As a physician working with children in schools and clinics, Canaan prioritized improving health and hygiene among urban students and peasant communities while cautioning against Western misdiagnoses rooted in assumptions about local populations. In his memoir, he critiques Western physicians who attributed most health problems in Palestine to malaria only.13 In his 1927 article, “The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition,” he also reflects on modernization’s dual impact, noting that while European civilization brought many benefits, it eroded valuable moral principles.14 With the erosion of aspects of Indigenous traditions, children’s roles in those traditions were diminished.

Canaan was part of this transformation but remained committed to preserving aspects of peasant life that he believed were vital to shaping a resilient Arab national identity. As Canaan and his contemporaries critically assessed the institutions they engaged with, they aimed at balancing their approaches to modernization with a nationalist approach that distinguished their visions from those of Western missionary institutions. Canaan’s approach emphasized working within the cultural environment and nurturing Palestinian children, while challenging both imported Western medical preconceptions and the communities’ reliance on local folk healing. His and his peers’ contributions can be seen as an extension of Arab Nahda intellectuals in various fields, such as Jurji Zaydan in education.15 Today, Palestinian children inherit the social and cultural tensions born in Canaan’s era. Therefore, analyzing Canaan’s cultural portrayal of childhood reveals both the loss and persistence of Indigenous practices in the face of modern upheaval. Growing Up between Worlds: Childhood and Modernity in Tawfiq Canaan’s Memoir

Tawfiq Canaan’s memoir opens with a detailed portrayal of his early life, shaped by the intersection of Arab traditions and Protestant missionary influence. His childhood, deeply embedded in familial, religious, and cultural contexts, exemplifies the hybrid identity that would later inform both his medical practice and ethnographic writings. He describes the customs surrounding his birth as the second child and first male, an event that brought joy to the Protestant congregation in the village. His birth as a male child was steeped in Arab traditions, including receiving his grandfather’s name. Visitors congratulating his parents brought gifts to ease childbearing costs and were customarily offered traditional sweets, coffee, cigarettes, and arak in return. These gifts and offerings were part of a reciprocal custom observed during celebrations.

To illustrate this tradition, Canaan cites a common proverb: “Kul shi fi dinya dayn, hitta dumu‘ al-‘anayn, everything in this world is a debt, even the tears of the eyes.”16 In his article “The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition,” he reflects extensively on these customs, explaining that his social upbringing was rooted in an Arab cultural context that encompassed both positive and negative childbearing practices. He emphasizes that these traditions reflect the high moral standards of Palestinians, where hospitality and deep respect, love, and veneration for parents and older people are the guiding principles of child-rearing culture in Palestine—despite prevalent medical ignorance and reliance on “superstitions.”17

His childhood exemplifies his parents’ hybrid approach to child upbringing, a fusion of traditional Arab cultural values with Western missionary modernity. Beshara, Canaan’s father, was the first Arab pastor of the Lutheran church and was directly connected with the missionaries. He completed elementary school at the Syrian Orphanage in Jerusalem. His mother, Katherina Khairallah, was a teacher and deaconess at the Kaiserswerth Deaconess Institution in Beirut and later at Talitha Kumi in Jerusalem. Despite tensions between the Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as with the Orthodox Church and the Ottoman authorities, his father remained in his profession until retirement. There is no indication in the memoir about when his mother stopped working at Kaiserswerth. However, she was active in the Protestant congregation activities. Both parents introduced modern practices to their lifestyles. This merging of modernity with tradition extended beyond the domestic sphere and into community life, where Canaan’s father played a pivotal civic and spiritual role. In his memoir, Canaan portrayed his father as invaluable to the community, offering advice, supporting traditional agricultural prosperity, enrolling children in modern boarding schools for further education, hospitalizing the sick, finding jobs for the unemployed, and settling disputes.

The hybridization that his parents practiced and he later adopted did not come without a cost. As an Indigenous person, he was subjected to Western superiority. Canaan’s memoir recounts an incident in which his contract with the Kaiserswerth was terminated after the hospital employed a German physician, a relative of the former director. Although the German Consul General of Jerusalem encouraged him to file a case, one he likely would have won, Canaan refused out of Christian ethics and gratitude, stating: “I decided not to make a case against a missionary institution, for my father and mother have spent their lives in the mission.”

