The historiography of education in the modern Middle East

ABSTRACT This review outlines the historiography of education in the Middle East, focusing on events from the nineteenth century through the 1980s, and on Bilad al-Sham, mainly Jordan, Palestine and Israel, Iraq, and Northern Africa, including Egypt and Türkiye. Modernisation and nationalism were the main lenses through which educators, researchers, and students viewed the significance of their schooling in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. Scholars likewise take these frameworks as key to understanding the importance of education in the region’s history. This review suggests that historians ought to recognise the saliency of previous frameworks for the actors who lived them while analysing the region beyond those limits. It advocates incorporating education more consistently into other fields, such as histories of the environment and race. It recommends that historians of education include those fields in their own work, while following historical actors, texts and ideologies across regimes and borders.