ in missionary families inBeirut and Jersualem.37 At some point, these girls, now thoroughly ‘trained’, wouldbecome subordinate teachers in the missionary schools. The missionaries had highhopes for them; the 1855 Syrian Mission report notes that ‘under proper instruction,and by the blessing of God, there will be brought forward a class of intelligent, piousand ef� cient female helpers in the great work of evangelizing this community’. And thesuccess of the system seemed proven, for Jessup exults: ‘The list of Dr De Forest’spupils is to a great extent the list of the leading female teachers and helpers in all thevarious departments of evangelic work in Syria.’38 Some of these girls were employedby the schools of other national missions. And there is an intriguing genealogy: the girlswho were raised in missionary homes and later took over teaching then sometimespassed on their careers to their own daughters.39

The practice of taking girls in and then having them help with the teaching seems

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 435

highly signi� cant in terms of training them into the missionary concept of domesticorganization, and therefore in terms of shaping ideas about gendered organizationamong some sectors of the local populace. ‘In� uence’ was more than a matter ofteaching girls in school; these girls shared daily life, in precisely what capacity it iswell-nigh impossible to measure. Jessup reproduces letters that some of these girlswrote to him; in highly stylized English, the letters—or testimonials—emphasize spiri-tual development and give us no clue as to the personal relationships and dailynegotiations that missionaries and ‘their girls’ had.40 But this earliest generation ofmissionary-educated Arab girls must have had a different relationship to both educationand their teachers than did later generations who were in formalized school situations.Those who lived with their missionary teachers, but also those participating in theseearliest, tiny, home-based schools were perhaps more isolated from their own familiesand communities, yet perhaps also closer to the missionaries, for they were always inthe home. They would have had more intimate relations with the missionary wives, andless with other schoolgirls. It is interesting that in the Arabic text, Mrs Smith is calledRah½ õ l’s ‘mother’.

Yet, what sort of negotiations went on between ‘mother’ and adoptive daughter?What role did Rah½ õ l play? It is clear that she was a translator–companion; Mrs Smithtook her along on visits to local households.41 It also appears that Rah½ õ l very soon beganher career as a teacher, for in early 1836 Mrs Smith notes that:

The wife of a persecuted Druze is very anxious to learn to read, and she comesto our house every day, when the school closes, to get instruction from Raheel.Today the latter was visiting her parents, and Keffa, the daughter of thewoman, gave her a lesson. It was affecting to see a little girl, six years of age,standing by her mother’s knee in the of� ce of a teacher.42

To take a young girl into the household was not simply a sel� ess act of generosity,even if it was seen as such. Eli Smith’s own later recollection makes that clear:

Very soon after her arrival at Beyroot, Mrs Smith had a � xed desire to take alittle Arab girl to be brought up in her family. It originated from a variety ofmotives. The warm affections of her heart sought the constant presence ofsome such object of attachment. The little girl’s soul she hoped to save; andshe desired also to train her up to be a helper in the great work of enlighteningand saving others. It grati� ed her feelings of benevolence to bring home to thescene of her domestic labors, a subject upon which to exercise them, that theymight know no cessation; for thereby, in her most domestic occupations, shewas enabled to feel that she was still doing good to one of the natives, to whomshe wished every hour of her life to be devoted. She hoped also, by thuscreating continual occasion for the use of the Arabic language, to be able tolearn it sooner.43

Sarah Smith refers affectionately and very personally to Rah½ õ l; describing their homein a letter, she mentions ‘a room for Raheel, my little girl’.44 And when she left Beirutin June of 1836, headed for Smyrna in the hopes that the voyage would improve herhealth, she says, ‘I had set my heart much upon taking Raheel with me … I had becomeso strongly attached to the little girl, and felt myself so much rewarded for all my effortswith her, that the circumstances of this separation were perhaps more trying than anyassociated with our departure.’45 But Rah½ õ l’s birth parents had refused to let her go, aninteresting indication that this ‘adoption’ had been a partial one. One wonders whatSarah Smith can have been thinking about parents in her own native country when she

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explains: ‘Parents, however, in Syria, have an especial aversion to parting with theirchildren for foreign countries.’46 Rah½ õ l was entrusted to Sarah’s friend and associate,Rebecca Williams.

Yet, there were invisible boundaries within the household, as well as visibly markeddifferences, as Eli Smith also makes clear:

[Sarah] at length selected from her school one of the most promising scholars,about eight years of age, and with the consent of her parents, adopted her. InMrs Smith’s care, attentions, and gradually in her affections also, she tookalmost the rank of a daughter. But it was settled as a fundamental principle inher education, from the � rst, not to Europeanize her, and thereby un� t her tolive contentedly and usefully among her countrymen, where she was to haveher abode. She was therefore always dressed in the native costume, and took a rankin the family midway between a daughter and a servant. In addition to needle-work, she was taught to assist in most kinds of domestic labor; and sothoroughly was she initiated into habits of industry, as never to sit down withnothing to do.

Yet with the servants she was never allowed to associate. Mrs Smith’s hope ofspecial bene� t to the child from residing in her family, was based very muchupon the principle of segregation; and she had the opinion � rmly � xed, thatunless every avenue by which contamination might be contracted were strictlyguarded, all her labor would probably lie lost. She was watched, therefore,with a care that parental anxiety rarely gives rise to; and had no access to thekitchen, except on an errand for a moment; nor was she ever left alone in thehouse, with the servants; and though permitted to visit her parents regularly, shewas allowed to spend the night at home but once a year.47

It is clear, moreover, that Sarah, at least, had some � rm words with Rah½ õ l’s birth motherconcerning the religious rituals of the Eastern Orthodox family:

The fasts she was allowed to observe, so far as they strenuously insisted; yetnot without being fully taught their futility in themselves toward aiding at allin the great matter of her soul’s salvation, nor without her parents beingwarned of the false ideas of religion they were likely to give her. In remonstrat-ing with the little girl’s mother on this subject, she is known to have mostaffectionately pressed upon her the extreme absurdity and sin of attachingsuch importance to fasts and festivals, while Sabbath-breaking, lying, andprofaneness were indulged in with an undisturbed conscience; and to havesolemnly warned her of the great danger she was in, of ruining her daughter’ssoul forever, by leading her into paths deviating from the strait and narrowway of salvation.48

What sort of loyalties and tensions might the situation have left in young Rah½ õ l? Anddespite Smith’s undoubted affections, surely the negative attitudes that she expressesrepeatedly in her memoirs toward ‘these weak-minded Syrian females’49 were commu-nicated to her young protegee. How might these practices and attitudes have affectedthe relations among Syrians attached to, employed by or in some way connected withthe mission, as well as relations within the household? How might hierarchies institutedwithin the household have traveled beyond that space? If Rah½ õ l did indeed go to visit herfamily, what sort of impact did her experience in the Smith household make on familialrelations among the ¨At½as?