Although not wealthy, Canaan’s parents’ social and religious status placed him in a middle-class environment, offering modern education and access to modern treatments in contrast to rural conditions. At home, daily rituals involved waking up early, completing household tasks, and eating whatever was offered without complaint. He and his siblings were also provided with biblical stories about the proper Christian spirit and children’s books to enhance their education. His household’s middle-class orientation helped him navigate physical challenges during childhood. He suffered from anemia for many years, requiring him to leave the Syrian orphanage temporarily to undergo hydrotherapeutic treatment. Frail and often ill, he relied on cod liver oil for strength. He eventually recovered through medical treatments and travel, benefiting from the climate in Beirut, where he completed his higher education.

Canaan’s middle-class childhood was also shaped by interactions within the community, which offered him a social education. Outside the home, he accompanied his father on walks and excursions to historical sites around Bayt Jala, where he learned extensively about the local topography and the stories of various religious and political figures. During these walks, he studied Arabic and German grammar, which his father eagerly practiced with him and his siblings. At school, Canaan followed disciplined routines at the Schneller School, focusing on collaborative work, community service, and academic learning. In the countryside and agricultural lands, Canaan connected with the fellahin, joined their harvesting practices, and developed a deep appreciation for their traditions. He observed their customs—especially their hard work, hospitality, and generosity.

His social education was closely tied to religious teachings, which he later passed on to his children and stamped his religious considerations in his ethnographic research. Canaan recalls a formative conversation with his father that shaped his early understanding of religious plurality within Christianity. The exchange is both pedagogical and poetic. As a child, he was surprised to learn that some of his friends were Orthodox and others were Catholic, having assumed that all the villagers were Protestant. Confused, he hurried to ask his father what this meant, prompting a dialogue that left a deep impression on him.

This parable-like dialogue encapsulated a message of religious tolerance and unity that stayed with Canaan throughout his life. While the anecdote omits references to Muslims and Jews, later experiences broadened his perspective beyond intra-Christian sectarianism. His ethnographic travels involved learning about society, deepening his understanding of different cultures and beliefs beyond a rigid biblical one, and incorporating the inclusivity of various cultural and historical developments. In his memoir, Canaan recalls excursions and picnics he and his wife organized with their children. Just as he had explored the countryside with his father, his children discovered the land, gaining an appreciation for its diverse culinary and agricultural traditions.

Throughout his memoir, which focused extensively on his medical practice, Canaan offered his health education vision that transcends traditions, religions, sects, classes, and political autonomy. He promoted the vision as a scientific contribution to his national duty towards urban and rural children. In urban settings, Canaan documented children’s vulnerability to epidemics, such as malaria, typhoid, and tubercular peritonitis. In some sections, he attributed the spread of diseases to what he observed as unhygienic practices in the mingling of children and young people.19 He advocated for modern health education solutions in response and praised the methods he and his siblings used to engage children on hygiene issues. His sister, Badra, who trained as a kindergarten teacher and later became the headmistress of a Jerusalem school, practiced some of these methods. He outlined the routines of the school she led, which aimed to mitigate the spread of infection by inquiring about the children’s family health status before class entry each day. Canaan supported this practice, where each child was asked whether they or any family members were suffering from fever or other symptoms of malaria or typhoid. To achieve his vision, he found no harm in facilitating Western medical examinations of schoolchildren’s blood tests to investigate infection rates. However, he confronted Western preconceptions on diagnosis.

Among rural communities, Canaan’s memoir mentions the shortage of hospitals and infrastructure, such as asphalt roads in villages, which limited educational opportunities for village children to access schools in cities like Beirut or Constantinople. His ethnographic research reflected on cultural practices that both fostered and hindered child well-being. He identified harmful practices of the era that impacted child health, including pre-modern domestic practices he characterized as “primitive.”20 In “The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition,” he analyzed societal perceptions of hygiene among urban and rural populations, noting high child mortality rates caused by disease spread due to the fellahin’s reliance on “superstitious” beliefs. Paradoxically, he also acknowledged children’s strong immunity from exposure to these customs, illustrating the complex interplay between tradition and health in Palestinian childhood.21

