Madrasa (Arabic: مدرسة, madrasa pl. مدارس, madāris) is the Arabic word (of Semitic origin; viz Hebrew midrash) for any type of educational institution, whether secular or religious (of any religion). It is variously transliterated as madrasah, madarasaa, medresa, madrassa, madraza, madarsa, medrese etc. In English the word normally specifically means any type of religious school or college for the study of the Islamic religion, though this may not be the only subject studied. Today, 20,000 Madrassas educate over 1.5 million students per year.
Definition
The word madrasa is derived from the triconsonantal Semitic root د-ر-س D-R-S 'to learn, study', through the wazn (form/stem) (مفعل(ة mafʿal(ah), meaning a place where X is done. Therefore, madrasa literally means "a place where learning and studying are done". The word is also present as a loanword with the same innocuous meaning in many Arabic-influenced languages, such as: Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Persian, Turkish, Azeri, Kurdish, Indonesian, Malay and Bosnian / Croatian. In the Arabic language, the word مدرسة madrasa simply means the same as school does in the English language, whether that is private, public or parochial school, as well as for any primary or secondary school whether Muslim, non-Muslim, or secular. Unlike the understanding of the word school in British English, the word madrasa is like the term school in American English, in that it can refer to a university-level or post-graduate school as well. For example, in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Modern Period, madrasas had lower schools and specialized schools where the students became known as danişmends.The usual Arabic word for a university, however, is simply جامعة (ǧāmiʿah). The Hebrew cognate midrasha also connotes the meaning of a place of learning; the related term midrash literally refers to study or learning, but has acquired mystical and religious connotations.
However, in English, the term madrasa usually refers to the specifically Islamic institutions. A typical Islamic school usually offers two courses of study: a ḥifẓ course teaching memorization of the Qur'an (the person who commits the entire Qur'an to memory is called a ḥāfiẓ); and an ʿālim course leading the candidate to become an accepted scholar in the community. A regular curriculum includes courses in Arabic, tafsir (Qur'anic interpretation), šarīʿah (Islamic law), hadiths (recorded sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad), mantiq (logic), and Muslim history. In the Ottoman Empire, during the Early Modern Period, the study of hadiths was introduced by Süleyman I. Depending on the educational demands, some madrasas also offer additional advanced courses in Arabic literature, English and other foreign languages, as well as science and world history. Ottoman madrasas along with religious teachings also taught "styles of writing, grammary, syntax, poetry, composition, natural sciences, political sciences, and etiquette."
People of all ages attend, and many often move on to becoming imams. The certificate of an ‘ālim for example, requires approximately twelve years of study. A good number of the ḥuffāẓ (plural of ḥāfiẓ) are the product of the madrasas. The madrasas also resemble colleges, where people take evening classes and reside in dormitories. An important function of the madrasas is to admit orphans and poor children in order to provide them with education and training. Madrasas may enroll female students; however, they study separately from the men.
Early history
The first institute of madrasa education was at the estate of Hazrat Zaid bin Arkam near a hill called Safa, where Prophet Muhammad was the teacher and the students were some of his followers. After Hijjah (migration) the madrasa of "Suffa" was established in Madina on the east side of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi mosque. Hazrat 'Ubada bin Samit was appointed there by the prophet as teacher and among the students. In the curriculum of the madrasa, there were teachings of The Qur'an,The Hadith, fara'iz, tajweed, genealogy, treatises of first aid etc. There were also trainings of horse-riding, art of war, handwriting and calligraphy, athletics and martial arts. The first part of madrasa based education is estimated from the first day of "nabuwwat" to the first portion of the "Umaiya" caliphate.
Established in 859, Ǧāmiʿat al-Qarawiyyīn (located in al-Qarawiyyīn Mosque) in the city of Fas, Morocco, is considered the oldest university in the world by some scholars, though the existence of universities in the medieval Muslim world is debated. It was founded by Fāṭimah al-Fihrī, the daughter of a wealthy merchant named Muḥammad al-Fihrī. This was later followed by the establishment of al-Azhar in 959 in Cairo, Egypt.
During the late ‘Abbāsid period, the Seljuk vizier Niẓām al-Mulk created one of the first major official academic institutions known in history as the Madrasah Niẓāmiyyah, based on the informal maǧālis (sessions of the shaykhs). Niẓām al-Mulk, who would later be murdered by the Assassins (Ḥaššāšīn), created a system of state madrasas (in his time they were called the Niẓāmiyyahs, named after him) in various ‘Abbāsid cities at the end of the 11th century.
During the rule of the Fatimid and Mamluk dynasties and their successor states in the medieval Middle East, many of the ruling elite founded madrasas through a religious endowment known as the waqf. Not only was the madrasa a potent symbol of status but it was an effective means of transmitting wealth and status to their descendants. Especially during the Mamlūk period, when only former slaves could assume power, the sons of the ruling Mamlūk elite were unable to inherit. Guaranteed positions within the new madrasas thus allowed them to maintain status. Madrasas built in this period include the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Ḥasan in Cairo.
Dimitri Gutas and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy consider the period between the 11th and 14th centuries to be the "Golden Age" of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, initiated by al-Ghazali's successful integration of logic into the madrasa curriculum and the subsequent rise of Avicennism.
At the beginning of the Caliphate or Islamic Empire, the reliance on courts initially confined sponsorship and scholarly activities to major centers. Within several centuries, the development of Muslim educational institutions such as the madrasa and masjid eventually introduced such activities to provincial towns and dispersed them across the Islamic legal schools and Sufi orders. In addition to religious subjects, they also taught the "rational sciences," as varied as mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, alchemy, philosophy, magic, and occultism, depending on the curriculum of the specific institution in question. The madrasas, however, were not centers of advanced scientific study; scientific advances in Islam were usually carried out by scholars working under the patronage of royal courts. During this time,[when?] the Caliphate experienced a growth in literacy, having the highest literacy rate of the Middle Ages, comparable to classical Athens' literacy in antiquity but on a much larger scale. The emergence of the maktab and madrasa institutions played a fundamental role in the relatively high literacy rates of the medieval Islamic world.