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Sarah Smith died in Izmir, while traveling to restore her health, in 1836. Accordingto the Fatat al-sharq biography, Rah½ õ l’s education continued, supervised by her adoptivefather. ‘Her father Dr Smith undertook to rear and educate her in letters and housemanagement in the manner in which his wife had been concerned to do, ful� lling hercharge to him to preserve and watch over [the girl].’50 According to Jessup, ‘Raheel’lived for � ve years with Rebecca Williams Hebard, and then with other missionaries(Hebard died in 1840). It seems that she never did return to live with her birth family.

Meanwhile, young But½rus al-Bustanõ (1819–97)—who was educated in the MaroniteSeminary at ¨Ayn Warqa, not in a missionary school—had come to work at the missionpress and with Dr Smith on translation of the Old Testament. There, ‘luck helped himto become acquainted with Rah½ õ l’. They married, and according to the biography theyboth joined the Evangelical church and worked side by side ‘to elevate the level ofknowledge … famous for piety and good morals’, as well as producing nine children.

But again, the question of birth family and culture versus the missionary communityseems to have intruded—though not in this Arabic-language biography, where the shiftfrom birth home to missionary home to marriage home appears a smooth trajectory.The marriage, in fact, appears to have caused consternation, presumably becauseal-Bustan õ was a Maronite turned Protestant. Jessup recounts this chapter of the story,saying that ‘her mother and friends were opposed to the engagement, as they wished tomarry her to a man of their own selection’. There was a forcible attempt by abrother-in-law to keep her in her mother’s home; when the missionaries intervened inthe form of a local law-enforcement of� cial, Rah½ õ l apparently said that she wanted to‘go home to Mrs De Forest’, and ‘escaped’ with the of� cer; she and al-Bustanõ weremarried the next summer.51 It seems that Rah½ õ l had come to identify with themissionaries, hardly surprising after so many years, although the only extant version ofthis tale comes from a missionary pen. We have no writings by Rah½ õ l; the only otherperspective is that of the Arabic biography, and in many ways this text, penned by amale Arab reformer, shows concerns similar to those of the missionaries.

Rah½ õ l is presented in this biography as a perfect homemaker: ‘Rah½ õ l organized herfamily and home without disturbing the thinking of her husband as he was bent overhis literary projects, writing famous books … and administering the Wat½aniyya School,and running scienti� c magazines like Al-jinan.’52 But Rahil is presented also in anotherlight, one typical of the ‘Famous Women’ biographies in this and other women’smagazines of the era:

Managing her home and raising her children did not delay her from taking thehand of her husband in overseeing the Wat½aniyya School and caring for thehealth of the young students, managing the [school’s] servants, producingperfect food, and assisting him with some of the apposite views by which shewas distinguished.

And in addition to that—continues the biography—‘she was enamored of readingphilosophical works in Arabic and English, as well as literary and moralistic books, andin her children, male and female, she propagated the love of knowledge and desire toread useful books.’53

Rah½ õ l ¨At½a is thus depicted as a paragon of the elite reformist image of nationalwomanhood. The perfect companionate wife and mother, she extends her domesticwork to include the school her husband has founded. And in her free time, she readsserious books—not the French romances that the press was fond of warning parents

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against. The author of this biography—reformist writer ¨Isa Iskandar al-Ma©luf—� ndsin her the perfect exemplar: ‘God have mercy upon her and multiply her likes amongour women, in home management, mastery of knowledge, and � ne childrearing, forthese are the � nest attributes of woman in every era.’54

Teachers and Pupils

Some two decades later, Maryam Nimr Makariyus (1860–88), said her biographer,attended ‘one of the best schools in Beirut’, graduating in 1877.55 It was the AmericanSchool for Girls, now a fully � edged institution rather than the home-based classesthat Rah½ õ l had known. Makariyus’s elegist and friend, Yaqut S½ arruf (d. 1937),attended it too. Writing in the mid-1870s, Jessup notes that the school comprised40 boarding and 60 day scholars.56 That education was a rare and precious gift forthese women is suggested in S½ arruf’s biography of her friend. Makariyus’s fatherhad died in the 1860 strife in Lebanon, and it was her mother who had insistentlykept her children—male and female—in school, � rst in Jerusalem and then inBeirut. Pointedly, S½ arruf notes that Makariyus’s mother had herself been denied aneducation:

She entered them in the schools of noble Jerusalem so that they would learnthe scholarly � elds that it had not been her [that is, their mother’s] luck tohave a portion of, because she was born and raised in an age in which toeducate girls was forbidden on the argument that it was not necessary for themand [its impact] on them was to be feared. Thus thought the people of thatage, a notion more reprehensible than sinning.57

The widow’s insistence on education for her daughter is emphasized in the biography,and the implication is strong that the mother visited her own longings on her daughter:‘The late lamented did not remain long in Jerusalem before her mother chose for hera school among the best schools of Beirut, enrolling her and not agreeing to take herout until she had completed all of her studies and taken her diploma.’58

