An Iraqi School for Iraqi Boys: The Jesuit–Iraqi Encounters and the Formation of Manhood in Baghdad College, 1932–58

This paper examines the role of the New England Jesuits in the socialization of gender differences, national identity, and civic values through education at Baghdad College in Iraq from 1932 to 1958. It seeks to understand how Jesuit educators inculcated American notions of masculinity among Iraqi students through academic programs and extracurricular activities, and how Iraqi students negotiated these gender norms and social values to suit their own needs. By analyzing the New England Jesuit Mission’s records, Baghdad College’s yearbooks, and former students’ writings using postcolonial theories and the intersection of gender, race, and class, this paper argues that the Jesuits inculcated gender norms of moral masculinity and ideal citizenship to Iraqi boys at Baghdad College through Western academics, sports, and Catholic rituals that accommodated students of diverse religious beliefs and ethnicities, but excluded Iraqi girls and students of lower middle- and lower class. Although Baghdad College’s rigorous academic curriculum and activities succeeded in producing a number of “men of character” among its graduates, some Iraqi students negotiated and defied the Jesuits’ goals and expectations through skipping classes, staging protests in school, and joining the anticolonial movements, leading to the precarious position of the Jesuits in Baghdad. By illuminating the experiences of the Jesuits who shaped and were shaped by their interactions with Iraqi people in an educational setting, this paper complicates the monolithic view of missionary enterprise in the Middle East that considered missionaries as imperial agents who imposed their culture on indigenous others. Applying the lenses of gender, race, and class to Jesuit education in Iraq also adds to the ongoing research on social and cultural relations between the United States and the Arab world, particularly the expansion of American Christianity through foreign education abroad.