The following excerpt provides a brief synopsis of the historical origins and starting points for the teachings that took place in the Ottoman madrasas in the Early Modern Period:
"Taşköprülüzâde's concept of knowledge and his division of the sciences provides a starting point for a study of learning and medrese education in the Ottoman Empire. Taşköprülüzâde recognizes four stages of knowledge—spiritual, intellectual, oral and written. Thus all the sciences fall into one of these seven categories: calligraphic sciences, oral sciences, intellectual sciences, spiritual sciences, theoretical rational sciences, practical rational sciences. The first Ottoman medrese was created in İznik in 1331, when a converted Church building was assigned as a medrese to a famous scholar, Dâvûd of Kayseri. Suleyman made an important change in the hierarchy of Ottoman medreses. He established four general medreses and two more for specialized studies, one devoted to the ḥadīṯ and the other to medicine. He gave the highest ranking to these and thus established the hierarchy of the medreses which was to continue until the end of the empire."
Elementary education
In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Like madrasas (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to an endowed mosque. In the 11th century, the famous Persian Islamic philosopher and teacher Ibn Sīnā (known as Avicenna in the West), in one of his books, wrote a chapter about the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of competition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates. Ibn Sīnā described the curriculum of a maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a maktab school.
Primary education
Ibn Sīnā wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills).
Secondary education
Ibn Sīnā refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as a period of specialization when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be allowed to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account.
Higher education
During its formative period, the term "madrasa" referred to a higher education institution, whose curriculum initially included only the "religious sciences", whilst philosophy and the secular sciences were often excluded. The curriculum slowly began to diversify, with many later madrasas teaching both the religious and the "secular sciences", such as logic, mathematics and philosophy. Some madrasas further extended their curriculum to history, politics, ethics, music, metaphysics, medicine, astronomy and chemistry. The curriculum of a madrasa was usually set by its founder, but most generally taught both the religious sciences and the physical sciences. Madrasas were established throughout the Islamic world, the most famous being the 10th century al-Azhar University and the 11th century Niẓāmiyyah, as well as 75 madrasas in Cairo, 51 in Damascus and up to 44 in Aleppo between 1155 and 1260. Many more were also established in the Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Granada (Madrasah of Granada), Murcia, Almería, Valencia and Cádiz during the Caliphate of Córdoba.
In the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period, "Madrasas were divided into lower and specialized levels, which reveals that there was a sense of elevation in school. Students who studied in the specialized schools after completing courses in the lower levels became known as danişmends."
While "madrasa" can now refer to any type of school, the term "madrasa" was originally used to refer more specifically to a medieval Islamic centre of learning, mainly teaching Islamic law and theology, usually affiliated with a mosque, and funded by an early charitable trust known as waqf.
Law school
Madrasas were largely centered on the study of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). The ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs wa-l-ʾiftāʾ ("license to teach and issue legal opinions") in the medieval Islamic legal education system had its origins in the 9th century after the formation of the maḏāhib (schools of jurisprudence). George Makdisi considers the ʾiǧāzah to be the origin of the European doctorate. However, in an earlier article, he considered the ʾiǧāzah to be of "fundamental difference" to the medieval doctorate, since the former was awarded by an individual teacher-scholar not obliged to follow any formal criteria, whereas the latter was conferred on the student by the collective authority of the faculty. To obtain an ʾiǧāzah, a student "had to study in a guild school of law, usually four years for the basic undergraduate course" and ten or more years for a post-graduate course. The "doctorate was obtained after an oral examination to determine the originality of the candidate's theses", and to test the student's "ability to defend them against all objections, in disputations set up for the purpose." These were scholarly exercises practiced throughout the student's "career as a graduate student of law." After students completed their post-graduate education, they were awarded ijazas giving them the status of faqīh 'scholar of jurisprudence', muftī 'scholar competent in issuing fatwās', and mudarris 'teacher'.
The Arabic term ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs was awarded to Islamic scholars who were qualified to teach. According to Makdisi, the Latin title licentia docendi 'license to teach' in the European university may have been a translation of the Arabic, but the underlying concept was very different. A significant difference between the ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs and the licentia docendi was that the former was awarded by the individual scholar-teacher, while the latter was awarded by the chief official of the university, who represented the collective faculty, rather than the individual scholar-teacher.
Much of the study in the madrasa college centered on examining whether certain opinions of law were orthodox. This scholarly process of "determining orthodoxy began with a question which the Muslim layman, called in that capacity mustaftī, presented to a jurisconsult, called mufti, soliciting from him a response, called fatwa, a legal opinion (the religious law of Islam covers civil as well as religious matters). The mufti (professor of legal opinions) took this question, studied it, researched it intensively in the sacred scriptures, in order to find a solution to it. This process of scholarly research was called iǧtihād, literally, the exertion of one's efforts to the utmost limit."
Medical school
Though Islamic medicine was most often taught at the bimaristan teaching hospitals, there were also several medical madrasas dedicated to the teaching of medicine. For example, of the 155 madrasa colleges in 15th century Damascus, three of them were medical schools. No medical degrees were granted to students, as there was no faculty that could issue them. Therefore no system of examination and certification ever developed in the Islamic tradition, in contrast with medieval Europe.
In the Early Modern Period in the Ottoman Empire, "Suleyman I added new curriculums ['sic'] to the Ottoman medreses of which one was medicine, which alongside studying of the ḥadīṯ was given highest rank."
