New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement

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Apr 18, 2012 Iran
Cover of Farzaneh Milani, "Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement" Cover of Farzaneh Milani, "Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement"

New Texts Out Now: Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement

By : Farzaneh Milani

Farzaneh Milani, Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Farzaneh Milani (FM): In a way, Words, not Swords is a rebuttal to my first book, Veils and Words. The central argument of Veils and Words revolved around Iranian women`s literary output. I claimed that the veil had covered not only Iranian women`s bodies, but also their literary voices. Women`s self-expression, either bodily or verbal, I surmised, was covered by the material veil and its verbal counterpart—silence. I explored ways in which women poets and prose writers escaped the censoring of their culture and transcended the limits placed on their bodies and their voices. I chronicled the many internal and external hardships women have faced in their efforts to counter physical and verbal exclusion. To explain—or, rather, to explain away—the unparalleled thriving of post-revolutionary Iranian women`s literature in spite of obligatory veiling, I conveniently reasoned that the veil has developed new connotations of its own quite different from the traditional notion. This new veil, I contended, no longer segregates: it now serves as a means of desegregation. It covers women`s bodies, but not their voices.

In the two decades since Veils and Words was published, I came to wonder: Why consider the veil as the focus of my critical inquiry in a study of women`s integration in Iranian society if it is cause and effect, sign and symbol, of both segregation and desegregation? If one does not have to be veiled to be confined and silenced—or, conversely, if a woman can be veiled but also desegregated and voiced—why then consider the veil my critical paradigm? I had not asked this question previously. Nor did it occur to me that perhaps the veil was a convenient cover to avoid addressing more fundamental issues. It took me years to realize that physical confinement—not the veil—was the foundation of women`s subordination in Iranian society and the source of their literary quasi-invisibility. It seemed to me that I needed to reach beyond the confines of the veil if I wished to fairly assess women`s vital integration in the public scene in general and in the literary arena in particular.

The central thesis of Words, not Swords is simple: a woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf remarked in her seminal work A Room of One’s Own, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will. A room without that very right is a prison cell; a house without it turns into house arrest.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

FM: Words, not Swords is divided into three sections:

In part I, I look at the social, literary, and aesthetic implications of sex segregation in a society in which the right of place depended on anatomy. I focus on how rules of segregation are simultaneously adhered to and subverted in classical Persian literature and Iranian cinema. I examine issues of women`s representation as well as their entry onto the written page and the silver screen. I also analyze the intersection of feminine beauty and restrained mobility. Why, I ask, are static women—the sleeping beauties—lauded, whereas those who are on the move—the flying witches (often portrayed as women)—are vilified?

In Part II, I celebrate Iranian women writers, who have refused to disappear from the public scene and are among some of the most influential figures in contemporary Iran. They have produced a radically dissenting and questioning body of writing with a momentum Persian literature has never before experienced. They have attained unprecedented stature at a level previously reserved only for male writers and are considered a most threatening emblem of change to all stripes of extremists. In particular, this section focuses on four seminal women poets and writers who build their literary universe on spatial metaphors of movement and containment. The legacy of Tahirih Qurratu’l-Ayn, Forugh Farrokhzad, Simin Behbahani, and Shahrnush Parsipur to the world of letters has been as extraordinary as their defiance against the age-old patterns of gender apartheid. Tahirih, who rejected sex segregation and celebrated freedom of movement (and of conscience) in the mid--nineteenth century, is being accorded recognition as the symbolic mother of the women`s movement in Iran. The twin themes of flight and captivity are presented as the central tropes of Forugh Farrokhzad`s poetry. The candor and courage of Simin Behbahani—the lioness of Iran—has made of her a symbol of resistance and integrity inside and outside the country and has given Iran a female national poet for the first time in its glorious literary tradition. And Shahrnush Parsipur proves that issues of containment and crossing are central to women`s artistic universe and the central trope of their writing.