It was at that school, said S½ arruf, that she herself had met Makariyus: ‘There tookhold of us a mutual affection, and our hearts were bound together by the bonds ofsincere love that death has tried to sever but unsuccessfully so to this day and in future.’Soon after graduation, Makariyus married, and her home was the scene of a livelyliterary salon, hosting intellectuals ‘male and female’. She educated her eldest child inEnglish and Arabic, ‘and was determined to teach his brother and sister when theyreached the age of discrimination, but the fate of death anticipated her’.59

S½ arruf’s obituary makes it clear that she and Maryam had enjoyed an intimate, fondlyremembered time at the missionary school. A few months before her death, Makariyusherself suggested this in a letter she wrote to an alumnae gathering; living in Cairo, shewas unable to attend. Makariyus reminisced about their days ‘in the school in whichyou are now gathered and in which we were nourished by the milk of knowledge’ andremembered their teachers:

I have no doubt that all of you remember now those days in which we usedto gather together like sisters of one family, all of us under the gaze of thosewomen who stayed awake over us at night as mothers do over daughters, whilewe reveled freely in the abundance of purity and youth … without a careexcept knowledge, worried only about not learning our lessons. As for

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now, other circumstances have replaced those, and our exertions have beenscattered in all directions such that it has become dif� cult for us to meettogether.60

It seems that the intellectual interests formed at school remained with these women.Yaqut continued to write for Al-muqtat½af, although she was later remembered—notalways by name—by male writers as a ‘helpmeet’ to her husband, a � ne mother to herfour children and a gracious salon hostess.61 Makariyus (who also contributed toAl-muqtat½af as well as her own husband’s magazine, Al-lat½a©if) clearly retained intellec-tual interests, too. In her letter to her former school friends, she complained that in herpresent life she did not � nd in Cairo the scienti� c or literary societies ‘that [if theyexisted] would remind us of Beirut’s associations … except that some time ago weattended the opening of a literary and scholarly association in the headquarters of theAmerican missionaries, attended by about 150 people’. She expressed hope that itwould grow and inspire other such groups: ‘I ask God that He make us able toundertake a bene� cial service to the daughters of this country.’62 Her friend andbiographer suggests that this wish was not just a matter of rhetoric. Maryam, saidYaqut, ‘was the healthiest and most industrious one among us’. And ‘toward the endof 1885, [when] we all came to Egypt, after we were settled she devoted herself toreading and study in preparation for a praiseworthy deed she intended to initiate inservice to the daughters of her age’.

Indeed, Makariyus had already shown her organizational and educational capabilitiesand longings. In 1880 in Beirut, Makariyus and other women, including S½ arruf, hadfounded Bakurat Suriya as a literary society for Syrian women: ‘we took turns givingspeeches and holding debates. And among her [Makariyus’s] speeches was a historicalcritique of al-Khansa’, the famous Arab female poet. She collected what was scatteredin books.’ S½ arruf enumerates Makariyus’s writings and speeches—including publishedexchanges with two prominent male intellectuals—and exhibits her own critical skills bytheorizing Makariyus’s biographical practice as one in which she emphasizes childhoodformation and attacks the silence on mothers that traditional Arabic biography, writtenby men, maintained.63 In her own biographies, S½ arruf follows Makariyus in emphasiz-ing mothers’ actions, especially in getting their daughters educated.64

I have described this biography at some length because it suggests, I think, thecomplicated legacy of missionary education for girls in Syria. It seems indisputable thatthese girls partook of the domestic emphasis and religious training that, from themissionary side, this education appeared to emphasize; yet it is not necessarily thedomestic emphasis that most shaped the pupils’ ambitions and future lives, though theydid marry and raise families, meeting social expectations. When S½ arruf describes thecurriculum at the American Girls’ School by noting the subjects that Makariyusstudied, she does mention ‘handwork, including sewing, embroidery, and the like’, butthat comes last in a long list: Arabic grammar, rhetoric, English, history, geography,arithmetic, natural philosophy, biology, meteorology, physiology—and then sewing.65

Makariyus is equipped to teach her children and run her household, which she did,S½ arruf insists, with care and aplomb; yet it is the literary society, the speeches and alsothe charity society that Makariyus, S½ arruf, other Syrian women and ‘American womenbenefactors’ founded to teach poor girls that the biography spends more time enumer-ating. This is signi� cant not only—or not so much—as a narrative of Makariyus’spredilections as it is (also) of S½ arruf’s: this is what she, as a sister graduate, chooses toremember and to emphasize about their school and their later lives, an emphasis borne

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out in her own essays for Al-muqtat½af. That most of these writings, including biography,were subsumed in the ‘Home Management Column’ is one of the ironies of earlygender discourse, and speci� cally, a telling irony of male journalists’ support forwomen’s authorship. Yet there was utility in this: perhaps it communicated to femalereaders that ‘home management’ was a wide arena indeed. Even the layout of themagazine, juxtaposed with its content, communicated ambivalence about women’splace in the realities of discourse and physical space.

Some years later, S½ arruf learned of the death of their teacher. Eliza Everett had cometo Beirut in 1868 to assume the headship of the newly revived girls’ school. A native ofOhio,66 she had been teaching at Houghton Seminary in Clinton, Pennsylvania whenHenry Jessup from the Syria Mission visited. Said Jessup: ‘I count it one of theprovidential reasons of my being sent to America in October, 1867, that I was able to� nd Miss Eliza D. Everett, the accomplished and consecrated lady who came to Beirutwith me in October, 1868, and laboured in Syria for twenty-� ve years in the BeirutFemale Seminary with remarkable acceptance and success.’67

S½ arruf traces Everett’s own history as a pupil, moving through the system, earning adiploma in 1858 and then, as many Syrian girls did, returning to her alma mater toteach. Later, at the Clinton School, ‘when she had grown skilled at the art of teachingand at school administration in both knowledge and practice, she was called to Syria’.68

Once there, her ‘greatest concern’ was learning Arabic and ‘propagating organizationand re� nement in the school’. Indeed, Jessup, the missionary, exclaims that Everett’s‘acceptance of the position put new life into the school, and her long connection withit was a blessing to the daughters of Syria’.69