Madrasa and university
Note: The word ǧāmiʿah (Arabic: جامعة) simply means 'university'. For more information, see Islamic university (disambiguation).
There is disagreement whether madrasas ever became universities. Scholars like Arnold H. Green and Hossein Nasr have argued that starting in the 10th century, some medieval Islamic madrasas indeed became universities. George Makdisi and others, however, argue that the European university has no parallel in the medieval Islamic world. Darleen Pryds questions this view, pointing out that madrasas and European universities in the Mediterranean region shared similar foundations by princely patrons and were intended to provide loyal administrators to further the rulers' agenda. Other scholars regard the university as uniquely European in origin and characteristics.
al-Qarawiyyīn University in Fez, Morocco is recognized by many historians as the oldest degree-granting university in the world, having been founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri. While the madrasa college could also issue degrees at all levels, the jāmi`ahs (such as al-Qarawiyyīn and al-Azhar University) differed in the sense that they were larger institutions, more universal in terms of their complete source of studies, had individual faculties for different subjects, and could house a number of mosques, madrasas, and other institutions within them. Such an institution has thus been described as an "Islamic university".
Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in 975 by the Isma‘īlī Shī‘ī Fatimid dynasty as a ǧāmiʿah, had individual faculties for a theological seminary, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy and logic in Islamic philosophy. The postgraduate doctorate in law was only obtained after "an oral examination to determine the originality of the candidate's theses", and to test the student's "ability to defend them against all objections, in disputations set up for the purpose." ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī also delivered lectures on Islamic medicine at al-Azhar, while Maimonides delivered lectures on medicine and astronomy there during the time of Saladin. Another early ǧāmiʿah was the Niẓāmīyah of Baghdād (founded 1091), which has been called the "largest university of the Medieval world". Mustansiriya University, established by the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Mustanṣir in 1233, in addition to teaching the religious subjects, offered courses dealing with philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences.
However, the classification of madrasas as "universities" is disputed on the question of understanding of each institution on its own terms. In madrasas, the ijāzahs were only issued in one field, the Islamic religious law of šarīʿah, and in no other field of learning. Other academic subjects, including the natural sciences, philosophy and literary studies, were only treated "ancillary" to the study of the Sharia. For example, a natural science like astronomy was only studied (if at all) to supply religious needs, like the time for prayer. This is why Ptolemaic astronomy was considered adequate, and is still taught in some modern day madrasas. The Islamic law undergraduate degree from al-Azhar, the most prestigious madrasa, was traditionally granted without final examinations, but on the basis of the students' attentive attendance to courses. In contrast to the medieval doctorate which was granted by the collective authority of the faculty, the Islamic degree was not granted by the teacher to the pupil based on any formal criteria, but remained a "personal matter, the sole prerogative of the person bestowing it; no one could force him to give one".
Medievalist specialists who define the university as a legally autonomous corporation disagree with the term "university" for the Islamic madrasas and jāmi‘ahs because the medieval university (from Latin universitas) was structurally different, being a legally autonomous corporation rather than a waqf institution like the madrasa and ǧāmiʿah. Despite the many similarities, medieval specialists have coined the term "Islamic college" for madrasa and ǧāmiʿah to differentiated them from the legally autonomous corporations that the medieval European universities were. In a sense, the madrasa resembles a university college in that it has most of the features of a university, but lacks the corporate element. Toby Huff summarizes the difference as follows:
From a structural and legal point of view, the madrasa and the university were contrasting types. Whereas the madrasa was a pious endowment under the law of religious and charitable foundations (waqf), the universities of Europe were legally autonomous corporate entities that had many legal rights and privileges. These included the capacity to make their own internal rules and regulations, the right to buy and sell property, to have legal representation in various forums, to make contracts, to sue and be sued."
As Muslim institutions of higher learning, the madrasa had the legal designation of waqf. In central and eastern Islamic lands, the view that the madrasa, as a charitable endowment, will remain under the control of the donor (and their descendent), resulted in a "spurt" of establishment of madrasas in the 11th and 12th centuries. However, in Western Islamic lands, where the Maliki views prohibited donors from controlling their endowment, madrasas were not as popular. Unlike the corporate designation of Western institutions of higher learning, the waqf designation seemed to have led to the exclusion of non-orthodox religious subjects such a philosophy and natural science from the curricula. The madrasa of al-Qarawiyyīn, one of the two surviving madrasas that predate the founding of the earliest medieval universities and are thus claimed to be the "first universities" by some authors, has acquired official university status as late as 1947. The other, al-Azhar, did acquire this status in name and essence only in the course of numerous reforms during the 19th and 20th century, notably the one of 1961 which introduced non-religious subjects to its curriculum, such as economics, engineering, medicine, and agriculture. It should also be noted that many medieval universities were run for centuries as Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools prior to their formal establishment as universitas scholarium; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the university dates back to the 6th century AD, thus well preceding the earliest madrasas. George Makdisi, who has published most extensively on the topic concludes in his comparison between the two institutions:
Thus the university, as a form of social organization, was peculiar to medieval Europe. Later, it was exported to all parts of the world, including the Muslim East; and it has remained with us down to the present day. But back in the middle ages, outside of Europe, there was nothing anything quite like it anywhere.
