Between Modern and National Education: The ‘Ajam Schools of Bahrain and Kuwait
Abstract
In the first decades of the 20th century, Islamic modernist discourse inspired very local transformations in education across the Middle East and Indian Ocean. As Gulf merchants returned from their oceanic travels, they brought back ideas for instituting “modern” education in the port towns of the Arabian Peninsula. The initial goals were not necessarily nationalist or even Arabist. Rather they were an attempt to provide education that would teach new, necessary skills in a modern, systematic environment while upholding traditional Islamic identities. While modern education has been understood primarily as a project undertaken by the Arab merchants of the region, this article demonstrates that the “‘Ajam” schools of Bahrain and Kuwait were initially a part of the same conversation. Tracing the early history of their development in the 1910s and 1920s through to the 1930s, I illuminate the initial orientation of the schools and how they responded to the influence of the Iranian modernist‑nationalist state project.
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