But what did ‘the daughters of Syria’ think? In contrast to Jessup’s paternalisticgeneralities, S½ arruf describes Everett with attention to the particular qualities thatendeared her to her students. Describing her as ‘smart, with a melodious voice, and agentle and digni� ed bearing’, S½ arruf calls Everett a teacher whom her students ‘loved,honored, and exerted themselves to obey and please’. S½ arruf is speci� c about the styleand expectations of that teacher, presenting them as bene� cial to the students. If partof the package is discipline, another part is academics:

She could only be satis� ed with hard work, civility, and good behavior, and sothe school was successful in her time and many girls emerged from it, manywho adorn the salons of Egypt and Syria these days, whether they be wives,mothers, or teachers … Her style in teaching was to offer help and exciteinterest so that students would come to learning of their own accord, wantingto study and bene� t from it. She made the students want to study the naturalsciences … She composed a � ne book in the science of theoretical astronomyand another in calculus, both of which she wrote in Arabic.70

The impression one gets from this biography is that Everett respected and liked herstudents, and that those bonds went beyond the classroom. S½ arruf suggests this severaltimes; she recalls that among the schoolgirls, ‘those who lived in Beirut used to wait forher visits in their homes as if this were in itself a festival, loving her as a girl loves herown sister, honoring her as a daughter honors her own mother’.71 As a boardingstudent, S½ arruf ‘cannot forget how [Everett] spent wakeful nights watching over us,especially those who were sick, as I cannot forget how she welcomed her students whenthey visited her after graduating from the school. She hosted them, and they hosted her,like true sisters, and she welcomed their husbands like brothers and relatives.’72

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Everett remained in contact, too, with those like S½ arruf and Makariyus, and manyother members of the Syrian entrepreneurial and professional strata, who emigratedfrom their country of origin:

Even with the abundance of her occupations, she used to correspond withthose pupils who were distant, telling them anecdotes of happenings [at theschool] and asking after their health and that of their husbands and children.To their children she showed the gaiety and affection that a grandmothershows her grandchildren.73

How much a part of the local missionary group Everett was I have not been able todetermine; hired as a teacher, it may not have been a ‘missionary calling’ but rather aprofessional venture that attracted her. In the absence of more information, thisremains speculation, but her 25-year career at the school might suggest that shedeveloped local loyalties, also hinted at in the emotional bonds she developed withstudents, according to S½ arruf’s warm biography. The emotional tenor of this text goesbeyond hagiographic obituary writing; it conveys a depth of feeling through emphasiz-ing the respect and affection that seem to have � ourished in this school. It is not hardto believe, then, that S½ arruf and her schoolmates really did take their teacher as amodel:

She herself was the ultimate rule, the clearest exemplar of comportment,proper order, and re� nement. Her movements and stillnesses, her words andher silences, her gait and her bearing, her eating and drinking, the arrange-ment of her hair and clothes, her manner of meeting people, and the dispo-sition of her room and books and desk: all were lessons to us, a model weimitated.74

The other biographies of missionary teachers that I have located in the early Arabicpress are less personal than S½ arruf’s tribute to Eliza Everett. Yet they also suggest therespect given to those missionaries whose tours of duty turned into lifelong work amongArab girls. In one case, the career was shortened by death in childbirth. Jessie Hogg(1866–1905) was born in Cairo to missionary parents from Scotland.75 Sent in 1873 toScotland for schooling—as was the usual practice among missionaries, casting somequestion on the centrality of family in their own lives or at least as those lives appearedto those among whom they worked, as Susan Thorne points out76—Hogg returned toEgypt in 1880 where ‘she � nished her elementary studies at the hands of her excellentmother’.77 After further education at ‘Edinburgh College [sic], where she was a paragonof grace, gentility, and serious effort to her peers’, she returned ‘with her entire family’to Egypt. In September of 1886 she was appointed as a missionary in Asyut, chargedwith administering the girls’ school ‘with Miss Keele’. For � ve years they workedtogether, ‘during which time her determination never � agged in visiting families,founding religious societies, and visiting neighboring areas … so that the populace grewattached to her and saw in her the image of her father, indeed his energy and zeal’.78

When her colleague was transferred to Cairo in 1891:

… the management of the secondary school for girls in Asyut relied solely onthe late lamented one. She undertook this momentous work for eleven years,throughout which she raised � ne ladies. By her own hand she produced [orgraduated] well-trained mothers for the country. She treated the pupils likesisters, and sought the teachers’ advice as if they were her partners. Not asingle one felt that they were subjected to the authority of a head. And she didnot need a code of law: rather, she was the law that they all followed.79

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Note here the emphasis on training for domestic futures: it was ‘well-trained’mothers that the school produced under Hogg’s headship, and she is given credit. LikeEverett, she is also said to have exercised a moral authority that displaced the need forexternally imposed codes of law. ‘She herself was the ultimate rule.’ Yet this biography,as far as we know, was not written by one of Hogg’s own pupils. What might the girlsof Asyut have emphasized as their teacher’s legacy?

In Hogg’s case, her career was cut short. In 1902 she left the school to marry theRevd McLanahan, who appears to have been another Scots missionary based in Egypt.After the wedding in Scotland, they ‘returned’ to Alexandria:

She was full of hopes and projects for working among us, and she did workamong us with untiring enthusiasm and un� agging zeal, until she was taken,and left us. But she remains alive in our hearts with her gentle and effectivewords, the religious societies she ran, and the important projects she pro-posed. All of this still speaks, after her, and has its requisite impact.80

Finally, in 1908 Fatat al-sharq published a biography of Luisa Procter that gavereaders a portrait of the life of a single woman in Britain who turned to charity workand then overseas missions. If her potential as role model is emphasized within thebiography through personal qualities and dedication as a teacher, her potential as rolemodel through the biography as a life trajectory that young women readers might haveread offers a more complicated message, of independence, intellectual pursuits andbusiness acumen.