Nevertheless, Makdisi has asserted that the European university borrowed many of its features from the Islamic madrasa, including the concepts of a degree and doctorate. Makdisi and Hugh Goddard have also highlighted other terms and concepts now used in modern universities which most likely have Islamic origins, including "the fact that we still talk of professors holding the 'Chair' of their subject" being based on the "traditional Islamic pattern of teaching where the professor sits on a chair and the students sit around him", the term 'academic circles' being derived from the way in which Islamic students "sat in a circle around their professor", and terms such as "having 'fellows', 'reading' a subject, and obtaining 'degrees', can all be traced back" to the Islamic concepts of ʾaṣḥāb ("companions, as of the prophet Muhammad"), qirāʾah ("reading aloud the Qur'an") and ʾiǧāzah ("license to teach") respectively. Makdisi has listed eighteen such parallels in terminology which can be traced back to their roots in Islamic education. Some of the practices now common in modern universities which Makdisi and Goddard trace back to an Islamic root include "practices such as delivering inaugural lectures, wearing academic robes, obtaining doctorates by defending a thesis, and even the idea of academic freedom are also modelled on Islamic custom." The Islamic scholarly system of fatwā and ʾiǧmāʿ, meaning opinion and consensus respectively, formed the basis of the "scholarly system the West has practised in university scholarship from the Middle Ages down to the present day." According to Makdisi and Goddard, "the idea of academic freedom" in universities was also "modelled on Islamic custom" as practiced in the medieval Madrasa system from the 9th century. Islamic influence was "certainly discernible in the foundation of the first delibrately planned university" in Europe, the University of Naples Federico II founded by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1224.
However, all of these facets of medieval university life are considered by standard scholarship to be independent medieval European developments with no tracable Islamic influence. Generally, some reviewers have pointed out the strong inclination of Makdisi of overstating his case by simply resting on "the accumulation of close parallels", but all the while failing to point to convincing channels of transmission between the Muslim and Christian world. Norman Daniel points out that the Arab equivalent of the Latin disputation, the taliqa, was reserved for the ruler's court, not the madrasa, and that the actual differences between Islamic fiqh and medieval European civil law were profound. The taliqa only reached Islamic Spain, the only likely point of transmission, after the establishment of the first medieval universities. In fact, there is no Latin translation of the taliqa and, most importantly, no evidence of Latin scholars ever showing awareness of Arab influence on the Latin method of disputation, something they would have certainly found noteworthy. Rather, it was the medieval reception of the Greek Organon which set the scholastic sic et non in motion. Daniel concludes that resemblances in method had more to with the two religions having "common problems: to reconcile the conflicting statements of their own authorities, and to safeguard the data of revelation from the impact of Greek philosophy"; thus Christian scholasticism and similar Arab concepts should be viewed in terms of a parallel occurrence, not of the transmission of ideas from one to the other, a view shared by Hugh Kennedy.
Tony Huff, in a discussion of Makdisi's hypothesis, concludes:
It remains the case that no equivalent of the bachelor's degree, the licentia docendi, or higher degrees ever emerged in the medieval or early modern Islamic madrasas.
Female education
From around 750, during the Abbasid Caliphate, women “became renowned for their brains as well as their beauty”. In particular, many well known women of the time were trained from childhood in music, dancing and poetry. Mahbuba was one of these. Another feminine figure to be remembered for her achievements was Tawaddud “a slave girl who was said to have been bought at great cost by Harūn ar-Rašīd because she had passed her examinations by the most eminent scholars in astronomy, medicine, law, philosophy, music, history, Arabic grammar, literature, theology and chess”. Moreover, among the most prominent feminine figures was Shuhda who was known as “the Scholar” or “the Pride of Women” during the 12th century in Baghdad. Despite the recognition of women’s aptitudes during the Abbasid dynasty, all these came to an end in Iraq with the sack of Baghdad in 1258.
Women played an important role in the foundations of many Islamic educational institutions, such as Fatima al-Fihri's founding of the University of Al Karaouine in 859. This continued through to the Ayyubid dynasty in the 12th and 13th centuries, when 160 mosques and madrasas were established in Damascus, 26 of which were funded by women through the Waqf (charitable trust) system. Half of all the royal patrons for these institutions were also women.
According to the Sunni scholar Ibn ʿAsākir in the 12th century, there were opportunities for female education in the medieval Islamic world, writing that women could study, earn ijazahs (academic degrees), and qualify as scholars and teachers. This was especially the case for learned and scholarly families, who wanted to ensure the highest possible education for both their sons and daughters. Ibn Asakir had himself studied under 80 different female teachers in his time. Female education in the Islamic world was inspired by Muhammad's wives, such as Khadijah, a successful businesswoman. According to a hadith attributed to Muhammad, he praised the women of Medina because of their desire for religious knowledge:
"How splendid were the women of the ansar; shame did not prevent them from becoming learned in the faith."
While it was not common for women to enroll as students in formal classes, it was common for women to attend informal lectures and study sessions at mosques, madrasas and other public places. While there were no legal restrictions on female education, some men did not approve of this practice, such as Muhammad ibn al-Hajj (d. 1336) who was appalled at the behaviour of some women who informally audited lectures in his time:
"[Consider] what some women do when people gather with a shaykh to hear [the recitation of] books. At that point women come, too, to hear the readings; the men sit in one place, the women facing them. It even happens at such times that some of the women are carried away by the situation; one will stand up, and sit down, and shout in a loud voice. [Moreover,] her 'awra will appear; in her house, their exposure would be forbidden — how can it be allowed in a mosque, in the presence of men?"
The term ʿawrah is often translated as "that which is indecent", which usually meant the exposure of anything other than a woman's face and hands, although scholarly interpretations of the ʿawrah and ḥiǧāb have always tended to vary, with some more or less strict than others.
While women accounted for no more than one percent of Islamic scholars prior to the 12th century, there was a large increase of female scholars after this. In the 15th century, Al-Sakhawi devotes an entire volume of his 12-volume biographical dictionary aḍ-Ḍawʾ al-lamiʿ to female scholars, giving information on 1,075 of them. More recently, the scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi, currently a researcher from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, has written 40 volumes on the "muḥaddiṯāt" (the women scholars of ḥadīṯ), and found at least 8000 of them.
