Jesuit contributions to the Iraqi education system in the 1930s and later

Abstract

This article will consider the significant role which the Society of Jesus had played in the Iraqi secondary and higher education systems in the period 1932–1968. The Jesuits’ Baghdad-based school and university formed a part of the substantial Jesuit educational network established across the Middle East from the nineteenth century and this article seeks to bring the fields of Jesuit and Iraqi Studies together and to offer reflection of the Jesuit educational ‘difference’ which was made in and to Iraqi society. This contribution is in Western Christian and Latin Catholic contexts not well known and yet the continued influence which the Jesuit educational and pastoral ethos encouraged is strongly remembered and held in high esteem by both Muslim and Christian Iraqis into the present. (As universally related to me during fieldwork in Iraq and London from 2012 to 2014 by members of the Iraqi Christian and Muslim communities when asked about the Jesuits.)