Summary
A private Islamic school beside the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, named for the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which with the mosque and Universal School anchors the southwest suburban Palestinian enclave (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.74-75).
Details
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Aqsa School began in the Mosque Foundation basement in 1986 with seventeen students; enrollment, limited to girls in grades six to twelve, jumped to eighty-five the following year; land across from the mosque was purchased in 1991 and the current premises completed in 1997, offering pre-K through twelfth grade, co-educational until the third grade and entirely girls in grades four to twelve (PDF p.74).
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Since the expansion enrollment has averaged three hundred students per year; 90 percent have been Palestinian and nearly half have had Beitunian roots (Riedel 2009, 81–86, as cited) (PDF p.74).
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Its original rationale was a separated space in which the community’s “maturing daughters” might be raised within an Islamic ethos and shielded from compromising moral influences in wider US society; its religion classes used The Ideal Muslimah (Hashimi 1998) (PDF p.74).
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Its general curriculum prepares girls for college and careers, and some girls use its textual religious instruction to contest their families’ patriarchal norms as “culture” and not “religion” (PDF p.74).
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Unlike Universal School, Aqsa has drawn mostly from Palestinian families, many of whom initially resisted the Mosque Foundation’s reformist shift, and retains a focus on Palestinian national concerns (PDF p.75).
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In Chapter 5, Nawal’s mother enrolled her two youngest children, including Nawal, in Aqsa School, where Nawal embraced its book-centered reformist disciplines, including wearing the hijab and jilbab, before financial considerations forced a move to a public high school in which her piety weakened (PDF p.158 / printed p.137).
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Intisar enrolled her eldest daughter in Aqsa School in the southwestern suburbs after white classmates in the public schools taunted her daughter as a terrorist and the school resisted anti-racism trainings; the decision brought Intisar herself into direct interaction with the suburbs’ piety-minded milieu (PDF p.176-177 / printed p.155-156).
Related pages
Mosque Foundation · Universal School · Bridgeview · Palestinian Chicago