Born in 1829 in Dublin, Procter is constructed as a model female from thebeginning, as are her parents:

Brought up in the care of her parents, she was raised on � ne principles. Shegrew up learning piety and virtue; circumstances of ease did not make herpro� igate, or allow her the vanity of youth, causing her to spend her free timein places of amusement or to give in to her whims, as other well-off girls did.Rather, she desired the general good and wanted to serve humanity, and shesacri� ced a part of youth and maturity in charitable works and laudableefforts.81

Procter’s father died when she was eighteen, and she cared for her mother in dif� cultcircumstances, since her father’s inheritance had been sequestered. After her mother’sdeath, she helped her brother, now an ordained Anglican priest, ‘caring untiringly forthe sick, helping the poor, spreading religious and moral principles among them’, untilher brother’s marriage. She landed in an orphanage near Dublin, ‘serving there withpleasure, desire, and energy’ and touring and giving speeches to raise money.82 ‘Shebegan after that to travel through God’s wide world … moving from place to place untilshe dusted the dirt of travel from her feet in Shuwayfat, Lebanon.’ Eventually, shebased herself there, founding the famous Shuwayfat school largely with her own money,turning it into a boarding school ‘whose doors she opened to boys and girls of allreligious communities’. By the time this obituary–biography was published twenty yearslater, her schools had graduated nearly 1600 pupils, boys and girls, according to thistext.83 But ‘her zeal did not stop’: she founded more schools in Lebanon, running themand ‘teaching the advanced sciences in the girls’ boarding school to the last month ofher life’.

Procter had died a few months before this biography appeared, at the age of 87 years,‘a third of which she spent serving and educating Syria’s children, expending for the

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sake of all that her life and her money’. The author praises her for knowledge, effort andcharacter traits; he notes that she was widely respected:

The people of Syria liked and respected her greatly for the zeal, partiality, andhard work they saw in her, in addition to her good morals and praiseworthytraits, such as modesty, uprightness, sincerity, loyalty, valor and generosity,initiative, persistence, and self-denial. God have mercy on her, she respectedtime, loved work, had a penchant for reading and economy, along withgenerosity of charity. She was clean, organized, and skilled, with a powerfulmemory and a keen eye, devout and pious.84

The biography conveys a reformist approval of those aspects of organization andorder that missionaries so often saw themselves as instilling. Yet it is not just thesepreoccupations that the biography lauds. In addition to the elements of career indepen-dence noted above, there is a further, and signi� cant, element. If Procter is seen as a� tting model for the youth of Syria, it is also because she is regarded as having had aloyalty to, and respect for, the society:

She loved Syria and wanted to spend the rest of her life in it; she consideredLebanon a homeland of hers, and so instructed that she be buried there. Sheloved and followed eastern customs, adorned herself with eastern femaledress, and urged her female students to imitate her, and to abstain fromwearing hats while they were in school … Whatever their class and sect, theLebanese felt her loss, especially the students … Writers eulogized her, news-papers and magazines in Syria wrote her obituary.85

The message for young female readers of the magazine is multi-layered: the editornotes that Jurj õ Baz, journalist, reformer and women’s rights advocate, wrote a book onProcter from which this biography had been summarized, and that in it he had:

… urged the women and girls of Syria to imitate and learn from her. And nowonder, for the sane person knows well that the progress of the nation ismeasured in the progress of its women, and the true writer is the one who withhis writings advances his nation’s bene� t and the cure for its social ills, not theone who writes lines of futile embellishment.

As Procter becomes a model for the rising nation’s girls, Baz is a model for its (here,implicitly male) writers: we publish this, says the magazine, ‘with our plea to the � newriters to follow his example and turn their attention to subjects that bene� t the easternwoman and will encourage her to want to acquire learning. For that is the � nestservice’.86

Finally, and brie� y, I want to mention a biography of Mary Eddy written andpublished by Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya in her journal Al-mar’a al-jad õ da (The NewWoman), founded in 1921 in Beirut. Mary Eddy (b. 1864) was the daughter ofAmerican missionaries, born in Sidon in southern Lebanon where her parents werebased. After an elementary education at home, she was sent to the United States tocomplete her studies, and eventually, after a further time in Syria, she attended medicalschool. Because she intended to practice in Syria, she had to obtain a permit from theOttoman authorities in Istanbul, and the biography details her persistence in facing themany obstacles she encountered as a woman and as a foreigner. In fact, notes thebiography, the dif� culties and expense of receiving that permit have led many youngArab male doctors to emigrate and ‘serve other countries’. Mary Eddy, however,persisted and triumphed, even over the objections of ‘one pasha on the committee, who

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444 Marilyn Booth

said, How can we allow this American woman to obtain what she wants? We cannot letrevolutionary ideas penetrate the minds of our h½ar õ m.’87

Eddy spent the rest of her life in medical service to ‘people of all classes and religions’throughout Ottoman Syria, living a nomadic existence to reach the patients who couldnot come to her. But what is most interesting about this biography for our purposeshere is the framework in which the author puts it. Beginning by naming Eddy as a‘tangible exemplar of the strong, active, sacri� cing woman’, the editor explains herchoice:

I reserved this feature of the magazine to mention our educated women whoare active in the women’s awakening, and my goal is to acknowledge the goodworks of those who have spent themselves in service to the nation, as well asto put before our women a living example that they may imitate … But withall my respect to the � ne daughters of my country, and my delight in them, Ido not see a one who has served her Syrian homeland as has this lady, ofAmerican origin and Syrian birth.

I apologize to the American community for counting Dr Mary Eddy as aSyrian national, because if patriotism is measured by what the individual offersto the country in which he lives or the people with whom he lives, this lady isone of the most patriotic Syrians, men and women.88

Eddy thus discursively crosses the boundary between missionary and target, foreign and‘native’, imperial and national.

