Teachers As State-Builders by Hilary Falb Kalisman;

Author:Hilary Falb Kalisman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Nationalism across Borders: Akram Zuʾaytir between Iraq and Palestine

From a very early age, future politician Akram Zu’aytir was exposed to the values of government service and agitation against that government, and also the assumption that the purpose of schooling was, above all, a nationalist one. Zuʾaytir was born in 1909 in Nablus. His father worked as a teacher and was the sometime mayor of Nablus during the Ottoman period. On the other hand, the Ottoman government also sentenced his brother to death during World War I for participating in the Arab Revolt. For at least a generation, then, Zuʾaytir’s family had been enmeshed in the connected domains of education, government service, and antigovernment activities.9 One of the first graduates of al-Najah, a private school in Nablus, Akram Zu’aytir internalized the school’s anti-imperial, anti-Zionist, and pan-Arab atmosphere. There, he sang national songs, read Arab history, and, during the early 1920s, listened to the nationalist lectures of then principal and future Arab Higher Committee member Muhammad Izzat Darwazeh, who hoped to heighten students’ “national consciousness.”10

Zuʾaytir later studied at the American University of Beirut. Even though illness prevented him from graduating, his short stint in higher education granted him sufficient credentials to teach, as well as access to alumni networks that would facilitate his, and many of his contemporaries’, transnational careers. In al-ʾUrwat al-Wuthqa, he met individuals who would combine nationalist teaching with government service, first as educators and later as ministers.11 Zuʾaytir also joined an Arab nationalist secret society, composed of cells and various executive committees, which utilized a vanguard model, requiring its members to influence other nationalists and even other secret societies.12 More concretely, Fadhil al-Jamali and Matta ʿAkrawi, once they became high-ranking officials, explicitly hired Zuʾaytir to teach in Iraq because of their shared connections to AUB.13 For Zuʾaytir, like many of his generation of educator nationalists, access to higher levels of schooling meant integration into “the big leagues,” allowing him to participate in the highest ranks of political movements, which were also connected to the civil service.

Before teaching in Iraq, Zuʾaytir taught in the government schools of mandate Palestine, using his credentials and knowledge of English as leverage to negotiate with the government that employed him while also pushing his luck protesting against it. He combined bargaining with the Department of Education regarding banal matters with, as he put it, seizing the chance “to inflame nationalist sentiments!”14 His requests included whether he could attend (and receive a scholarship) to any law school in the United Kingdom without passing an examination (he could not); whether the Higher Teachers Examination he took would be a sufficient credential to enable him to matriculate at the Sorbonne (it would not); and whether the department would transfer him to Jerusalem to allow him to take law classes while teaching (it could not in time to suit his ambitions).15 While he received few if any positive answers, his constant questioning shows an intimate relationship with the state he both served and criticized. He was also ambitious, seeking to gain an education (and legal credentials) by any means possible.

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