Definition
The word madrasa is derived from the triconsonantal Semitic root د-ر-س D-R-S 'to learn, study', through the wazn (form/stem) (مفعل(ة mafʿal(ah), meaning a place where X is done. Therefore, madrasa literally means "a place where learning and studying are done". The word is also present as a loanword with the same innocuous meaning in many Arabic-influenced languages, such as: Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Persian, Turkish, Azeri, Kurdish, Indonesian, Malay and Bosnian / Croatian. In the Arabic language, the word مدرسة madrasa simply means the same as school does in the English language, whether that is private, public or parochial school, as well as for any primary or secondary school whether Muslim, non-Muslim, or secular. Unlike the understanding of the word school in British English, the word madrasa is like the term school in American English, in that it can refer to a university-level or post-graduate school as well. For example, in the Ottoman Empire during the Early Modern Period, madrasas had lower schools and specialized schools where the students became known as danişmends.The usual Arabic word for a university, however, is simply جامعة (ǧāmiʿah). The Hebrew cognate midrasha also connotes the meaning of a place of learning; the related term midrash literally refers to study or learning, but has acquired mystical and religious connotations.
However, in English, the term madrasa usually refers to the specifically Islamic institutions. A typical Islamic school usually offers two courses of study: a ḥifẓ course teaching memorization of the Qur'an (the person who commits the entire Qur'an to memory is called a ḥāfiẓ); and an ʿālim course leading the candidate to become an accepted scholar in the community. A regular curriculum includes courses in Arabic, tafsir (Qur'anic interpretation), šarīʿah (Islamic law), hadiths (recorded sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad), mantiq (logic), and Muslim history. In the Ottoman Empire, during the Early Modern Period, the study of hadiths was introduced by Süleyman I. Depending on the educational demands, some madrasas also offer additional advanced courses in Arabic literature, English and other foreign languages, as well as science and world history. Ottoman madrasas along with religious teachings also taught "styles of writing, grammary, syntax, poetry, composition, natural sciences, political sciences, and etiquette."
People of all ages attend, and many often move on to becoming imams. The certificate of an ‘ālim for example, requires approximately twelve years of study. A good number of the ḥuffāẓ (plural of ḥāfiẓ) are the product of the madrasas. The madrasas also resemble colleges, where people take evening classes and reside in dormitories. An important function of the madrasas is to admit orphans and poor children in order to provide them with education and training. Madrasas may enroll female students; however, they study separately from the men.
Early history
The first institute of madrasa education was at the estate of Hazrat Zaid bin Arkam near a hill called Safa, where Prophet Muhammad was the teacher and the students were some of his followers. After Hijjah (migration) the madrasa of "Suffa" was established in Madina on the east side of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi mosque. Hazrat 'Ubada bin Samit was appointed there by the prophet as teacher and among the students. In the curriculum of the madrasa, there were teachings of The Qur'an,The Hadith, fara'iz, tajweed, genealogy, treatises of first aid etc. There were also trainings of horse-riding, art of war, handwriting and calligraphy, athletics and martial arts. The first part of madrasa based education is estimated from the first day of "nabuwwat" to the first portion of the "Umaiya" caliphate.
Established in 859, Ǧāmiʿat al-Qarawiyyīn (located in al-Qarawiyyīn Mosque) in the city of Fas, Morocco, is considered the oldest university in the world by some scholars, though the existence of universities in the medieval Muslim world is debated. It was founded by Fāṭimah al-Fihrī, the daughter of a wealthy merchant named Muḥammad al-Fihrī. This was later followed by the establishment of al-Azhar in 959 in Cairo, Egypt.
During the late ‘Abbāsid period, the Seljuk vizier Niẓām al-Mulk created one of the first major official academic institutions known in history as the Madrasah Niẓāmiyyah, based on the informal maǧālis (sessions of the shaykhs). Niẓām al-Mulk, who would later be murdered by the Assassins (Ḥaššāšīn), created a system of state madrasas (in his time they were called the Niẓāmiyyahs, named after him) in various ‘Abbāsid cities at the end of the 11th century.
During the rule of the Fatimid and Mamluk dynasties and their successor states in the medieval Middle East, many of the ruling elite founded madrasas through a religious endowment known as the waqf. Not only was the madrasa a potent symbol of status but it was an effective means of transmitting wealth and status to their descendants. Especially during the Mamlūk period, when only former slaves could assume power, the sons of the ruling Mamlūk elite were unable to inherit. Guaranteed positions within the new madrasas thus allowed them to maintain status. Madrasas built in this period include the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Ḥasan in Cairo.
Dimitri Gutas and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy consider the period between the 11th and 14th centuries to be the "Golden Age" of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, initiated by al-Ghazali's successful integration of logic into the madrasa curriculum and the subsequent rise of Avicennism.
At the beginning of the Caliphate or Islamic Empire, the reliance on courts initially confined sponsorship and scholarly activities to major centers. Within several centuries, the development of Muslim educational institutions such as the madrasa and masjid eventually introduced such activities to provincial towns and dispersed them across the Islamic legal schools and Sufi orders. In addition to religious subjects, they also taught the "rational sciences," as varied as mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, alchemy, philosophy, magic, and occultism, depending on the curriculum of the specific institution in question. The madrasas, however, were not centers of advanced scientific study; scientific advances in Islam were usually carried out by scholars working under the patronage of royal courts. During this time,[when?] the Caliphate experienced a growth in literacy, having the highest literacy rate of the Middle Ages, comparable to classical Athens' literacy in antiquity but on a much larger scale. The emergence of the maktab and madrasa institutions played a fundamental role in the relatively high literacy rates of the medieval Islamic world.