Regarding the growing colonial projects and the harmful effects of the Nakba on children’s health, Canaan’s memoir recounts that despite his various disagreements with the missionary schools in the early modern era, he still saw a way to help children through them during the displacement following the Nakba in 1948. He offered continuous support for missionary schools that provided aid to Palestinians displaced in 1948, whether financially, medically, or through humanitarian means. For nineteen years, he prepared thousands of scrapbooks filled with magazine photos, wild plants, and flowers, all cut and assembled by hand. He distributed them to children, especially among refugees, at schools in the Syrian orphanage, Talitha Kumi, and others. He also documented the donations of children’s books, writing pads, paper, pencils, safety pins, cups, pictures for hanging, and firewood to the Syrian orphanage and other institutions. His lost manuscript on women in Palestine during the destruction of his Musrara house in 1948 would have offered invaluable insights into the social and reproductive systems that contributed to his vision of the childbearing practices of the era.

As such, Canaan’s biography demonstrates a complex view of childhood in his era. His childhood bridged multiple social worlds—urban and rural, traditional and modern, secular and religious, situating him in the center of transformations affecting child evolution. As an urban child, his childhood learning modes relied primarily on religious and communal engagements, and modern education models at home and school. These hybrid learning modes shaped his adulthood engagements. He approached Palestinian culture as a vibrant living tradition accumulated from a versatile package of ancient and modern civilizations and religions.22 His memoir thus captures a transitional moment in which overlapping forces of tradition, modernity, colonialism, and reformist vision shaped childhood.

Like other ethnographies, such as the work of Dalman, Canaan’s ethnographic research on Palestine is filled with recorded narratives, beliefs, songs, and rituals describing Palestinian children’s cultural learning. While contemporary approaches to learning often emphasize four primary learning styles—visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic—the cultural styles of learning to be investigated in Canaan and Dalman’s records are derived from an anthropology of childhood perspective. Sharif Kanaana provides anthropological approaches to understanding the cultural learning styles among Palestinians, including orality, imitation, mimicry, and observation.23 The learning styles that Kanaana proposes correspond to theories on learning through traditions offered by scholars such as Jan Vansina and Ruth Fennigan.24 These cultural learning styles frequently blend aspects of contemporary learning styles. For example, our analysis of Canaan’s biography revealed how these styles were embedded in the hybrid forms of urban child upbringing, where orality merges visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements, while imitation involves both visual and aural components.

This section focuses on children in rural areas by interpreting various recorded forms of orality, emulation, and observation practiced among children in Palestinian peasant communities’ rituals. Dalman’s documentation connects peasant rituals to those found in the Torah, suggesting they are extensions of historical practices from the Bible, offering traces of the Song of Songs, and his ethnographic records are meant to investigate means to achieve children’s salvation. Canaan, by contrast, sought sources of identity to establish Palestinians’ rootedness in the land, situating Palestinian children’s cultural lifestyle within peasants’ lived-religion practices, yet also providing biblical traces. Canaan and Dalman’s records failed to further investigate how traditions are learning tools for children, nor did later historical anthropologists of religion, such as James Grehan. The reason is that both ethnographic records and their historical analysis situate childhood within a romantic perspective that prevailed in their era, which aimed to favor their innocence instead of agency and sought children’s salvation within a biblical view.25 Through interpreting peasants’ rituals from the lens of children’s agency, the following sub-sections achieve a reading of aspects of children’s cultural learning in Canaan and Dalman’s records beyond these biblical perspectives, one rooted in the lived religious practice of everyday rituals and connected to educational theories.

In Oral Tradition as History, Jan Vansina discusses singing as a medium for preserving and transmitting oral traditions, particularly in African contexts. He views song as a performance art and a pedagogical tool—a way to encode and transmit history, values, and social norms through memorization and communal reinforcement.26 Juxtaposing this argument in the Palestinian context, Janette Habashi argues that oral traditions are pedagogical tools that enable children to position themselves as active participants in producing cultural life and as co-authors of their history.27 Following Vansina’s argument that song serves as structured knowledge transmission, this section analyzes how rain-seeking songs documented by Canaan and Dalman function as mnemonic devices in children’s learning, emphasizing child agency.

