¹ Note on transliteration: all translations from the Arabic are by the author unless otherwise indicated. I have used simplified transliteration (only ʿayn and hamza) for people's names and the titles of books, journals, and journal articles. For direct quotations from texts, I have transliterated according to the guidelines provided by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

² Quoted in Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York, 2000), 40Google Scholar.

³ The power of such metaphors dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when “‘family romances’ depicting Mount Lebanon as a distant relation of France came to serve as precedents, pretexts, and props for French involvement.” Arsan, Andrew, “‘There Is, in the Heart of Asia, an Entirely French Population’: France, Mount Lebanon, and the Workings of Affective Empire in the Mediterranean, 1830–1920,” in Lorcin, Patricia M. E. and Shepard, Todd, eds. French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (Lincoln, 2016), 76–100, at 80Google Scholar.

⁴ Long, Taylor, “Political Parenting in Colonial Lebanon,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4/2 (2011), 257–81, at 266CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ The Arab East (the Mashriq) refers to today's Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and the Arabian peninsula. This article focuses on Cairo, Beirut, and Alexandria, centers of print production in the region.

⁶ The Avalon Project, “The Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 22,” https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art22 (accessed 29 March 2021), italics mine.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2007), 8Google Scholar. Jacob has diagnosed this temporal hierarchy as constitutive of colonial modernity itself. Jacob, Wilson, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2011), 5Google Scholar.

⁹ Gelvin, James, The Modern Middle East: A History (New York, 2015), 70Google Scholar. For a related discussion of historicism and progress in Egypt see Di-Capua, Yoav, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, 2009), 28–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870–1950 (Cambridge, 2015), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barak, On, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, 2013), 5Google Scholar, on Beirut, 120–48; Wishnitzer, Avner, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago, 2015), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Jordheim, Helge, “Introduction: Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization,” History and Theory 53/4 (2014), 498–518, at 502CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fryxell, A., “Time and the Modern: Current Trends in the History of Modern Temporalities,” Past & Present 243/1 (2019), 285–298, at 286, 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Jordheim suggestively returns to Herder to remark that “the existence of a plurality of times is linked to the existence of a plurality of life forms.” Jordheim, “Introduction,” 512.

¹³ Ibid., 513.

¹⁴ On al-Afghani see Massad, Joseph A., Desiring Arabs (Chicago, 2007), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Massad also argues that Tarabishi, “like the thinkers he criticizes,” “is unable to exit from a colonial evolutionary schema whose origins is [sic] primitive infantilism, disease, and backwardness and whose telos is adulthood, health, and progress.” Ibid., 20. Pursley describes the “shared temporal imaginary of British and Iraqi mandate officials” such as Satiʿ al-Husari, according to which “Iraq was moving towards phased independence through delimited stages of development,” although they disagreed over the pace. Pursley, Sara, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford, 2019), 57Google Scholar. Jacob makes a similar argument about Egyptian writer Qasim Amin, whose attempts to “make a claim on progress” inaugurated an Egyptian nationalist time. Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 59–62.

¹⁵ On Iraq see Pursley, Familiar Futures, 31–3. Importantly, not all Iraqi nationalists were of the developmentalist school: rebellious Shi'i scholars advocated for immediate independence—before being deported for holding Iranian passports. Ibid., 62–5.

¹⁶ Massad, Desiring Arabs, 161–90, has argued that (Western) discourses of progress, development, and liberation naturalized binary sexuality (homo/hetero) in the postcolonial Middle East. Writing on Qajar Iran, Najmabadi shows how “the heteronormalization of eros and sex became a condition of ‘achieving modernity.’” Najmabadi, Afsaneh, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, 2005), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Iraq, Pursley argues that “the increasing moralization of both education and masculinity [through the military] was not just about producing strong bodies for the nation, but about producing heteronormative citizens.” Likewise, for pragmatist Iraqi educators in the 1930s, “national uniformity would be produced through the difference of sex.” Pursley, Familiar Futures, 76, 92; see also 99–105, 123–6. Jacob takes a more ambivalent stance, arguing that while sex “was a normalizing conduit in the reforming of Egyptian masculinity and femininity to align with modernity,” its discursive manifestations “stood [both] for and against normative sexuality.” Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 180.