As in the cases of Everett and Hogg, Eddy’s and Procter’s adult careers were builtaround either educating the Arab young or caring for the sick of Syria. Whateverpersonal goals and needs these careers may have satis� ed, they were perceived at leastby a certain slice of the local elite as bene� cial to their social goals, which includedfemale education if not a reordered gender regime. Yet, what sort of model would thesewomen have provided to local girls? As single career women, they did not embody the‘well-trained mothers’ that Hogg, at least, was said to ‘produce’ and that Everettpresumably saw in the school graduates with whom she corresponded. Ellen Fleisch-mann notes in this volume that one Arab girl, at least, saw Eddy as inspiration tobecome a doctor (above 420). Some of the girls that the other women mentioned hereeducated also became professionals, whether teachers in the same or other girls’ schoolsonly until their own marriages, or lifelong professional women such as Salma Qusat½il õ .Increasingly, there was both need and acceptance of educated women to staff locallyfounded schools, which as I said at the beginning, were important counter-measures toforeign control of whatever sort.89 And when Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya celebratedSyrian and Egyptian women in Al-mar’a al-jad õ da, the role of missionary education inproducing women who did not � t customary molds is evident. Al-Dimashqiyya’s warm,personal pro� les of other Arab women in the ‘Workers in the Women’s Awakening’column privileges local initiative and instills pride in a parade of active, wonderfulwomen with allegiance to the strong national futures of their nations. Indeed, the themeof local women replacing foreign women becomes explicit in a pro� le of Marie Kassab,famous for founding her own school, after receiving her education in the English Girls’School in Beirut, and teaching there and in Damascus. When foreign schools wereclosed during the Great War, says al-Dimashqiyya, Kassab opened her own; it is acrucial site, says the author, for fostering national unity. This pro� le includes thetestimonies of others, and one of them salutes Kassab: ‘Madam Mary Kassab, the

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 445

import of your national school is the undoing of the ties of enslavement that bind us,and our release from slavery to the foreigners.’90

Similarly, biographies in the women’s press in Egypt increasingly featured Arabwomen who funded, ran and taught in wholly local schools, whether secular orchurch-based.91 If this was not the result that missionary boards had envisioned, it wasat least in small part due to the efforts of women such as Everett, Procter and Hogg,while local recognition of their efforts included the observation of how those efforts hadmade possible the replacement of foreign workers with local ones.

Of the biographies of missionaries that I have described here, each differs inprovenance, authorial identity and perspective. Yaqut Barakat S½ arruf’s biography of herteacher Eliza Everett is notable for its intimacy and warmth, even though it issimultaneously an obituary with the stylistic � ourishes that entailed. Al-Dimashqiyya’sbiography of Eddy is strongly respectful, the tribute of one strong, vocal and activewoman to another. The biographies of Hogg and Procter, more distant in theirauthorial presence, show recognition of a strong local impact. Yet it is important to bearin mind that in every case, it is the missionary teacher’s sensitivity to her local context,and her commitment to a place, a language and a rising generation of Arab girls whocraved education, that receive emphasis and praise. Moreover, it is suggested that thesewere teachers who treated pupils and other teachers with respect and a lack ofhierarchical thinking. Finally, there is a suggestion that the encounter between teacherand taught was not a one-way street; that the missionaries as well as their ‘targets’ werein� uenced and changed. Thus, foreign missionaries such as Procter are praised fortaking on aspects of an ‘indigenous’ identity, and for regarding Syria and/or theLebanon as a ‘homeland’. If this is at least partly wishful thinking on the part ofbiography writers, it is no less signi� cant for that. It suggests a set of criteria by whichthose with whom missionaries came in contact evaluated that encounter, as it offers aconstruction of what these Western women’s experiences as part of a ‘civilizing mission’did to them. Perhaps it civilized them in ways they least expected, as the relations ofunequal power that clearly accompanied missionaries into the � eld were themselvestested or changed if not dissolved. And perhaps one conclusion we can draw is thatfrom the perspective of those at the receiving end of missionary energies, there weremissionaries—and then there were missionaries.

NOTES

1. ‘Al-mar’a al-sharqiyya: ma yajibu ¨alayha ¨amaluhu al-yawm’, Fatat al-sharq 5 (February 15, 1919),187–8.

2. I use this term to refer to inhabitants of the Ottoman Syrian provinces, known as ‘Greater Syria’or al-Sham, and comprising what are now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the OccupiedTerritories.

3. It is important to note, as A. L. Tibawi does, that educational institutions existed in Syria, as theydid in Egypt, before missionaries began schools. A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria IncludingLebanon and Palestine (London/New York, Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 1969), 140–1. On Egypt,see J. Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London, Luzac& Co., [1938]). On Coptic and other denominational schools, as well as mission schools, in Egyptsee also J. C. McCoan, Egypt as it is (London/Paris/New York, Cassell Petter & Galpin, [1885?]),225–32.

4. Nas½ õ f attended a French missionary school before entering the � rst government secondary schoolfor girls, al-Saniyya. See Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: the formative years and beyond(Albany NY, State University of New York Press, 1995), 21.

Frances Woodsmall, citing ‘information from the Principal’, says that the American MissionSchool for Girls in Beirut, which I discuss further below, had its � rst Muslim graduate in 1909 and

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446 Marilyn Booth

then no further Muslim students until after World War I (Frances Woodsmall, Moslem WomenEnter a New World (New York, Round Table Press, 1936, 212n). This contradicts Jessup (Rev.Henry Harris Jessup, The Women of the Arabs: with a chapter for children, New York, Dodd & Mead,1873, cited by Fleischmann). Woodsmall notes that Muslim girls were educated in the AsyutAmerican Mission School, though more Coptic girls attended. On the earliest missionary schoolsfor girls see Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists, 31–2.

Certain foreign schools, such as Miss Whateley’s school in Cairo, seemed to make it theirmission to educate Muslims and to focus on poorer strata of the population.

5. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists, 22.6. Ibid., 188–9. On biography, identity and nationalism in the Arab women’s press, see Marilyn

Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: biography and gender politics in Egypt (Berkeley/Los Angeles,University of California Press, 2001).

7. Jessup, Women, 18. Similarly, Jessup blames the perceived lack of willingness on the part of GreekOrthodox and Maronite families to allow their daughters to be educated on ‘Mohammedandomination … which degrade[d] and depress[ed] all the sects and nationalities’ (45)—a convenientway to shift blame for the lack of receptivity to missionary overtures.

