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The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo
A Social History of Islamic Educations
By Jonathan Berkey PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03191-0
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Seek knowledge, even as far away as China." So goes a famous injunction of the Prophet Muhammad to the men and women of the Islamic community. Relatively few would actually travel to what was, for medieval Muslims, quite literally the ends of the earth, but the "journey in search of knowledge" became almost a trope of the biographies of merchants and princes as well as religious scholars. Whether or not the attribution of the tradition to the Prophet is genuine, it accurately reflects a principle generally held in the Islamic world, and which formed a common theme of medieval literature: namely, that the pursuit of knowledge ('ilm), and specifically religious knowledge, is an activity always worthy of approbation and encouragement. Treatises praising knowledge and its acquisition repeated didactic anecdotes aimed at fostering a proper sense of values among those who would be students. One said of al-Shafi'i, the eponymous founder of one of the four principal rites of Sunni law, that he paid no attention to the advances of a slave-girl purchased for him by his students, much to her dismay. Frustrated after vainly waiting for him throughout the night, she returned to the trader who had sold her, complaining that he had bound her to a "crazy man." The scholar, unfazed, responded simply and sincerely that "the crazy man is he who knows the value of knowledge, and who then squanders it, or hesitates so that it passes him by."
Islam's high estimation of the value of knowledge translated naturally into broad-based social and cultural support for education. All Muslims are encouraged to acquire at least a functional familiarity with those texts—in particular the revealed Quran and the traditions (hadith) that embody sayings, commands, and stories handed down from the Prophet Muhammad and his companions—that form the basis of Islam as a religion and as an all-embracing way of life. This does not mean that every Muslim will or should become a scholar of the religious and legal sciences, or that all need be versed in the intricacies of the shari'a, the Islamic law that is far more than a "holy law." On the other hand, according to a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century treatise, "it is necessary for the Muslim to strive for as much knowledge as he may have need in his station, whatever that is." Every believer must know, for example, what God requires of the faithful in terms of prayer, fasting, paying the alms tax, or performing the pilgrimage. Merchants must know enough of the law to avoid commercial practices abhorrent to it. The principles and precepts of the law of Islam, as derived from the Quran, hadith, and the consensus of the community, represent the revelation of God's will in its widest possible sense. And since knowledge of God's will is the surest means to avoid the sins of avarice, arrogance, profligacy, and more, "learning is prescribed for all of us."
Muslim sensibilities, at least as refracted through the writings of the educated elite themselves, placed scholars of the religious and legal sciences at the pinnacle of society and at the vanguard of the forces it marshalled to defend itself against enemies and to bring order and meaning to its members. Ahmad Amin, the twentieth-century Egyptian scholar and writer, described in his autobiography the difficulties he had in marrying, despite his good appearance, respectable pedigree, and comfortable income: the turban he wore, which indicated to all his religious education and orientation, acted as a social impediment, discouraging prospective brides and their families. In earlier centuries, such prejudices did not predominate, despite the contempt and ridicule apparent in popular tales about inept schoolteachers, such as those found in The Thousand and One Nights. True scholars, on the contrary, were revered, and the sons and daughters of a prominent jurist or professor made suitable spouses for the children of the political and military elite. A late medieval treatise on education approvingly quoted the hadith that "nothing is more powerful than knowledge. Kings are the rulers of the people, but scholars [al-'ulama'] are the rulers of kings." This represented no vague claim that the pen was mightier than the sword. The scholars of the religious sciences, especially jurisprudence and the Prophetic traditions, were guardians of an organic body of knowledge the transmission of which largely shaped Muslim culture, and which in itself defined the legitimacy of kings. Another tradition proclaimed that "one scholar [faqih] is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers." It was knowledge that moved mountains, and the powers of this world, whether human or diabolical, could not overcome it.
The point of a tradition extolling the power of learning, as opposed to that of acts of piety and ritual, was not to belittle worship and prayer, the outward manifestations of piety and submission to God by individuals and the community. That knowledge which Muslim society treasured above all else and transmitted from one generation to the next was not a disembodied collection of principles unrelated to the exigencies of daily life. On the contrary, knowledge that mattered was to a large extent knowledge of the guidelines by which men and women should live, and thus learning itself impelled Muslims to act according to the principles it proclaimed. But the traditions that sing the praises of learning and of scholars do suggest the extraordinary emphasis that Muslim religion and civilization placed upon knowledge, specifically religious knowledge, and the power inherent in the process and object of instruction. Traditions that ascribe to the Prophet statements such as "the superiority of the learned man [al-'alim] over the worshipper [al-'abid] is like my superiority over the least of you" may reflect in part the self-interest of the scholars who collected, edited, and commented upon the hadith and who, in some cases, admittedly fabricated them. On the other hand, they also reflect the community's judgment that, in a very real sense, learning is worship, that the study and transmission of the revealed word of God and the sayings of His prophet, and of the system of law to which the revelation pointed, are the fundamental service God demands of His creatures.