¹⁷ As writes, Freeman, “the naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation.” Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC, 2010), 3Google Scholar. Reinhart Koselleck, “Time and History,” in Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, 2002), 100–14, at 103.

¹⁸ For Freeman, “manipulations of time convert historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and regimes, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time” for individuals and populations. Freeman, Time Binds, 3.

¹⁹ Freeman notes that “discussions of queer time continue to centre on forms of sexual practice that are queer in the sense that they are non-heteronormative.” Ibid., 11. On the Middle East see Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches; Massad, Desiring Arabs.

²⁰ Cuno, Kenneth, Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (New York, 2015)Google Scholar; Kholoussy, Hanan, For Better, for Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (Stanford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kozma, Liat, “‘We, the Sexologists …’: Arabic Medical Writing on Sexuality, 1879–1943,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22/3 (2013), 426–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sara Pursley and Omnia El Shakry have shown how nationalist elites and experts in Iraq and Egypt respectively in the 1930s and 1940s linked heterosexuality to a temporality of “controlled acceleration,” a tool to harness the “peril and promise” of male adolescence for the linear, elite-dominated process of nationalist development. Pursley, Familiar Futures, 57; Shakry, Omnia El, “Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 43/4 (2011), 591–610, at 594CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Analyses that go beyond this framing include, inter alia, Judith Butler, “Bodies and Power Revisited,” in Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds., Feminism and the Final Foucault (Champaign, 2004), 183–96; Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11/1 (2002), 3–21; Carolyn Dean, “The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality,” History and Theory 33/3 (1994), 271–96.

²² Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 143, italics mine. Quoted in Catherine Malabou, “One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry (2020), https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/one_life_only/ (accessed 21 March 2021).

²³ On the difficulty of “thinking about matter” see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in Coole and Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Ageny, and Politics (Durham, NC, 2010), 1–46, at 1–3. On zoē or biological life as the “poor half” of life see Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in ibid., 201–20, at 207.

²⁴ Malabou, “One Life Only.”

²⁵ See also Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’”; Coole, “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh,” in Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 92–115; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, 2006). An earlier feminist intervention refusing to separate the social and the natural-scientific aspects of bodies is Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana, 1994).

²⁶ Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 27; Malabou, “One Life Only.” Thinking the body as at once discursive and material is also a temporal challenge, i.e. how to think the materiality of bodies simultaneously with their contexts, without identifying either the material body or its social construction as “before.”

²⁷ Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic (Chicago, 2013); Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, 2017).

²⁸ Pande, by contrast, highlights how body and family were “folded in” to the linear time of nationalism and colonialism, and how sexual normativity, built around age as well as gender, stabilized and naturalized the “homogenous, empty time” of modernity and nationalism. Ishita Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (Cambridge, 2020), 10–11, 16–17, 20.

²⁹ As Halberstam writes, “failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent.” Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC, 2011), 88. Afsaneh Najmabadi likewise argues that the apparent “naturalness [of sex] also provides possibilities for developmental failure, in which a host of sex–gender nonconformities are rendered diseased abnormalities.” Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex or the Sexing of Jins,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45/2 (2013), 211–31, at 211.

³⁰ Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, 27.

³¹ Drawing on Serres, Nead has argued for a “pleated” or “crumpled” time that “draw[s] together past, present and future into constant and unexpected relations,” to show that modernity—in London as in Beirut—was not a grand, coherent process but a “configuration of diverse and unresolved historical processes.” Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2005), 5, 8. See also Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, 1995).

³² Fisher shows how age structured “modern articulations of sexuality” and sexual science. Kate Fisher, “The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality,” Gender & History 31/2 (2019), 266–83, at 267.