In the example of the rain-seeking ritual (istisqa’), the processions began when the shaykh called upon villagers to fast. Men, women, and children wore tattered clothes, led their animals, and made a pilgrimage to a nearby mountain shrine, pleading for God’s mercy. Before departing, villagers forgave one another in preparation for requesting divine forgiveness. At the start of the procession, children sang, sometimes danced, and used improvised instruments, such as tin cans (tanak) filled with stones for rhythmic percussion. The procession circled the shrine, entered it, and prayed. Children participated by singing, drumming, and praying until the rain fell. If the rain stopped, the process would be repeated the following year. Dalman recorded one of the rain-seeking songs as follows:

Children’s songs (Aboud village, Qalqilya):

Thus, by orally repeating these verses, the children went from house to house, knocking on doors until someone came out and sprinkled them with water, saying, “May God give you to drink through the mercy of your Lord.”

Canaan documented similar repetitions of oral verses in this and other contexts within his discussion of the lived religious practice. As a sign of approval and humility, the elders removed their head coverings when the children passed them, emphasizing that children are performers of critique and active cultural agents. The children sang:

Canaan also documented references to accusations of certain families as a cause of the Lord’s wrath:

To amplify the effect of the oral, the istisqa’ procession featured a wooden doll, “Umm al-Ghaith,” draped in colorful fabric to resemble a woman. Peasants carried these dolls, sang, and prayed for God’s mercy and the saints’ help, bringing rain. These dolls were also called “Shoshbel” when they sang, “Shoshbel, Shoshbel . . . we will not go except being wet,” which explains a doll’s clothing carried by one of the dervishes in the village.31 The doll accompanied children as they moved through the village, chanting rain songs.

Both Dalman and Canaan’s ethnographic sources of rain-seeking rituals reveal notable similarities in village practices of that era. The consistent mention of these traditions in both works lends credibility to their accounts and provides a reliable basis for interpreting children’s oral learning methods. The verses often began with a chant-like exchange in which children called upon God, blending complaint with plea. They then described the drought situation, asserting their innocence and offering a reason. Finally, the verses took the form of an oral “trial” of community practices, with children’s voices highlighting their struggle against extreme heat and the looming threat of famine.

According to Vansina, the singing tradition is not merely decorative or entertaining but a systematized form of knowledge transmission. In societies without writing, songs perform many of the roles written texts play in literate societies, such as preserving accuracy, guiding pedagogy, and structuring narrative memory.32 Records of the istisqa’ ritual provide that children’s involvement reflects a transgenerational transmission and describe what children learned as they practiced. First, children’s mnemonics through music in these verses, which are accompanied by melody, rhythm, and repetition, help children retain passages of historical content attributed to rituals of seeking rain. The songs are emotionally charged and use structured formulas and rhyming patterns that make information easier to memorize and recall. This makes singing particularly effective for transmitting the social practice accompanying the rain-seeking during drought.

Second, the accuracy of Dalman and Canaan’s recorded practice demonstrates communal participation and correction. Rain-seeking songs are performed in groups, which serves as a built-in error-correction system. If a child singer makes a mistake, the community may correct it during the performance. This reinforces collective memory and creates a shared version of the past that evolves slowly. Third, children learn these songs through listening and repetition. This process builds both oral competence and musical skill, reinforcing the memorization of vast narrative content.

Beyond memory and accuracy, performance also plays a crucial role in validating children’s voices within the ritual. The performance aspect of the ritual conveys the authority and legitimacy of the narrative introduced by children, such as in repeating “‘Ya Rabna, Ya Rabna, Ihna sghar, esh zanbna?’ (Oh, our Lord, we are small, what is our sin?).” Their narrative includes their perception of the societal virtues and demonstrates the influences of modernity and how they confronted them. Through the verses, children voiced injustices, attributing them to their status as peasant children—an often-overlooked perspective in discussions of Palestine’s transition to modernity. Children expressed these concerns by observing transformations among the shaykhs, representing village leaders and decision makers.

Children’s narratives in the istisqa’ songs reflected passive virtues too, such as deceit and false testimony practices by specific instigators of wrongdoing in the village like “‘Abdul-Jabbar,” “Abu Hababa,” and “Sheikh Shahada.” Explaining these actions as a sin led to injustice and warranted divine punishment, engaging with a core moral in religion: wrongdoing displaces goodness. In the songs, children also describe how shaykhs distinguished themselves from villagers by wearing shawls instead of traditional attire, describing it as a sinful act. These shawls symbolized the encroachment of modernity, the declining importance of agriculture, and the loss of local control over water resources.