In part III, I shift the emphasis from an exclusively Iranian perspective and concentrate on how Iranian (and Muslim) women are reduced to stereotypes in the West. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are totally false. There is usually an element of truth to them. The problem is that they are arrested representations. They are fixed. Frozen. Dehumanized. They are immobilized, caged images of a reality that is perpetually moving and shifting. In this section, I consider the birth of a new literary subgenre—the hostage narrative—and the portrayal of Iranian women as the ultimate prisoners in a giant gulag the size of Iran. Hostage narratives, I argue, generalize and simplify, flatten and fix, rather than specify and expand. They present women in the role of victims and effectively dismiss their contributions to Iranian culture in favor of a master narrative of oppression and irrelevance, of entrapment and imprisonment. Intentionally or not, they perpetuate a legacy of silence and insignificance where there is in fact a resolute struggle for freedom and expression.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

FM: This book was made possible by, among others, a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In keeping with the spirit of their genuine commitment to accessible scholarship, I have made every effort to write a book that is jargon-free and hopefully appeals to a wide readership.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

FM: Currently, I am writing a biography of Forugh Farrokhzad, the iconic Iranian poet of the twentieth century. In the mid-1970s, I decided, against the advice of many well-wishers, to switch my dissertation topic from a male French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, to Farrokzhad, a female Iranian poet. Farrokhzad had produced poetry more autobiographical than had ever been attempted in Iran.

Finding biographical data on this most autobiographical poet, however, proved to be quite a task. Farrokhzad did not keep a journal, at least not one that we know of. Although she was a prolific correspondent, I did not have at my disposal, at the time, stacks of her letters safely tucked away in some attic or generously published by the recipient. Nor did I have access to tapes of her therapy sessions or records of her institutionalization. Moreover, my plan of amassing information through interviews was thwarted at every turn. Many men, who claimed to have been her lovers, were all too eager to share their “personal” experiences. But her family members and those closest to her refused to be interviewed. Others argued against revealing the private life of a dead person. Since no library houses Farrokhzad’s papers, letters, unpublished poems, or manuscripts, the research obstacles involved in writing her biography turned out to be manifold, and compounded by the fundamental limitations of life narrative as a genre.

I want to re-imagine Farrokhzad’s biography as a quasi-multi-authored text with polycentric perspectives, offering the different portraits of a rebel, daughter, sister, wife, biological and adoptive mother, lover, poet, cinematographer, and Iranian woman with universal relevance. The challenge, for me, is to be factual and informative without being sensational; to be revealing, but not voyeuristic; coherent, but not univocal; candid, but non-judgmental. I want to avoid turning her life into a metaphor for political or gender agendas while recognizing her pioneering significance in Iranian literature and history.

Excerpts from Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement 

From the Prologue: 

“Yeki bud, yeki nabud”: Iranian stories always begin with this paradoxical phrase, which simply means “There was one, and there wasn`t one.” Throughout my childhood, this phrase was my passport to an enchanted world of wonder and mystery. Like the word abracadabra, it had incantatory powers: now you see it, now you don`t. It is so, and it is not so. Maybe, and then maybe not. Like dreams, like the unconscious, like nature in its infinite glory, “yeki bud, yeki nabud” was a tangle of competing viewpoints, expansive enough to accommodate seemingly contradictory claims. It was a warning at the threshold to all stories that there is always another story, another side to the story, that truth is elusively mutable. In its succinct yet economical way, it was a reminder that every story is the ghost of the life that inspired it. It celebrated the birth of one while mourning the death of the other, acknowledging the complexities of life and of its telling. It embraced paradoxes, destabilized certainties, allowed opposites to live in perfect harmony. It declined to choose one side over the other and greeted all moments that defied classification. It refused to be immobilized in certitudes, immured in dogmas, bound by judgmental pronouncements. “Yeki bud, yeki nabud” was a warning at the threshold of all stories that the mind creates its own elaborate, self-serving fictions. Bedazzled, I would throw open the gates of my eyes and ears and witness the birth of a charming world. On the wing of words, on the magic carpet of stories, I would journey to faraway lands, inaccessible places, spaces of boundless possibilities where everything sounded real but was beyond my everyday reality. 

