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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Temkin, and this week, we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm speaking today with June Akiba. Dr.
Akiba is at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, and we'll be discussing his article, Girls are also People of the Holy Quran, Girls' Wolves, and female teachers in pre-Tonsamite Istanbul for the journal Hawa. Dr. Akiba, thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you very much, Emily.
Before we get into it, some people might see the subject, you're writing on elementary education for Muslim girls in Ottoman era Istanbul is quite specific. Why was it important to you to look at elementary girls' education in particular? It's important because we don't know much about girls' education in the Ottoman Empire before the modernizing reform in education began. Specialists on Ottoman history have been aware that, traditionally, Ottoman Muslim girls were not excluded from elementary schooling, but few studies have been done on girls' education in traditional Ottoman society due to the polity of historical sources, as well as the general lack of interest in that topic.
In terms of my personal research history, I must admit that my specialty field is mainly focused, as I've been studying Ottoman judges since my dissertation. Specifically, I've been considering the judiciary institution and the judges' education and social origins. By definition, Ottoman judges were exclusively made. I actually started researching the education of Ottoman girls by accident.
The story goes back almost 20 years. I was working at the Topocapalist archives for my dissertation when I came across a list of elementary schools in Istanbul during the late 18th century, which included a significant number of girls' schools directed by female teachers. First, I doubted the document was actually from the 18th century because it was undated. However, several years later, I found a similar document dating from 1811, which was published in Modern Turkish and showed a higher proportion of girls' schools with female teachers compared to the prior document.
At that point, I became convinced that these two lists of elementary schools were evidence of the spread of girls' education in Istanbul before the modernizing reforms. I started paying more careful attention to any difference to girls' education when searching historical documents at the archives and managed to gather several relevant sources. Though it took many years before I was able to publish an article on this topic in English. Also, I did not consider non-Muslim populations, namely Christian and Jews, which comprised about half of the population in Istanbul during the early 19th century.
I excluded them from an analytical situation that was different from their Muslims. As you know, Islam has often been described as a patriarchal religion that does not allow equal rights for women. It's true that Islamic precepts include strict gender norms and that traditional Muslim studies, including the Ottoman society, have been made dominated. Ottoman women had no place in the medresses or the institutions of higher Islamic learning, for example.
However, women's status in actual history of cultural settings cannot be generalized, which is why historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman societies have tried to uncover women's active role in various aspects of social, economic, and political life. So my study which demonstrates the spread of girls' mental education would, I hope, facilitate the rigorous iteration of female education in traditional Muslim society. Absolutely. I mean, there were things, there were elements of your discussion on it in the article that surprised me.
So you talk about how in the 1860s, co-education schools were actually more common than single-sex schools. And you write that it turns out co-education is not a modern phenomenon. Were you surprised by that? Why, why not?
Yes, I was surprised too, because the principle of co-education was only formally introduced in the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Before that, during the later of my period, co-educational elementary schools were only permitted by law in places where a separate girls' school did not exist, like a small neighborhood or a small village. So at first glance, co-education seems to be a modern phenomenon and single-sex education appears to be traditional. This is especially true when we consider the famous gender separation principle of Islam.
In Saudi Arabia today, today, for example, single-sex education is being implemented from the elementary level. That's it is remarkable that co-educational schools were predominant in the survey record of 1868. The evidence suggests that co-education schools were the norm during the mid-19th century. And this observation probably holds true for the period before that.
Now it's remarkable is the fact that the schools named as girls' schools were also co-education when the 1868 record. Although girls always constituted the majority of students in these schools. And probably only the younger boys attended them. Wow, so you write about both girls' education and the spread of female teachers.
To what extent was the former dependent on the latter? Well, in my estimate of the number of female pupils attending elementary schools in Istanbul in 1811, really assumed that there were five or six girls per school. If my assumption is correct, there are more girls in the non-gender specific schools direct by male teachers than in the girls' schools with female teachers. But in my estimate, approximately 20% of the female pupils were attending girls' schools, which suggests that female teachers certainly contributed to the spread of girls' education to a significant extent.
Another important point is that I did not include girls older than 10 in my estimate of the number of female pupils, whereas these elder girls were presumably only accepted in the female teachers' schools because mingling of elder girls with elder boys was deemed undesirable. I would say that girls' schools, directed by female teachers, provided further opportunity for girls to continue their education and that elder female pupils were then ideal candidates for next generation of female teachers. That is so interesting that it's about the continuation of the education that's working for teachers in the black world. Finally, before I let you go, you say that you wanted to look at the extent to which girls' schooling penetrated out of society.
Could you give our listeners a sense of the extent of which it did? Yes, the total number of schools in greater Istanbul in the early 19th century was around 500. At that time, the most population of 180,000, which means that there was one school for every 360 people. Although it's important to keep in mind that these elementary schools were much smaller in size compared to today's schools.
Among the 500 elementary schools, about 20% or around 100 were girls' schools administered by female teachers. As I said earlier, girls attended both known gender-specific co-educational schools and girls' schools. Thus, there were quite few educational opportunities available for young girls at that time. I also estimated the enrollment rate of girls aged 4 to 9 in Istanbul in 1811 based on the number of schools recorded in the historical sources and concluded that about 1 fifth of girls aged 4 to 9 attended school and received elementary education.
Although my estimation methods might be debatable, for example, it might have been better to assume the school age as 5 to 10 instead of 4 to 9. But I believe the conclusion that about 1 fifth of young girls were enrolled in school is largely feasible. That doesn't mean that only the wealthiest 20% of families sent the girls to school, considering that parents of the wealthy or class could employ private tutors to teach their daughters. It is likely that female pupils came from diverse social backgrounds.
I should add that girls' education in elementary schools was basically religious, centering on the recitation of the Quran. Pupils probably also read books on religious doctrine and on basic Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Although writing was not always taught to girls. Still, they would like to have acquired some degree of literacy, enabling them to read certain types of texts.
As mentioned before, there are about 100 female teachers in greater Istanbul, which means that there were as many women who were able to carry out the knowledge and the culture necessary to teach children. Overall, the extent to which girls' school in penetrated is significant, both configuratively and qualitatively, in light of our current knowledge about female education. I've been speaking today with Jun Akiba. He is at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo.
And we've been discussing his article, Girls are also People of the Holy Quran. Girls' schools and female teachers in three times might disnoble. It's in the journal, How about Dr. Akiba, thank you so much for taking your time today.
Thank you, thank you very much. The article we discussed today is really accessible for a limited time in the journal, Hava.