The physical toll of these sins affects children directly, as reflected in phrases they recite like “My body is cooked by the sun,” which illustrates the exhaustion caused by extreme heat resulting from sin. Thus, by linking these sins to rain-seeking, performing rituals at shrines to seek God’s intervention against evil reforms these injustices and reclaims goodness.

The dolls “Umm al-Ghaith” and “Shoshbel” symbolize the role of inanimate objects in rain-request rituals, enriching the visual experience of the procession amid the heat and illustrating the “superstitions” that shaped children’s evolving cultural awareness. Yet, children prioritized the need for rain over the dolls and the celebration, signaling their emerging responsibility to recite the verses during difficult times. Further, these verses portray the mother as a helper or problem solver, making bread to combat the laziness of idle peasants while alleviating her children’s hunger. Here, “beating” symbolizes a harmful societal habit that persists today. Still, it may also encourage children to practice patience amid hunger and refrain from seeking help until their needs are met. In both scenarios, the children openly expressed their suffering, highlighting their difficulties with their parents due to the lack of rain.

The narrative produced by children in istisqa’ describes how they moved away from their innocent roles. Their processions and recitations challenged the romantic-era perception of childhood as an identity construct produced and maintained through the rhetoric of protection to maintain child innocence, which often overlooked children’s agency and reinforced their inequality.33 This perspective also contested the biblical interpretations, which portrayed children as vulnerable beings in need of salvation.34 As such, the istisqa’ ritual offers an insight into a genuine learning experience for children beyond these perceptions. Orality becomes a learning tool where children transmit historical knowledge while actively contributing to forming narratives on societal virtues and transformations.

Compared with the contemporary perspective on education, repeating these oral songs and their accompanying performative rituals can be understood as rote learning approaches that produce inactive citizens and mere receivers of knowledge.35 However, repetition in istisqa’ singing offered children communal legitimacy, opportunity for criticism, and agency in making the ritual and influencing cultural change. Such an approach challenged foreign actors’ educational goals inside modern schools during that era. These practices demonstrate how children absorbed communal knowledge and reinterpreted and critiqued societal norms—asserting moral judgments and shaping cultural memory, thus exercising their agency within and beyond the ritual structure.

Oral learning in urban areas differed significantly from rural settings due to various factors, notably environmental conditions and the city’s connection to modern influences, such as education, political organization, newly developed transport systems, cafes, and diverse state institutions. Urban residents, particularly in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, interacted with individuals of various nationalities and were more integrated with state structures, distancing themselves from the daily habits of peasants. Despite urban children being enrolled in modern education systems, many memoirs illustrate how oral learning persisted during that era. Canaan’s memoir mentions visits to peasants’ lands, and Wasif Jawhariyya’s memoir regarding his childhood is a notable example of children’s oral learning through storytelling (hakaya) and music.36 Although not representative of all urban children, Canaan and Jawhariyya’s experiences offer valuable insight into urban modes of oral learning.

In sum, children’s participation in oral rituals like the istisqa’ challenges long-standing narratives that depict them as passive recipients of tradition or subjects needing salvation. Instead, these performances show that children were critical agents—absorbing, adapting, and contesting cultural and religious values through song, ritual, and social commentary. Their voices reflect mnemonic and moral functions and a form of communal pedagogy grounded in shared performance and critique. Recognizing these practices as valid forms of learning compels us to reconsider dominant educational paradigms—particularly those that dismiss repetition, orality, and performance as pedagogically inferior. Furthermore, these rituals have profound implications for heritage preservation: they call for the protection and revitalization of children’s cultural practices not just as folklore, but as living educational systems deeply embedded in local epistemologies.

In The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold discusses emulation as a generative engagement with the environment, where learners of heritage crafts attune themselves to the same flows of material, perception, and action to produce ideal figures that represent the community’s cultural identity. His view centers on becoming similar by sensory participation and dwelling in the same experiential world, enabling learners to emulate goals and intentions rather than copying actions verbatim.37 Widad Kawar elaborates on methods through which embroidery skills were passed down through Palestinian generations, focusing on the role of emulation in preserving cultural heritage.38 Building on Ingold’s concept of sensory participation and Kawar’s insights into cultural continuity through craft, this section explores how Palestinian children emulated spiritual ideals through shrine rituals, vows, and healing practices. Across these diverse documented practices by Canaan, a coherent model emerges: heritage transmission was enacted through children’s bodily engagement with the sacred, where knowledge was felt, not just taught. These practices collectively formed an immersive pedagogy of sacred experience, transmitting heritage through bodily, sensory, and symbolic participation. Children did not simply observe shrine rituals; they enacted their power through play, fear, reverence, and imitation, often internalizing moral lessons that shaped their sense of self and the sacred.

In Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine, Canaan describes the sacred landscape, including shrines and their role. Shrines served as sacred worship sites and pedagogical environments where children’s senses, bodies, and imaginations were shaped. Typically located outside the village and surrounded by the residents’ cultivated lands, shrines became sacred locations where people sought refuge in cases of hardship, such as for healing from illness and rescue from drought or as places of protection for peasants’ belongings. According to Grehan, shrines also became cornerstones of an informal justice system, where oaths by the saint’s name at the shrine are considered an oral contract.39 Saints residing in these shrines are humans who possess specific qualities, deviant from the social norm or pious, supernatural or inherited, that attract village communities to grant them legitimacy to their deviance due to the belief in their intermediation with God. In many locations where saints of shrines lived, their virtues were subject to constant testing and corroboration.40 These shrines played a significant role in impacting children’s beliefs and values. Canaan relays a story from the mukhtar of Shu‘fat village about an incident from his childhood that illustrates how these shrines’ powers affected children:

Shrines also served as hubs for children’s educational upbringing. They included rooms used as a village kuttab. The shaykh or preacher resided in one room of these shrines and served as the teacher in another, as in the villages of Bayt Duqqu, Qalunya, and Abu Ghush. In Dayr Yassin, other rooms were used for prayer, washing the dead before burial, and hosting guests. Inside the shrine itself lay the wali’s tomb, and sometimes the tombs of their descendants, such as children and grandchildren, as in the shrine of Sitt Badriya.42 In some cases, sacred trees, such as oak, olive, and pistachio, grew nearby. The shaykh sometimes gathered with children to teach them there under these trees. The people of neighboring villages believed that these shrines, caves, sacred trees, wells, and springs possessed supernatural powers, and receiving an education in such places encouraged emulation of nature and its power.

Beyond spatial proximity to shrines, children engaged in rituals and healing practices that further deepened their embodied relationship with the sacred. Habitual visits to shrines involve adults preparing figurines made of glass, pearls, gold, and silver, which children carry when visiting the wali for healing and protection from the evil eye. Due to the many good deeds that saints were believed to have performed in these sacred places when asked for help, villagers offered gifts of gratitude. Canaan gives the example: “When a child is severely ill the mother implores a saint: ‘I beg you, O prophet David, to cure my son.’ Or in a more humble way, ‘I am your servant, O Friend of God, save my only child!’”43 Villagers used wood and plants found around shrines to create amulets (hijab) for protection against the evil eye, which children wore as necklaces or tied around livestock. Some plants, such as dates or a mixture of alum and salt, were burned as incense for sick children, while stones and pebbles from around or inside the shrine were soaked in water and given to children to drink for healing. In some places, clothing made from materials of the shrine or a sacred tree was believed to protect a child from all evil spirits.

Another layer of engagement came through parental vows and sacrificial acts, which linked children’s physical health and milestones to the moral economy of shrines. Many parents made vows (nathr) to the shrines for their children. For example, they would vow to al-Khadr:

Some vows were material, while others were actions. For example, a mother might say: “O my lady Mary, if my son Elyas walks, I shall light your staircase on both sides. O Lady Maryam, if my son Elias learns to walk, I will light candles on both sides of your shrine.”45 If the vow involved a sacrificial offering, the parents would circle the child three times around the shrine. If the child was old enough to walk, they would slaughter an animal and step over the flowing blood. Sometimes, the child’s forehead was anointed with the blood.

Rituals such as circumcision during festivals added a performative and communal dimension to sacred learning, reinforcing embodied collective identity and hierarchy. The circumcision of boys was a common practice during religious festivities at these shrines. During the Nabi Musa festival, tents were set up, and the event included music, prayers, and performances outside coffeehouses, such as shadow plays and the box of wonders, which entertained attendees, including children, with stories, images, decorations, mirrors, and colors. The circumcision ceremony involved dressing the boys in silk clothes, gold chains, and buttons according to the family’s social status. Children wore protective amulets (hijab) and stones to ward off the evil eye representing envy. The child and his relatives would circle the shrine, accompanied by a musical band and women’s ululations.46 Whether through the touch of blessed pebbles, the smell of burning incense, or the sight of ceremonial costumes, sensory experiences were central to how children internalized the sacred.