The following excerpt provides a brief synopsis of the historical origins and starting points for the teachings that took place in the Ottoman madrasas in the Early Modern Period:
"Taşköprülüzâde's concept of knowledge and his division of the sciences provides a starting point for a study of learning and medrese education in the Ottoman Empire. Taşköprülüzâde recognizes four stages of knowledge—spiritual, intellectual, oral and written. Thus all the sciences fall into one of these seven categories: calligraphic sciences, oral sciences, intellectual sciences, spiritual sciences, theoretical rational sciences, practical rational sciences. The first Ottoman medrese was created in İznik in 1331, when a converted Church building was assigned as a medrese to a famous scholar, Dâvûd of Kayseri. Suleyman made an important change in the hierarchy of Ottoman medreses. He established four general medreses and two more for specialized studies, one devoted to the ḥadīṯ and the other to medicine. He gave the highest ranking to these and thus established the hierarchy of the medreses which was to continue until the end of the empire."
Elementary education
In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Like madrasas (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to an endowed mosque. In the 11th century, the famous Persian Islamic philosopher and teacher Ibn Sīnā (known as Avicenna in the West), in one of his books, wrote a chapter about the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of competition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates. Ibn Sīnā described the curriculum of a maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a maktab school.
Primary education
Ibn Sīnā wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills).
Secondary education
Ibn Sīnā refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as a period of specialization when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be allowed to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account.
Higher education
During its formative period, the term "madrasa" referred to a higher education institution, whose curriculum initially included only the "religious sciences", whilst philosophy and the secular sciences were often excluded. The curriculum slowly began to diversify, with many later madrasas teaching both the religious and the "secular sciences", such as logic, mathematics and philosophy. Some madrasas further extended their curriculum to history, politics, ethics, music, metaphysics, medicine, astronomy and chemistry. The curriculum of a madrasa was usually set by its founder, but most generally taught both the religious sciences and the physical sciences. Madrasas were established throughout the Islamic world, the most famous being the 10th century al-Azhar University and the 11th century Niẓāmiyyah, as well as 75 madrasas in Cairo, 51 in Damascus and up to 44 in Aleppo between 1155 and 1260. Many more were also established in the Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Granada (Madrasah of Granada), Murcia, Almería, Valencia and Cádiz during the Caliphate of Córdoba.
In the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period, "Madrasas were divided into lower and specialized levels, which reveals that there was a sense of elevation in school. Students who studied in the specialized schools after completing courses in the lower levels became known as danişmends."
While "madrasa" can now refer to any type of school, the term "madrasa" was originally used to refer more specifically to a medieval Islamic centre of learning, mainly teaching Islamic law and theology, usually affiliated with a mosque, and funded by an early charitable trust known as waqf.
Law school
Madrasas were largely centered on the study of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). The ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs wa-l-ʾiftāʾ ("license to teach and issue legal opinions") in the medieval Islamic legal education system had its origins in the 9th century after the formation of the maḏāhib (schools of jurisprudence). George Makdisi considers the ʾiǧāzah to be the origin of the European doctorate. However, in an earlier article, he considered the ʾiǧāzah to be of "fundamental difference" to the medieval doctorate, since the former was awarded by an individual teacher-scholar not obliged to follow any formal criteria, whereas the latter was conferred on the student by the collective authority of the faculty. To obtain an ʾiǧāzah, a student "had to study in a guild school of law, usually four years for the basic undergraduate course" and ten or more years for a post-graduate course. The "doctorate was obtained after an oral examination to determine the originality of the candidate's theses", and to test the student's "ability to defend them against all objections, in disputations set up for the purpose." These were scholarly exercises practiced throughout the student's "career as a graduate student of law." After students completed their post-graduate education, they were awarded ijazas giving them the status of faqīh 'scholar of jurisprudence', muftī 'scholar competent in issuing fatwās', and mudarris 'teacher'.
The Arabic term ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs was awarded to Islamic scholars who were qualified to teach. According to Makdisi, the Latin title licentia docendi 'license to teach' in the European university may have been a translation of the Arabic, but the underlying concept was very different. A significant difference between the ʾiǧāzat at-tadrīs and the licentia docendi was that the former was awarded by the individual scholar-teacher, while the latter was awarded by the chief official of the university, who represented the collective faculty, rather than the individual scholar-teacher.
Much of the study in the madrasa college centered on examining whether certain opinions of law were orthodox. This scholarly process of "determining orthodoxy began with a question which the Muslim layman, called in that capacity mustaftī, presented to a jurisconsult, called mufti, soliciting from him a response, called fatwa, a legal opinion (the religious law of Islam covers civil as well as religious matters). The mufti (professor of legal opinions) took this question, studied it, researched it intensively in the sacred scriptures, in order to find a solution to it. This process of scholarly research was called iǧtihād, literally, the exertion of one's efforts to the utmost limit."
Medical school
Though Islamic medicine was most often taught at the bimaristan teaching hospitals, there were also several medical madrasas dedicated to the teaching of medicine. For example, of the 155 madrasa colleges in 15th century Damascus, three of them were medical schools. No medical degrees were granted to students, as there was no faculty that could issue them. Therefore no system of examination and certification ever developed in the Islamic tradition, in contrast with medieval Europe.
In the Early Modern Period in the Ottoman Empire, "Suleyman I added new curriculums ['sic'] to the Ottoman medreses of which one was medicine, which alongside studying of the ḥadīṯ was given highest rank."
Madrasa and university
Note: The word ǧāmiʿah (Arabic: جامعة) simply means 'university'. For more information, see Islamic university (disambiguation).