³³ Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, 75.

³⁴ Beth Bailey, “The Vexed History of Children and Sex,” in Paula Fass, ed. The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (New York, 2012), 191–210, at 191, 197, 199.

³⁵ Fisher argues that concerns about childhood vulnerability, “youth corruption,” and the “erotics of age” led sexologists to define homosexuality as consensual relations between adult men, rejecting “affirmative framings of age-differentiated relationships” and “recast[ing] same-sex desire as driven by the gender of the partner and not their youth.” Fisher, “The Age of Attraction,” 269; 271.

³⁶ Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York, 2012), 35.

³⁷ Heidi Morrison, Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt (New York, 2015), 5, 14; Nazan Maksudyan, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse, 2014), 84.

³⁸ Morrison, Childhood and Colonial Modernity, 25, 45–7.

³⁹ This phrase appeared in Azhari Shaykh Husayn al-Marsafi's 1881 work of social theory, Risalat al-Kalim al-Thaman, and titled a series of science primers published by Cornelius van Dyck, American-born professor at Beirut's Syrian Protestant College, in 1886.

⁴⁰ Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, 78.

⁴¹ Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930 (Cambridge, 1995), 59–62.

⁴² Thus the time of childrearing, like the broader discourse of domesticity of which it was a part, remained “open to contestation.” Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford, 2017), 30.

⁴³ Bulus al-Khuli, “Bi al-Tarbiya,” al-Marʾa al-Jadida 1/10 (1921), 202–4, at 202.

⁴⁴ Omnia El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, 1998), 126–70; Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife,” in ibid., 91–125, esp. 91–5.

⁴⁵ Abou-Hodeib, A Taste For Home, 5. See also Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife,” 108.

⁴⁶ While Syrian Christian women dominated the women's press to 1907, Egyptian and Muslim women became more frequent participants in later decades. Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, 1994), 35.

⁴⁷ Baron, Women's Awakening, 93.

⁴⁸ Abou-Hodeib, A Taste For Home, 5–7.

⁴⁹ Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 213–14; Baron, Women's Awakening, 91–3.

⁵⁰ Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 212–13.

⁵¹ Hoda Yousef, Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870–1930 (Stanford, 2016), 43–6.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Baron, Women's Awakening, 68.

⁵⁴ Abou-Hodeib shows how the home was “cultivated as a sphere where a sense of control [could] be maintained,” even as it was integrated into uneven networks of global commodity exchange. Abou-Hodeib, A Taste for Home, 33, 37.

⁵⁵ al-Khuli, “Bi al-Tarbiya,” 202.

⁵⁶ Pursley, Familiar Futures, 57; Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 96–7; Nadya Sbaiti, “Lessons in History: Education and the Formation of National Society in Beirut, Lebanon, 1920–1960s” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, 2008), 238–9; Misako Ikeda, “Toward the Democratization of Public Education,” in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni, eds., Re-envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952 (Cairo, 2005), 218–48.

⁵⁷ This interpretation differs from Pursley's observation that domestic space and the conjugal family in interwar Iraq served as “particularly productive of the modern experience of timelessness” central to capitalism and the nation state. Pursley, Familiar Futures, 10.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 21.

⁵⁹ al-Khuli, “Bi al-Tarbiya,” 202.

⁶⁰ ʿAli Fikri, “al-Din wa-l-Akhlaq: al-Ghaya min al-Tarbiya,” al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya 11/11 (1933), 362–3, at 363.

⁶¹ On the future as a “horizon of planning” see Koselleck, “Time and History,” 119.

⁶² “al-Atfal wa Tarbiyatuhum al-Jasadiyya: al-Shahr al-Sabʿa,” al-Sayyidat wa-l-Banat 1/6 (1903), 174–5, at 174.

⁶³ “Maqyas Dhakaʾ al-Tifl,” al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya 14/1 (1928), 17.