Children’s participation in shrine rituals—through their bodies, voices, and action—represents a form of immersive engagement. Children’s custodianship of these shrines illustrates how immersive ritual practices functioned as informal yet potent modes of cultural transmission. According to Grehan, the cult of serving the shrine would endure as long as sufficient people believed in its wali’s (holy person) sanctity. Walis of those shrines, who were once humans, had directly suffered the hardships of life, and through their own experience and memory, would know and understand the cares of ordinary believers.47 Here, immersive engagement becomes a pedagogical tool for children about their cultural heritage or being prepared to join this form of “sainthood,” that is, becoming sacred. While engagement with these folk healing practices in seeking the ideal involves difficult experiences that achieve a counter value to children’s innocence, it enables children’s involvement in the making of the sacred and breaking its rigidity by taking part in producing it. Also, while enhanced official religion practices replace these highly dependent on folk practices, children’s immersive engagements with making the sacred were hindered and replaced with rigid and official perceptions of the sacred.48

Outside the shrine context, domestic healing tools like the tasat al-ra‘ba extended this experiential pedagogy into everyday life, blending sacred inscriptions, storytelling, and bodily healing. Canaan documents the practice of “tasit al-ra‘ba” (fear bowl) or “tasit er-radjfeh” (fear cup). He describes this cup as a folk healing tool that Palestinians and neighboring communities used for medical purposes. It is a decorated metal bowl inscribed with phrases, filled with water, and drunk after specific prayers or recitations. Canaan traces the origin of this cup and its story, concluding that, according to a popular legend, benevolent jinn once used it for bathing. One day, the jinn left the bowl by a spring, where a passing human found it. Soon, its unique properties were discovered, leading to many imitations, all believed to possess the same powers. This story suggests that the cup’s influence stems not from the metal but from its inscriptions. According to Canaan, writing is a fundamental element in Eastern “superstitions,” and the cup’s healing properties derive from the Quranic verses, the names of God, angels, planets, and stars, and magical formulas inscribed around it. This is why the cup is considered sacred and treated with reverence.49

As its name suggests, the cup was used to counteract the effects of fear. A common belief held that fear, especially sudden shock, caused harmful symptoms such as fever and nervous seizures due to abrupt circulatory changes. Additionally, the cup was used for other ailments, particularly for snake and scorpion bites, but the practice has nearly disappeared today. Canaan documented some of the inscriptions found on various “fear cups”:

Canaan explains that the fear bowl’s effectiveness in healing patients was tied to the historical belief in “superstitions.” The connection between healing and magic arose when a person became ill or frightened, weakening their body and making them vulnerable to demonic forces or evil spirits, which were believed to cause illness. This condition was colloquially known as “samet badan” (body poisoning). The Bowl of Fear was thought to neutralize these toxins by blessing the water through its sacred inscriptions. Children who used the bowl emulated the healing experience and thereby reinforced the belief in the power of good to cancel out evil, a notion confirmed by Quranic texts and phrases like, “This blessed bowl is effective . . .” Since its power was believed to come from its inscriptions, using magic within a religious framework was considered beneficial. These practices did more than seek healing; they ritualized fear, inscribed it into sacred language, and offered children a tangible way to participate in the metaphysics of their community.

As such, while these highly dependent on “superstitions” healing practices are also replaced by modern medicalinterventions and official religious practices, they ceased to enable children to actively participate in maintaining the heritage and virtues of the village communities. Canaan proposed that receiving modern medical interventions reduced the mortality rates. However, these interventions reduced notable immunity resulting from these practices.51 Such an aspect of childhood as a recipient of knowledge about the ideal healing practice versus being a participant in its production interrupts the evolution of the child’s agency in questioning and experiencing the knowledge.

Observation, a culturally embedded form of learning, allowed Palestinian children to absorb and emulate their communities’ knowledge, values, and practices. In Tawfiq Canaan’s ethnographic records, children learned by watching and imitating their elders—particularly in agricultural and seasonal practices—thus internalizing a worldview rooted in weather patterns, nature-based wisdom, and ritual sayings. Far from passive onlookers, children were active participants in this intergenerational pedagogy, shaping their understanding of health, well-being, and communal identity through everyday observation. Observation involves directing attention toward a known phenomenon or showing intentional interest in something, whether a natural or unnatural occurrence or individual or collective behavior, to enhance perception. It aids in developing listening skills, improving communication, and understanding personal and collective needs.