Before I knew it, childhood and its tantalizing tales came to an end. Chasing new dreams and different stories, I left my home country, and, ironically, it was by leaving Iran that I became an Iranian. Uprooted and transplanted, I looked every which way for a sense of familiarity and belonging. I needed something solid to hold on to—some familiar signpost, a lasting fixture in the ceaselessly changing landscape of my immigrant life. I gradually adopted Iranian literature as what I later called “my surrogate home” in my book Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. It became my accessible consolation, my perennial and portable garden. I put down roots in it and turned it into a place to grow in. Every time I opened its gate, a familiar scent wafted out of it, a scent of home, a scent of effortless belonging, of childhood and its memories. I soon found myself drawn increasingly to the works of Iranian women writers. Against the advice of many and after having completed a substantial amount of research on Flaubert and his search for the ideal woman and the right word, I eventually chose for my dissertation topic the study of Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-67). Many well-wishers, including some of my teachers, were genuinely concerned about my professional future. They wanted to know why I was switching from a world-renowned author to an obscure woman poet from Iran. They argued, with conviction and concern, that an Iranian woman writing her dissertation on another Iranian woman from a feminist perspective was triple professional jeopardy. More than three decades later and with the benefit of hindsight, I consider that choice to have been a turning point in my life. 

… 

Iran is a land of paradoxes. It has a mercurial political climate and is in the midst of sweeping cultural transformations and profound intellectual ferment. It is one of the world`s oldest civilizations and has one of the world`s youngest populations. In the crowded streets of its major cities, Calvin Klein jean ads compete with portraits of turbaned clerics. And surely no one can accuse the Islamic Republic of intolerance toward its contradictions, particularly when it comes to its treatment of women. Iranian women can vote and run for some of the highest elected offices in the country, but they must observe an obligatory dress code. They can drive personal vehicles, even taxis and trucks and fire engines, but they cannot ride bicycles. They are forcibly separated from men into the back of buses but can be squashed in between perfect strangers in overcrowded jitney taxis. They have entered the world stage as Nobel Peace laureates, human rights activists, best-selling authors, prize-winning film directors and Oscar nominees, but they cannot enter governmental offices through the same doors as men. It is this complex mixture of advancement and setbacks, protest and accommodation, resistance and acquiescence, innovation and tradition, that most accurately reflects women`s lives in Iran today. Yet for decades and prior to the highly contested 12 June 2009, election, only one side of this ongoing battle—the side that reflects a static image of victimhood and immobility—has dominated America`s imagination and most of its best sellers. 

Focusing on both sides of this ongoing struggle, this book explores two competing narratives of womanhood that exist side by side in Iran. Women are oppressed by restrictive laws and male-centered interpretations of Islamic Scripture. They are also the most vibrant forces of change. And women writers have been and continue to be at the forefront of this conflict. Breaking the spell of their textual quasi-invisibility coincidentally with breaking into the public sphere, they have made the circulation of their bodies and their voices central to their artistic universe. Metaphors of containment—walls, veils, imposed silences, fences, cages, blind windows, closed doors, and bars—coexist in their works side by side with the desire to sprout wings, fly, flee, run, dance, sing through their texts, bear witness to the hitherto unspoken, and push boundaries into the unsaid and the forbidden. By refusing to focus solely on one side of this equation or to reinforce the veiled/unveiled, East/West divide, I examine how freedom of movement allows women—whether they are veiled or unveiled—easier access to centers of power, facilitates the exercise of legal and economic rights, permits the pursuit of a variety of careers in the public sector, promotes their integration into the literary arena, and sanctions the development of a civil society. 

Relying on the wisdom and experience of thousands of storytellers over hundreds of years, I thus begin my tale of Iranian women`s physical and literary desegregation with “yeki bud, yeki nabud.” 