8. The earliest text I treat was published in 1888, and later ones in the � rst and second decades ofthe twentieth century. By the 1890s, Arab Muslim women were writing and publishing in the pressas well.

9. On readership and authorship in the early Arabic women’s press, see Beth Baron, The Women’sAwakening in Egypt: culture, society, and the press (New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1994);Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied.

10. Jurj õ N õ qula Baz, ¨Al-yub õ l al-fad½d½ õ lil-anisa Mary ¨Ajam õ s½ah½ ibat ‘Majallat al-¨Arus’ bi-Dimashq’,Fatat al-sharq 20 :9 June 15, 1926, 403–7. Presumably these ‘booklets’ were the missionary tractsprinted in Malta by the Church Missionary Society. See A. L. Tibawi, American Interests in Syria,1800–1901: a study of educational, literary and religious work (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966), 64–5.

11. For one example of such rhetoric, see Marilyn Booth, ‘Woman in Islam: men and the “women’spress” in turn-of-the-century Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 :2 (2001),171–201.

12. In his memoirs, longtime missionary Henry Harris Jessup complains repeatedly that Maroniteswould convert to upset their priests and then, having come to an understanding with them, would‘revert’. This seems an example of how missionary endeavors could be appropriated, used andsubverted by local populations. Henry Harris Jessup, Fifty-three Years in Syria (New York,Chicago, Toronto, London and Edinburgh, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1910), vol. 1.

13. Tibawi, American Interests, 65.14. Ah½mad Effendõ Muh½arram & Wal õ al-D õ n Bek Yakan, ¨Shah õ rat al-nisa’: al-Amõ ra Aliksandrah di

A� rinuh Fizinuska’, Fatat al-sharq 10 :1 (October 1915), 2.15. Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, 139–40.16. ¨Isa Iskandar al-Ma©luf, ‘Shah õ rat al-nisa’: al-T½ abõ ba Salma Qusat½il õ al-Dimashqiyya’, Fatat al-sharq

14 :7 (April 15, 1920), 242.17. Jurj õ N õ qula Baz, ‘Shah õ rat al-nisa’: H½ anna Kasban õ Kuran õ ’, Fatat al-sharq 2 :10 (July 15, 1908):

362–6; 362, 363.18. Ibid., 362, 366.19. On the dif� culty of this, and the salience of family ties, see Baron, The Women’s Awakening in

Egypt.20. Al-Ma’luf, ‘al-T½ ab õ ba Salma Qusat½il õ al-Dimashqiyya’, 243.21. Letter dated July 5, 1854 from the Prudential Committee, American Board of Commissioners for

Foreign Missions Archives, quoted in Tibawi, American Interests, 134.22. See Ellen Fleischmann’s essay (above 411), where she goes into more detail on the early schools.

I have relied, too, on information in Tibawi, American Interests; Jessup, Fifty-three Years.23. ¨Isa Iskandar al-Ma’luf, ‘Rah½ õ l ¨Ata zawjat al-mu¨allim But½rus al-Bustan õ ’, Fatat al-sharq 14 :1

(October 15, 1919), 1–2. This is said to be taken from al-Ma’luf’s book Nawabigh al-nisa’, whichI have been unable to locate. Al-Ma’luf was editor and publisher of the magazine Al-athar and anenthusiastic supporter of Syrian women’s education.

24. ‘Shah õ rat al-nisa’: Warda al-Yazij õ ’, Fatat al-sharq 18 :5 (February 1924), 3. An earlier biographyin the same journal also emphasizes her education. ‘Shah õ rat al-nisa’: Warda al-Yazij õ ’, Fatatal-sharq 2 :1 (October 15, 1907), 1–7.

25. Jessup, Women, 156–7.

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Arabic Biographies of Missionary Teachers 447

26. Edward W. Hooker, Memoir of Mrs Sarah L. Huntington Smith, Late of the American Mission in Syria(New York, American Tract Society, 3rd edn, 1845). That these are edited memoirs, publishedby a missionary press, adds to their problematic quality as a source. Was Smith as rigidly pious andobsessed with her own spiritual state as Hooker’s excerpts and commentary suggest?

27. Ibid., 109.28. Ibid., 127.29. Ibid., 360.30. Ibid., 185, 188, 189.31. Ibid., 193–4.32. Al-Ma©luf, ‘Rah½ õ l ¨At½a’, 2. The biography notes that this Shuwayfat family produced a number of

notable men and women, ‘among them Musa ¨At½a, one of the workers in the American [mission]Press in Beirut in 1841’ (ibid., 2). It is not clear how Rah½ õ l came to the Smiths’ attention, but itmay have been through this Musa ¨At½a. The biography says nothing about Rah½ õ l’s parents.

33. Ibid., 2.34. Jessup, Women, 51.35. Smith, in Hooker, Memoir, 371.36. Tibawi, American Interests, 125.37. Jessup, Women, 54–6.38. Ibid., 83.39. See the ‘genealogy’ of Katie DeForest, her adopted daughter Lulu, and Lulu’s biological daughter

Katie; Lulu and Katie took over the school at some point. Jessup notes that of Mrs DeForest’sstudents, three had daughters who were teaching (Jessup, Women, 88–92).

40. See Jessup, Women, 64–7.41. Hooker, Memoir, 233.42. Ibid., 317.43. Ibid., 370–1.44. Ibid., 266.45. Ibid., 322.46. Ibid., 322.47. Ibid., 371–2 (my italics).48. Ibid., 372.49. Ibid., 305.50. Al-Ma©luf, ‘Rah½ õ l ¨At½a’, 2.51. Jessup, Women, 134–6.52. Ibid., 3.53. Ibid., 3.54. Ibid., 4.55. Yaqut S½ arruf, ‘Maryam Nimr Makariyus: Firaq al-rifaq’, Al-muqtat½af 12 :7 (April 1888), 435–9.

