The First Girls' School in the Arab Lands

The teaching of girls in schools — after the convents — is a recent thing in the Arab lands, going back a hundred and twenty years: since the American missionaries founded their first school, in Beirut, in the spring of 1824, in which the wives of Pliny Fisk and Jonas King taught. In the following year Mr. Bird established their second school, which gathered eighty boys and two girls.

Three years later, in 1828, they established the first girls' school in these lands. Mrs. Thomson and Martha Dodge took charge of it, and six girl pupils came to it. The former went to Jerusalem, and the mother of Dr. John Wortabet succeeded her.

Then Mrs. Bird established her day school in 1830, Mrs. Goodell the Lebanese school in the same year, and Mrs. Dodge the school for Druze girls in Aley in 1834.

Until Sarah Smith and Miss Willis founded their Beirut school in 1835, which forty girl pupils entered. The English lady Mrs. Mott put up a special building for it, as is attested by a "memorial column" set up on the site of the school beside the church, engraved with words to this effect:

"This column was erected in the year 1894 on the spot where the English lady Mrs. Mott built 'the first girls' school' in Syria in the year 1835, in memory of that, and of the American lady Sarah Smith, the first teacher in it and the founder of 'the first Sunday school' in the Ottoman Empire."

In the following year, 1836, our school celebrated the first annual celebration held by a girls' school in the Arab lands. In it was founded the first Sunday school in the country, with five women teachers and thirty girl pupils. In it, too, was held the first evangelical women's meeting "for prayer," attended by twenty.

Among the pupils of Sarah Smith and Miss Willis, most of them Greek Orthodox, were Rahil Ata and Lulu Abu Murad, the wives of the teachers Butrus al-Bustani and Mikhail Araman.

The first higher school for the daughters of the Arabs was established by the American missionary Mrs. De Forest in Beirut in 1847 — the same year in which the Sisters of Charity, the Lazarists, came to us. Two years later, in 1849, a boarding section began in the dwelling of its foundress, with the missionaries Dr. De Forest, William Thomson, and Eli Smith teaching in it.

The Americans' boarding schools for girls multiplied — in Souk al-Gharb in 1858, Beirut and Sidon in 1862, and Tripoli in 1873 — as their day schools multiplied in other towns. Their girl pupils have approached eight thousand in the space of fifty years.

In what I relate I have depended on Doctors Cornelius Van Dyck, Henry Jessup, and Iskandar Baroudi in the magazines al-Hilal, al-Mabahith, and al-Kulliyah; on Father Louis Cheikho in the book "Lebanon"; and on other sources.

A Beiruti who devoted himself to the education of girls a hundred and ten years ago: Asaad Khayat. He traveled repeatedly to London, where he formed a society for the training of girls, calling upon the English to educate the daughters of the Arabs. He founded a school in Beirut in 1840, for the two sexes together, which 25 boys and 7 girls entered. He sent fifty pupils to England, a third of whom completed their studies. In his house inside the city wall at the Yaacoub Gate, to the northeast of the statue of my kinsman Sheikh al-Yaziji, Dr. De Forest and his wife lived, receiving in this house the first boarding girl pupils, ninety-seven years ago.

The Maronite Sisters of the Visitation at Aintoura established their school in 1844, and it stands still. The Jesuit congregation of the Sacred Hearts was founded in two branches, at Bikfaya and Zahle, in 1853, and was united in 1872 to establish girls' schools. Likewise the Maronite congregation of the Holy Family, founded at Ebrine in 1895 for teaching and training.

The schools of the Sisters of Charity from 1847; the Englishwomen missionaries and the Prussian sisters, 1860; Saint Joseph, 1872; Nazareth, 1873; the Sainte Famille, 1894; the Good Shepherd, 1895; Saint Charles, 1908; the Besançon sisters, 1903; and others besides — from the Greeks, 1860, and the Russians, 1887–1914, down to the Three Moons, 1869; Zahrat al-Ihsan, 1881; the Maqasid charitable schools; the schools of the two Wardas, Malhamah and Faroun; the Ahliah, 1916; Tahdhib al-Fatat and Nur al-Hayat; and Shemlan, Broummana, Shweir, Aley, and Choueifat.

Schools by the dozens — nay, by the hundreds — in Beirut and Lebanon have all worked together to found the education of girls in the Arab world, and above all their girl pupils who became teachers in the other schools of the Arab lands.

The first girls' school in Egypt was established by Muhammad Ali Pasha, grandfather of the ruling house, for the harem of his household and its slave girls, in 1835. The second was the Greek school, 1843; the third, the French, 1846; the fourth, the American, 1855; the fifth, the English, 1862. The first in Alexandria belonged to the Lazarist Sisters of Charity, 1844.

In Palestine the American missionaries established the first girls' school in 1837, and the schools of the Frankish missions for the teaching of girls followed one another there from the year 1848; their like began to follow in Syria from the year 1860, and they continue still.

And so it has become in Iraq, newly risen to the education of its daughters and its sons, with zeal and energy, keeping pace with the other lands.

The governments of the Arab world, in all their different elements, have established official schools for the teaching of girls... How welcome a thing, their education!