…

From the Epilogue: 

Scheherazade calmly and convincingly defied death by weaving tales. She began every storytelling session with a succinct and simple yet paradoxical phrase, “Yeki bud, yeki nabud”: “There was one, and there wasn`t one.” Who could listen to such an inspired opener for one thousand and one nights and not be transformed by its infinite wisdom? Scheherazade summoned all her diplomatic know-how, all her storytelling techniques, all her diagnostic and healing skills. She knew trust building was key to her enterprise. Her tales, like Babushka dolls, were always pregnant with another tale. They didn`t have tidy endings. They avoided pigeonholing, stereotyping, imprisoning. They opened vistas of beauty, adventure, romance, but also ambiguity. They appeased creepy monsters, prevented intruders from executing their evil designs, showed the infinite complexity of human nature, punished an unfaithful husband or an adulterous wife without blaming the whole gender for the mistake of one. It was through these powerful aphrodisiacs that Scheherazade succeeded in turning confrontation into cooperation, in having the sultan cease his bloodletting. She led him to a twilight zone where certainty and doubt lived in peaceful coexistence, where absolutes no longer ruled supreme, where there was room for ambiguity. She destereotyped his mind and populated his universe with heroes and villains of both genders. Good or bad were not the monopoly of any one group. In the end, Shahriyar—a paragon of political power, the king of kings, the shelter of the universe, God`s shadow on earth—had to admit that a woman who personified powerlessness and vulnerability had made him doubt his “kingly power.” “O Scheherazade,” he told her lovingly, “you made me regret my past violence towards women and my killing of innocent girls.” Marital harmony was finally established in this household, too. Words replaced swords. 

… 

Scheherazade`s tales circulated from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, from mothers to daughters before they were written down at some point, probably sometime between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, when the writing pen was mainly in the hands of men, just as the public square was increasingly monopolized by them. Otherwise, how can one explain that this woman who “had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things,” this erudite, wise, and witty woman who “had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers,” did not write down her own mesmerizing tales? Why did such an accomplished teller of tales, who had scrutinized “the works of the poets and knew them by heart” and “had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments,” need to rely on male scribes for the recording of her stories? One Thousand and One Nights does not answer these questions but portrays Scheherazade as being at the mercy of male rulers and scribes, indebted to them, in need of their mediatory role, beholden to their writing skills. And herein is the difference between Scheherazade and her literary progeny. Iranian women have appropriated the writing pen and broken the spell of their physical and literary quasi-invisibility. No longer consigned to immobility of body and voice, no longer immured physically or verbally, they have written their bodies and their voices into circulation. Like their foremother, they have rejected violence and challenged the very foundations of their society through words. Like her, they have inserted their message of hope and temperance in the turbulent history of their land. Unlike her, however, they have become their own scribes. They have rejected the traditional partitioning of physical and literary spaces.

For the past 160 years, Iranian women writers have struggled for mobility of body and voice. And today, whether women teach or study in institutions of higher education, congregate in offices, mosques, nongovernmental agencies, or conferences and study groups; whether they appear in front of cameras or direct films from behind it; whether they communicate through books and articles or paintings or plays or keep in touch through blogs and online forums and information networks; whether they ascend the ladder of government or vote in unprecedented numbers, they are more mobile than ever before. And they are refusing to relinquish their newly acquired spaces. Never before in the written history of Iran have women moved so far outside the framework preordained by their culture, reaching beyond the traditional fields in action and imagination. Never before have they been as present in the public sphere and the public discourse as they are today. Animated by a dizzying, dazzling sense of movement, they have emerged as a formidable civic force to be reckoned with. One might even argue that they have been at the center of a bloodless, nonviolent revolution that has shaken the very foundations of Iranian society. Although this revolution does not correspond to traditional definitions of a revolution, it has nonetheless fundamentally transformed the country`s social structures, redefined masculinity and femininity, modified the balance of public and private power. It has been a turnabout, a reallocation of physical and discursive spaces, a redistribution of authority and resources.

Women writers have indeed led the way not only toward literary liberation, but also toward gender liberation.

[Excerpted from Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement, by Farzaneh Milani, by permission of the author. Copyright © 2011 by Syracuse University Press. For more information, or to purchase this book, please click here.]
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Feb 22, 2012 Lebanon
Betty S. Anderson By :
Betty S. Anderson

New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

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[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

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[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA: I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school`s goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine`s writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society`s Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa`s Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school`s founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]