⁶⁴ “Wasaya Tifl,” al-Marʾa al-Jadida 2/8 (1922), 137–8. This kind of temporal ordering also accompanied discourses about time and efficiency in household work. Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, 2016), 67–72.

⁶⁵ As Holt has noted, uncertainty was a resonant temporality in the nineteenth-century Levant, where new forms of production, debt, and speculation meant to bring prosperity had quickly become “legible as empire” and extraction. Elizabeth Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (New York, 2017), 21.

⁶⁶ Freeman, Time Binds, 40.

⁶⁷ Jurj ʿArqtanji, “al-Laban: al-Halib,” al-Marʾa al-Jadida 5/7 (1925), 290–91, at 290.

⁶⁸ ‘Arqtanji, an Alexandria-based writer, also authored at least two stand-alone works on child health and nutrition: Fawaʾid fi Taghdiyat al-Atfal (Alexandria, 1913) and Durr al-Aqwal li-Wiqayat al-Atfal (Alexandria, 1917).

⁶⁹ Amina Khuri, “Samir al-Sighar: Min Ayna Taji al-Athmar?”, al-Marʾa al-Jadida 3/8 (1923), 286.

⁷⁰ Ibid. A raṭl was twelve to sixteen ounces, and a qanṭar was roughly a hundred pounds.

⁷¹ On precocity as a “developmental pathology” see Pursley, Familiar Futures, 22.

⁷² “Nubugh al-Atfal,” al-Marʾa al-Misriyya 6/3 (1925), 115–16, at 115. Similar articles on exceptional children appeared in al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya, e.g. “Bab al-Tufula wa-l-Umuma,” 14/1 (1929), 27–9; “Bab al-Tufula wa-l-Umuma: al-Tifla al-Nabigha,” 14/3 (1936), 104.

⁷³ “Nubugh al-Atfal.”

⁷⁴ Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age.

⁷⁵ “Al-Daftaria ʿAynd al-Atfal,” al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya 1/3 (1921), 79–81, at 79; “Bad Amrad al-Atfal,” al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya 16/3 (1938), 105–6, at 105.

⁷⁶ Labiba Hashim, Kitab fi al-Tarbiya (Cairo, 1911), 43–4.

⁷⁷ Hashim, Kitab fi al-Tarbiya, 44.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 45.

⁷⁹ “Al-Tifl al-Mutaʾakkhir,” al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya 16/3 (1938), 103–4.

⁸⁰ The root athama means to sin or err.

⁸¹ “Al-Tifl al-Mutaʾakkhir,” 104.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Sbaiti, “Lessons in History,” 16–17 and Ch. 2; on Egypt see Ikeda, “Toward the Democratization of Public Education.”

⁸⁴ The phrase is Pursley's; see Pursley, Familiar Futures, 57.

⁸⁵ Fuʾad Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs (Cairo, 1923), 5. Although it is sublimated in favor of male adolescence in Sarruf's piece, birth might also have constituted a (feminized) moment of rupture.

⁸⁶ This pleated time differed from the nonlinear temporality of return/reform, islāh, emphasized in Islamic reformist works on childrearing. El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play,” 150–6.

⁸⁷ Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, 60–61.

⁸⁸ Al-Jumard, “Tilmidhat wa-Talamidh al-Madaris al-Thanawiyya,” al-Muʿallim al-Jadid, 1954, 69. Cited in Pursley, Familiar Futures, 116.

⁸⁹ Hodgson uses “Islamicate” to encompass social and cultural formations “associated historically” with Islam but not reducible to Islam as a religion. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1974), 59.

⁹⁰ Mehmet Kalpaklı and Walter Andrews, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC, 2005), 55; Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Love of Boys in Arabic Poetry of the Early Ottoman Period, 1500–1800,” Middle Eastern Literatures 8/1 (2005), 3–22, at 3.