There is disagreement whether madrasas ever became universities. Scholars like Arnold H. Green and Hossein Nasr have argued that starting in the 10th century, some medieval Islamic madrasas indeed became universities. George Makdisi and others, however, argue that the European university has no parallel in the medieval Islamic world. Darleen Pryds questions this view, pointing out that madrasas and European universities in the Mediterranean region shared similar foundations by princely patrons and were intended to provide loyal administrators to further the rulers' agenda. Other scholars regard the university as uniquely European in origin and characteristics.
al-Qarawiyyīn University in Fez, Morocco is recognized by many historians as the oldest degree-granting university in the world, having been founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri. While the madrasa college could also issue degrees at all levels, the jāmi`ahs (such as al-Qarawiyyīn and al-Azhar University) differed in the sense that they were larger institutions, more universal in terms of their complete source of studies, had individual faculties for different subjects, and could house a number of mosques, madrasas, and other institutions within them. Such an institution has thus been described as an "Islamic university".
Al-Azhar University, founded in Cairo, Egypt in 975 by the Isma‘īlī Shī‘ī Fatimid dynasty as a ǧāmiʿah, had individual faculties for a theological seminary, Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, early Islamic philosophy and logic in Islamic philosophy. The postgraduate doctorate in law was only obtained after "an oral examination to determine the originality of the candidate's theses", and to test the student's "ability to defend them against all objections, in disputations set up for the purpose." ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī also delivered lectures on Islamic medicine at al-Azhar, while Maimonides delivered lectures on medicine and astronomy there during the time of Saladin. Another early ǧāmiʿah was the Niẓāmīyah of Baghdād (founded 1091), which has been called the "largest university of the Medieval world". Mustansiriya University, established by the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Mustanṣir in 1233, in addition to teaching the religious subjects, offered courses dealing with philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences.
However, the classification of madrasas as "universities" is disputed on the question of understanding of each institution on its own terms. In madrasas, the ijāzahs were only issued in one field, the Islamic religious law of šarīʿah, and in no other field of learning. Other academic subjects, including the natural sciences, philosophy and literary studies, were only treated "ancillary" to the study of the Sharia. For example, a natural science like astronomy was only studied (if at all) to supply religious needs, like the time for prayer. This is why Ptolemaic astronomy was considered adequate, and is still taught in some modern day madrasas. The Islamic law undergraduate degree from al-Azhar, the most prestigious madrasa, was traditionally granted without final examinations, but on the basis of the students' attentive attendance to courses. In contrast to the medieval doctorate which was granted by the collective authority of the faculty, the Islamic degree was not granted by the teacher to the pupil based on any formal criteria, but remained a "personal matter, the sole prerogative of the person bestowing it; no one could force him to give one".
Medievalist specialists who define the university as a legally autonomous corporation disagree with the term "university" for the Islamic madrasas and jāmi‘ahs because the medieval university (from Latin universitas) was structurally different, being a legally autonomous corporation rather than a waqf institution like the madrasa and ǧāmiʿah. Despite the many similarities, medieval specialists have coined the term "Islamic college" for madrasa and ǧāmiʿah to differentiated them from the legally autonomous corporations that the medieval European universities were. In a sense, the madrasa resembles a university college in that it has most of the features of a university, but lacks the corporate element. Toby Huff summarizes the difference as follows:
From a structural and legal point of view, the madrasa and the university were contrasting types. Whereas the madrasa was a pious endowment under the law of religious and charitable foundations (waqf), the universities of Europe were legally autonomous corporate entities that had many legal rights and privileges. These included the capacity to make their own internal rules and regulations, the right to buy and sell property, to have legal representation in various forums, to make contracts, to sue and be sued."
As Muslim institutions of higher learning, the madrasa had the legal designation of waqf. In central and eastern Islamic lands, the view that the madrasa, as a charitable endowment, will remain under the control of the donor (and their descendent), resulted in a "spurt" of establishment of madrasas in the 11th and 12th centuries. However, in Western Islamic lands, where the Maliki views prohibited donors from controlling their endowment, madrasas were not as popular. Unlike the corporate designation of Western institutions of higher learning, the waqf designation seemed to have led to the exclusion of non-orthodox religious subjects such a philosophy and natural science from the curricula. The madrasa of al-Qarawiyyīn, one of the two surviving madrasas that predate the founding of the earliest medieval universities and are thus claimed to be the "first universities" by some authors, has acquired official university status as late as 1947. The other, al-Azhar, did acquire this status in name and essence only in the course of numerous reforms during the 19th and 20th century, notably the one of 1961 which introduced non-religious subjects to its curriculum, such as economics, engineering, medicine, and agriculture. It should also be noted that many medieval universities were run for centuries as Christian cathedral schools or monastic schools prior to their formal establishment as universitas scholarium; evidence of these immediate forerunners of the university dates back to the 6th century AD, thus well preceding the earliest madrasas. George Makdisi, who has published most extensively on the topic concludes in his comparison between the two institutions:
Thus the university, as a form of social organization, was peculiar to medieval Europe. Later, it was exported to all parts of the world, including the Muslim East; and it has remained with us down to the present day. But back in the middle ages, outside of Europe, there was nothing anything quite like it anywhere.