On the circulation of this biography, see Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, xiii.56. Jessup, Women, 222. He mentions Miss Everett, Miss Jackson and Miss Loring as the teachers. It

was the latter from whom Yaqut found out about Everett’s death.57. S½ arruf, ‘Maryam Nimr Makariyus’, 435. The parenthesized reference to the mother is S½arruf’s; she

wants no ambiguity about the subject of this discrimination.58. Ibid., 435.59. Ibid., 436.60. Letter from Maryam Makariyus, reprinted in Zaynab Fawwaz, Al-durr al-manthur f õ t½abaqat rabbat

al-khudur (Cairo/Bulaq, Al-Mat½ba¨a al-Kubra al-Amiriyya, AH 1312 [1894], 500. Fawwaz reprintsS½ arruf’s biography of Makariyus with light editing.

61. See Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied, xvi.62. Ibid., 504.63. Ibid., 436–8.64. See also her biography of another friend, Nas½ra Ilyas (1862–89), Yaqut S½ arruf, ‘Bab tadbõ r

al-manzil: al-Sayyida Nas½ra Ilyas’, Al-muqtat½af 13 :8 (May 1889), 549.65. Ibid., 435–6.66. According to S½arruf, she was born in ‘Willoughby, Ohio’; according to Jessup, her parents were

living in Painesville when she consulted them on whether to take the job in Beirut. Yaqut S½arruf,‘Aliza Ifrit’, Al-muqtat½af 27 :4 (April 1902), 319. Jessup, Fifty-three Years, I, 339.

67. Jessup, Fifty-three Years, I, 335–6.

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68. S½ arruf, ‘Aliza Ifrit’, 319.69. Jessup, Fifty-three Years, I, 339.70. S½ arruf, ‘Aliza Ifrit’, 319–20.71. Ibid., 319.72. Ibid., 320.73. Ibid.74. Ibid.75. Her father was presumably John Hogg, associated with Asyut according to Jessup (Fifty-three Years

in Syria, I, 383). I am still trying to trace this family. In May Her Likes Be Multiplied I transliteratedher name as Hogue, since that seemed closer to the Arabic transcription; it is often dif� cult tomake out the name from the Arabic. But having ‘located’ John Hogg since publication of the book,I am now speculating that Jessie was his daughter.

76. Susan Thorne, ‘Missionary-imperial feminism’, in: Mary Taylor Huber & Nancy C. Lutkehaus(Eds), Gendered Missions: women and men in missionary discourse and practice (Ann Arbor, Universityof Michigan Press, 1999), 56.

77. ‘Wafat sayyida fad½ õ la’, Al-sayyidat wa-al-banat 2 :5 (April 1905), 144. This text, which bears noauthorial byline, is said to be ‘summarized’ from the newspaper Nijm al-mashriq, which was areligious and educational weekly magazine produced for Evangelical Sunday Schools in Alexandriaby Mitrõ S½al õ b al-Duwayr õ , ‘of the evangelical sect’. It was founded in 1901. Even if the text (whichis encased in quotation marks, and thus perhaps was reproduced in its entirety rather thansummarized) came originally from a ‘house publication’, its edited republication and hence greatercirculation in a woman’s magazine means a potentially broader audience. On the magazine, seeYusuf Q. Khur õ (Ed.), Mudawwanat al-s½ih½ afa al-¨arabiyya, vols 1–2 (Beirut, Ma¨had al-Inma’al-¨Arabõ , 1985), vol. 1, 488. Qustak õ ¨Attara (Tar õ kh takw õ n al-s½uh½uf al-mis½riyya, Alexandria,Mat½ba¨at al-Taqaddum, 1928, 284) gives slightly different details. The newspaper is also men-tioned in another women’s magazine: Fatat al-sharq 2 (1907), 72.

78. Ibid., 144.79. Ibid.80. Ibid. McCoan mentions Scottish mission schools in Alexandria (writing in 1885) as among the

‘more important of these foreign auxiliaries of public instruction in Egypt’.81. Jurj õ N õ qula Baz, ‘Luisa Procter mu’assisat al-madaris al-inkil õ ziyya fõ al-Shuwayfat bi-Lubnan’,

Fatat al-sharq 3 :1 (October 1908), 4.82. Ibid., 5.83. Ibid., 5–6.84. Ibid., 6.85. Ibid., 7.86. Ibid., 7–8.87. Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya, ‘Al-¨amilat fõ al-nahd½a al-nisa’iyya: al-Duktura Mary Eddy’, Al-mar’a

al-jadõ da 3 :5 (May 1923), 151.88. Ibid., 149.89. E.g., on women founding schools in Lebanon and Syria, see Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial

Citizens: republican rights, paternal privilege, and gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York,Columbia University Press, 2000), 96–7.

90. Julia Tu’ma al-Dimashqiyya, ‘Al-¨amilat fõ al-nahd½a al-nisa’iyya: al-Anisa Mary Kassab’, Al-mar’aal-jadõ da 4 :1/2 (January/February 1924), 7. This entire series is of great interest, but spaceconstraints preclude further discussion of it here.

91. One response to missionary schools was to initiate schools sponsored by local churches. Thejournals run by Syrian women in Egypt featured women who took such initiatives, such as VirginieBasõ l õ , who, although wealthy, founded and directed a Syrian Orthodox girls school in Alexandria,and who is praised pointedly as an exemplar, posed against girls ‘who now spend their time intrivial pursuits’, particularly since she was working on a volunteer basis and did what she didbecause she ‘loved useful work’. (This of course made her work more socially acceptable, too. Onattitudes to work in the women’s press biographies see Booth, May Her Likes, chap. 4.) Thewomen are posed as models for men as well, for the essay points out that ‘this is a great and worthywork that women undertake without any help at all from men’ and asks whether men will matchit. (The pro� le of Basõ l õ is embedded in an article on another Syrian woman, a philanthropistsimilarly engaged, who had funded a new building for the school. The article is occasioned by thecornerstone ceremony. Haylana Sayyaj. See ‘Al-Sayyida Haylana Sayyaj, mad½ rab al-mathal f õal-ih½ san’, Majallat al-sayyidat wa-al-rijal 8 :6 (April 30, 1927): 414–16; 416.)

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