⁹¹ Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex,” 212. A rich body of work treats heterosexuality indirectly through studies of women, marriage, and family. See inter alia Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley, 2007); Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, 2005).

⁹² Cuno, Modernizing Marriage; Badran, Margot, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; Pollard, Nurturing the Nation.

⁹³ Alexandra Avierino, “al-Hila ʿala al-Nasl,” al-Anis al-Jalis 9/4 (1906), 112. On later population discourse see Shakry, Omnia El, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007), 145–64Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Baron, Egypt as a Woman, 36. See also Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), Ch. 3Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Massad, Desiring Arabs, esp. Chs. 1–2; Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, esp. Ch. 4.

⁹⁶ Boone, Joseph, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York, 2014), xxiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ Norbert Sholz, “Foreign Education and Indigenous Reaction in Late Ottoman Lebanon: Students and Teachers at the SPC in Beirut” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Georgetown University, 1997), 149.

⁹⁸ Sholz, “Foreign Education,” 143, 150.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 150.

¹⁰⁰ Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 19, 25.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 84; see also Stefan Hock, “To Bring about a ‘Moral of Renewal’: The Deportation of Sex Workers in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 28/3 (2019), 457–82; Seçil Yilmaz, “Love in the Time of Syphilis: Medicine and Sex in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1922” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Graduate Center at the City University of New York, 2017).

¹⁰² Kozma, “We, the Sexologists,” 430–31. For an earlier shift in this direction outside the domain of governmentality and biopolitics suggested by Foucault see Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex,” 212.

¹⁰³ On the medicalization of sex education see Kozma, “We, the Sexologists”; and Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 167–79.

¹⁰⁴ On encounters between psychology and Islam see El Shakry, The Arabic Freud; and Pandolfo, Stefania, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This analysis also suggests that the “discovery of adolescence” as a discrete, prolonged stage of life may have happened earlier in Lebanon than in Egypt and Iraq, where it rose to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s. El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 79; Pursley, Familiar Futures, 107.

¹⁰⁵ Pursley, Familiar Futures, 22.

¹⁰⁶ Yusuf Murad received a doctorate in psychology from the Sorbonne; Murad's colleague, Mustafa Ziywar, trained in “philosophy, psychology, and medicine in France in the 1930s.” El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 23.

¹⁰⁷ He later became vice president of the American University of Beirut (1952–70) and a board member at UNESCO.

¹⁰⁸ El Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play,” 157.

¹⁰⁹ Jörg Matthias Determann, Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (London, 2018), 62.

¹¹⁰ Coe is cited in Weigle, Luther A., The Pupil and the Teacher (New York, 1911), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹¹ Luther A. Weigle (1880–1975) was an influential figure in early twentieth-century Christian education. A Yale Divinity School graduate and professor of Christian nurture, he was known for his ecumenism. The Lutheran Board of Publications commissioned The Pupil and the Teacher as a Sunday school textbook. B. W. Kathan, “Six Protestant Pioneers of Religious Education: Liberal, Moderate, Conservative,” Religious Education 73 (1978), 138–50; Weigle, Luther A. and Weigle, Richard Daniel, The Glory Days: From the Life of Luther Allan Weigle (Friendship Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

¹¹² Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 16.

¹¹³ Ibid., 17.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 12.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 13.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 14.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 21–22.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., 21.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 21, italics mine. Weigle writes, “There is a world of difference between twelve and thirteen in the mind of boys and girls.” Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher, 47.

¹²⁰ Ayubi and Wadud have argued for the importance of context and authorial intent in interpreting masculine and masculine plural forms in Arabic. These forms can serve as defaults meant to include both men and women, but can also be read in certain contexts as specifically signifying male subjects. As Ayubi writes, the grammatical use of the masculine default “raises a problem of method in Muslim feminist hermeneutics: how to distinguish general prescriptions in religious texts from exclusively male ones.” In my view, this methodological problem extends to secular Arabic texts as well. Ayubi, Zahra, Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (New York, 2019), 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wadud, Amina, Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective (New York, 1999), xii–xivGoogle Scholar.