Nevertheless, Makdisi has asserted that the European university borrowed many of its features from the Islamic madrasa, including the concepts of a degree and doctorate. Makdisi and Hugh Goddard have also highlighted other terms and concepts now used in modern universities which most likely have Islamic origins, including "the fact that we still talk of professors holding the 'Chair' of their subject" being based on the "traditional Islamic pattern of teaching where the professor sits on a chair and the students sit around him", the term 'academic circles' being derived from the way in which Islamic students "sat in a circle around their professor", and terms such as "having 'fellows', 'reading' a subject, and obtaining 'degrees', can all be traced back" to the Islamic concepts of ʾaṣḥāb ("companions, as of the prophet Muhammad"), qirāʾah ("reading aloud the Qur'an") and ʾiǧāzah ("license to teach") respectively. Makdisi has listed eighteen such parallels in terminology which can be traced back to their roots in Islamic education. Some of the practices now common in modern universities which Makdisi and Goddard trace back to an Islamic root include "practices such as delivering inaugural lectures, wearing academic robes, obtaining doctorates by defending a thesis, and even the idea of academic freedom are also modelled on Islamic custom." The Islamic scholarly system of fatwā and ʾiǧmāʿ, meaning opinion and consensus respectively, formed the basis of the "scholarly system the West has practised in university scholarship from the Middle Ages down to the present day." According to Makdisi and Goddard, "the idea of academic freedom" in universities was also "modelled on Islamic custom" as practiced in the medieval Madrasa system from the 9th century. Islamic influence was "certainly discernible in the foundation of the first delibrately planned university" in Europe, the University of Naples Federico II founded by Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1224.
However, all of these facets of medieval university life are considered by standard scholarship to be independent medieval European developments with no tracable Islamic influence. Generally, some reviewers have pointed out the strong inclination of Makdisi of overstating his case by simply resting on "the accumulation of close parallels", but all the while failing to point to convincing channels of transmission between the Muslim and Christian world. Norman Daniel points out that the Arab equivalent of the Latin disputation, the taliqa, was reserved for the ruler's court, not the madrasa, and that the actual differences between Islamic fiqh and medieval European civil law were profound. The taliqa only reached Islamic Spain, the only likely point of transmission, after the establishment of the first medieval universities. In fact, there is no Latin translation of the taliqa and, most importantly, no evidence of Latin scholars ever showing awareness of Arab influence on the Latin method of disputation, something they would have certainly found noteworthy. Rather, it was the medieval reception of the Greek Organon which set the scholastic sic et non in motion. Daniel concludes that resemblances in method had more to with the two religions having "common problems: to reconcile the conflicting statements of their own authorities, and to safeguard the data of revelation from the impact of Greek philosophy"; thus Christian scholasticism and similar Arab concepts should be viewed in terms of a parallel occurrence, not of the transmission of ideas from one to the other, a view shared by Hugh Kennedy.
Tony Huff, in a discussion of Makdisi's hypothesis, concludes:
It remains the case that no equivalent of the bachelor's degree, the licentia docendi, or higher degrees ever emerged in the medieval or early modern Islamic madrasas.
Female education
From around 750, during the Abbasid Caliphate, women “became renowned for their brains as well as their beauty”. In particular, many well known women of the time were trained from childhood in music, dancing and poetry. Mahbuba was one of these. Another feminine figure to be remembered for her achievements was Tawaddud “a slave girl who was said to have been bought at great cost by Harūn ar-Rašīd because she had passed her examinations by the most eminent scholars in astronomy, medicine, law, philosophy, music, history, Arabic grammar, literature, theology and chess”. Moreover, among the most prominent feminine figures was Shuhda who was known as “the Scholar” or “the Pride of Women” during the 12th century in Baghdad. Despite the recognition of women’s aptitudes during the Abbasid dynasty, all these came to an end in Iraq with the sack of Baghdad in 1258.
Women played an important role in the foundations of many Islamic educational institutions, such as Fatima al-Fihri's founding of the University of Al Karaouine in 859. This continued through to the Ayyubid dynasty in the 12th and 13th centuries, when 160 mosques and madrasas were established in Damascus, 26 of which were funded by women through the Waqf (charitable trust) system. Half of all the royal patrons for these institutions were also women.
According to the Sunni scholar Ibn ʿAsākir in the 12th century, there were opportunities for female education in the medieval Islamic world, writing that women could study, earn ijazahs (academic degrees), and qualify as scholars and teachers. This was especially the case for learned and scholarly families, who wanted to ensure the highest possible education for both their sons and daughters. Ibn Asakir had himself studied under 80 different female teachers in his time. Female education in the Islamic world was inspired by Muhammad's wives, such as Khadijah, a successful businesswoman. According to a hadith attributed to Muhammad, he praised the women of Medina because of their desire for religious knowledge:
"How splendid were the women of the ansar; shame did not prevent them from becoming learned in the faith."
While it was not common for women to enroll as students in formal classes, it was common for women to attend informal lectures and study sessions at mosques, madrasas and other public places. While there were no legal restrictions on female education, some men did not approve of this practice, such as Muhammad ibn al-Hajj (d. 1336) who was appalled at the behaviour of some women who informally audited lectures in his time:
"[Consider] what some women do when people gather with a shaykh to hear [the recitation of] books. At that point women come, too, to hear the readings; the men sit in one place, the women facing them. It even happens at such times that some of the women are carried away by the situation; one will stand up, and sit down, and shout in a loud voice. [Moreover,] her 'awra will appear; in her house, their exposure would be forbidden — how can it be allowed in a mosque, in the presence of men?"
The term ʿawrah is often translated as "that which is indecent", which usually meant the exposure of anything other than a woman's face and hands, although scholarly interpretations of the ʿawrah and ḥiǧāb have always tended to vary, with some more or less strict than others.
While women accounted for no more than one percent of Islamic scholars prior to the 12th century, there was a large increase of female scholars after this. In the 15th century, Al-Sakhawi devotes an entire volume of his 12-volume biographical dictionary aḍ-Ḍawʾ al-lamiʿ to female scholars, giving information on 1,075 of them. More recently, the scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi, currently a researcher from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, has written 40 volumes on the "muḥaddiṯāt" (the women scholars of ḥadīṯ), and found at least 8000 of them.
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