In his studies on the “Folklore of the Seasons in Palestine” and “Plant-Lore in Palestinian Superstition,” Tawfiq Canaan presents the weather laws established by Palestinian farmers to organize their agricultural practices. Children in these practices learned from their elders through environmental observation, like weather, constellations, and sayings. For example, in the rainfall patterns, if rainfall moved from north to south, it was seen as a sign that the rain would stop soon, leading them to say: “Qaws hijaz al-matar (the Hijazi arc of rain).” If the rain moved from east to west, they called it “Qaws jarrar (the dragging arc).” A well-known agricultural saying was, “Awal al-mawsim la thoom (At the start of the season, do not hover over the fields).” The first ten days of the season were called “Turooh,” the second ten days “Nutooh,” and the third ten days “Futooh,” marking the gradual arrival of blessings.52 “The best rainfall occurred when the Pleiades constellation (Ath-Thurayya) and the Libra constellation (Al-Mizan) aligned from north to south in the sky,” with the saying: “Mawsim Ath-Thurayya ‘ajab min adab, fil-barr maal wafil-bahr thahab (The Pleiades season is astonishing in its prosperity—on land, it brings wealth, and at sea, it brings gold).”53 After heavy rainfall, they would say: “Al-hardoon bil‘ab bintu (The lizard plays with its daughter),” a phrase children repeated, referring to reptiles emerging from their burrows after heavy rain, followed by sunshine.54

Beyond observing rainfall, children actively participated in agricultural cycles such as the harvest seasons, spending nights with their elders in simple stone farmhouses built around the fields. They also joined evening gatherings in the orchards, where they sang and played after harvesting. They learned sayings like “Fi ayyam al-hasa’id, bnghani qasa’id (During harvest days, we sing poems).” Harvesting involved complex tasks such as building, carrying, loading, and cutting crops, yet workers often sang to pass the time. Regarding harvested fruits, they said “Al-khiyar bitfi ‘an al-qalb al-nar (Cucumbers cool the fire of the heart),” and “Al-bateekh, bakul minnu, bathla minnu, wa minnu batnqarish, wa bat‘am hissani minnu (Watermelon—I eat it, refresh myself with it, snack on it, and feed my horse from it).”55

These embodied moral lessons in food proverbs in daily life for Palestinian farmers and their families were passed down in childhood based on the observations of previous generations. By experiencing these traditions, children became convinced of their validity, adopting and repeating them to guide their village community in agricultural practices. Observation becomes a moral and social formation and children played a role in keeping these beliefs alive through participating in these observations, customs, and practices.

This article examines Tawfiq Canaan’s portrayal of childhood learning in early twentieth-century Palestine, where tradition, religion, and modernity intersect. Through memoir and ethnography, Canaan presents childhood as an active process of socialization, rooted in familial customs, oral storytelling, and communal rituals. He contrasts rural, tradition-based learning with the growing influence of colonial education and Western medical systems, recognizing the benefits of modern schooling while critiquing its disconnection from the cultural and moral realities of Palestinian life. His writings reveal childhood as a dynamic and contested space where cultural continuity and modern transformation converge.

Canaan’s unique perspective as a Western-trained physician and native ethnographer allows him to depict childhood as both resilient and adaptable. Learning occurs through embodied practices like rain-seeking songs and shrine rituals, positioning children not as passive recipients but as active participants in preserving cultural memory. These rituals provide children with moral and historical agency, countering colonial portrayals of Palestinian childhood as primitive or passive. Canaan’s work ultimately reclaims the cultural significance of childhood, emphasizing how local knowledge systems resist erasure and continue to shape community identity amid colonial pressures. Palestinian childhood today inherits the social and cultural tensions born from Canaan’s era. Emphasis on Canaan’s records of cultural portrayal of childhood revealed the loss of aspects of cultural continuity in children’s agency in preserving cultural memory.

Ruba Totah holds a PhD in social and cultural anthropology from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her research interests include transnationalism, intercultural and cross-cultural performing arts spaces, and religiosity. Her recent research focuses on the ethnomusicology of performing rituals within church communities around Jerusalem.