Everyone who has lived in Iraq, or visited it even for a short while, must have heard of the "Adel National School," for over a quarter of a century it has never ceased to graduate, year after year, an outstanding class of boy and girl students. Indeed, this institute is counted not merely among the best schools of Iraq, but as the best of them — we say it in all sincerity, in view of the brilliant results it records in the ministerial examinations every year. Who, then, stands behind this educational renaissance?

It is the school's founder, its proprietor, and the woman at the head of its administration: Mrs. Zahoura Adel — a bundle of vitality and energy, a symbol of ambition and struggle...

Her school in Baghdad celebrated last month its silver jubilee, marking the passage of twenty-five years since its founding, under the patronage of His Excellency Dr. Abd al-Hamid Kadhim, the Minister of Education. The celebration took the form of a vast festival in which the most varied elements, official and civilian, took part; the gardens and halls were packed with throngs of people, and in the ceremonial hall the finest manifestations of taste were on display, glowing with electric lights arranged with splendid engineering art...

The boy and girl students performed several theatrical scenes and folk dances, and a charming display of fashions, and their choirs sang anthems with great mastery. The proceedings of the festival made the loveliest impression upon the guests, who esteem in Mrs. Zahoura Adel, and in her husband and helper Dr. Anis Adel, two champions among the pioneers of culture and instruction in Iraq... For the jubilee three parties were held, not one, because the hall and the garden, for all their spaciousness, could not contain all the invited guests — people of standing, men of letters, and the students' parents.

And as we set down these words with great pride — for this institute is rightly counted a distinguished women's undertaking — we are pleased to review swiftly the stages through which the institute passed until it reached

what it is today...

A beautiful dream haunted the head of the ambitious young woman when, in 1932, she received eight pupils into her house: they were the nucleus of the school that now num-bers a thousand pupils. Yes, a thousand boys and girls! For the instruction is modern and coeducational.

Mrs. Adel has declared with pride that from the very first year in which her school entered candidates for the ministerial elementary examination, the rate of success was 89 percent — and this, as everyone knows, is a very high figure. But the

Mrs. Zahoura Adel, founder of the "Adel National School"

His Excellency Mr. Kadhim al-Solh, Lebanon's ambassador in Baghdad, decorates Mrs. Zahoura Adel with the Order of Education, first class — on the consideration that education in any Arab country deserves the appreciation of the sister Arab governments.