¹²¹ Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 22.

¹²² Ibid., 22.

¹²³ Ibid., 22.

¹²⁴ Ibid., 22.

¹²⁵ Ibid., 22, italics mine.

¹²⁶ Ibid., 35. Weigle writes, “The development of sexual instincts underlies every other change at adolescence.” Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher, 51. On the concept of gharīza as resonating between modern psychological and older Islamic–ethical traditions, see El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 65–6. On the reproductive connotations of tanāsul in twentieth-century Persian writing on sex see Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex,” 218–19.

¹²⁷ Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 29.

¹²⁸ Ibid., 9.

¹²⁹ Ibid., 9.

¹³⁰ Ibid., 9–10.

¹³¹ Ibid., 32.

¹³² Ibid. Many writers in al-Marʾa al-Jadida and across the women's press likewise argued for the nobility and sanctity of labor (ʿamal).

¹³³ On the trope of sacrifice in Egyptian nationalist masculinity see Noorani, Yaseen, Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³⁴ Baxter, Kent, The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa, 2008), 46, 69Google Scholar. As Bederman observes for Hall in particular, “adolescence, as a theoretical construct, provided him with a way to come to terms with anxieties about sexuality that plagued many men at the turn of the century. How could a man be the virile and passionate pioneer of his race but not waste this vital energy through sin and decadence?” Bederman, Gail, Madness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States (Chicago, 1996), 81Google Scholar, quoted in Baxter, The Modern Age, 70.

¹³⁵ Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 35.

¹³⁶ Ibid.

¹³⁷ Ibid., 29.

¹³⁸ Ibid. Weigle writes, “it has well become a new birth.” Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher, 47. This phrase originally belonged to Stanley Hall. Baxter, The Modern Age, 50.

¹³⁹ As Najmabadi has shown for Iran, the heterosexualization of eros was a hallmark of the experience of modernity. Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches, 97.

¹⁴⁰ Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 22.

¹⁴¹ Ibid., 36.

¹⁴² Ibid.

¹⁴³ Ibid., 45. Sarruf translated Weigle's phrase “love between the sexes” as al-ḥubb al-jinsi; see Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher, 63. In Persian, the modern concept of jins came in the twentieth century to unite psychobiological explanations for binary sex difference, on one hand, and gender roles, on the other, even as it continued to invoke older meanings of “type” or “genus.” Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex,” 213.

¹⁴⁴ As Najmabadi argues, the modernist disavowal of homoerotic desire at once “marked homosociality as empty of homoeroticism [and thus] … provided same-sex practices a homosocially masqueraded home.” Najmabadi, “Genus of Sex,” 212.

¹⁴⁵ Sarruf, Tahdhib al-Nafs, 41.

¹⁴⁶ Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher, 58. Sarruf, quoting Weigle, subsequently listed the precocious achievements of Byron, Shelley, Pascale, Savonarola, Leibnitz, Schilling, Michaelangelo, and Spurgeon. The only figures cited by Weigle but not cited by Sarruf were Peter Cooper and René Descartes.

¹⁴⁷ Pursley, Familiar Futures, 106.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 123, italics mine.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid., 126.

¹⁵⁰ By the 1950s in Iraq, nationalist writers were worried about both “boys and girls” (fatayat wa fityan) as potential agents of disruption, leading them to “re-orient female education around moral character development.” Pursley, Familiar Futures, 116.

¹⁵¹ Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 95–107.

¹⁵² Baun, Dylan, Winning Lebanon: Youth Politics, Populism, and the Production of Sectarian Violence, 1920–1958 (New York, 2020), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵³ Dueck, Jennifer, The Claims of Culture at Empire's End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule (London, 2010), 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵⁴ On Egypt see Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, 2010), esp. Ch. 7Google Scholar; Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 92–124.

¹⁵⁵ Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 195; on fascism and masculinity see also Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 141.