Its emphasis on knowledge and learning, perhaps more than any other feature, sets Islam squarely within the Near Eastern monotheistic tradition, and in particular links it to Judaism, whose own preoccupation with study, with teaching, and with the book is well-known. Contemporaries may have been aware of the broader tradition: a late medieval Muslim treatise described "what appears in praise of knowledge in the word of God as He handed it down in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran." Indeed, the education of Jews in the medieval Near East, as reflected in the records of the Cairo Geniza, parallels that of Muslims in its curricular emphasis on law, its pedagogy and institutions, and even in the language and metaphors that the surviving documents use to characterize the world of learning: the "wandering scholar" is as much a trope of Jewish history and legend as it is of the Muslim historical and biographical record. Islam's emphasis on learning and scholarship may also serve to distinguish Islam from medieval European civilization. A fourteenth-century Muslim writer could routinely assert the spiritual power of the scholar against that of one thousand worshippers. How many contemporary Europeans would have made the same claim?
The Madrasa
From the beginning, then, Islam was a religion of the book and of learning, a society that esteemed knowledge and education above almost every other human activity. It was several centuries, however, before Muslim societies developed a network of institutions specifically devoted to religious knowledge and its propagation. In the medieval Muslim societies of the Near East, the institution of education par excellence was the madrasa, a noun of place derived directly from a verb meaning "to study" and related etymologically to the Hebrew midrash, used in medieval Egypt to refer to a variety of institutions devoted to traditional Jewish learning. The madrasa has received considerable attention from historians in recent years, and their research provides us with a composite picture of the character of that institution.
Islam, like Judaism, is very much a religion of the law, and scholars have identified the madrasa as necessarily, if not exclusively, an institution for instruction in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The model developed by George Makdisi and others presents an institution specifically devoted to the study of Islamic jurisprudence according to one or more of the four "orthodox" rites of law in Sunni Islam, the Shafi'i, Hanafi, Maliki, or Hanbali Other subjects elemental to a religious education, such as Quranic exegesis (tafsir), hadith, or the linguistic sciences might also form part of the madrasa's curriculum, but only as ancillaries to the study of law. Certainly the curriculum offered in the madrasa concentrated on the traditional religious and legal sciences, to the exclusion of the so-called "foreign" rational sciences inherited from the Hellenistic world. Education in the madrasa, while traditional, was nonetheless of a "higher" character, focusing on the textbooks and commentaries written and compiled by Islamic scholars over the centuries, the students having acquired a preliminary grounding in the Quran and the Arabic language either in a primary school or from family members. These madrasas provided endowed professorships and student stipends in one or more of the religious and legal sciences, and, often, accommodations for both instructor and instructed.
Much of the previous scholarly literature has focused on the origins of the madrasa and its growth in Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria, and can only be briefly summarized here. Originally, of course, most instruction in the Islamic religious and legal sciences took place not in institutions formally devoted to education, but in mosques, where religious scholars would sit in teaching circles (halqa, majlis) with their students. The systematization of Islamic law in the eighth and ninth centuries and the gradual coalescence of the various rites resulted in the need for more prolonged and intensive study than had formerly been the pattern. Beginning in Iraq and the eastern provinces of the Muslim empire in the tenth century, hostelries (khans) began to be established next to mosques prominent for the teaching that went on inside them. These khans served as convenient accommodations for students and teachers who came to Baghdad and elsewhere from other cities or outlying areas, allowing them the opportunity to concentrate more intensively on their academic subjects.
The process that saw the growth of "mosque-khan complexes" culminated in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the establishment of madrasas. Islamic governments themselves never assumed financial responsibility for the inculcation of the religious sciences; rather, these new institutions were established and endowed as a pious act by wealthy individuals, usually but not exclusively members of the ruling political elite. Devoted by the terms of the legal documents establishing their endowments (waqf, pl. awqaf) principally to the study and transmission of Islamic law and the other religious sciences, the madrasas provided the physical structure for instruction and income to support professors (mudarris, pl. mudarrisun) and students. The first madrasas were probably constructed in Khurasan, but it was the Saljuq wazir (minister) Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092) who popularized the institution in the central provinces of the Islamic empire, specifically in Iraq. His famous madrasa, the Nizamiyya in Baghdad, became the model for those established in Syria by the twelfth-century Muslim princes Nur al-Din ibn Zangi and Salah al-Din ibn Ayyflb (Saladin) and their successors.
Even if the madrasa was not always and explicitly a device of Sunni governments in their struggle against Shi'i sectarianism, as a previous generation of scholars thought, it was nonetheless associated in a more general way with the assertion in the high Middle Ages of a self-consciously traditionalist and, in the wake of the Crusades, militant Sunni Muslim identity. The new institution proved to be extremely popular in those lands in which Sunni Islam re-established its preeminence following the decline and collapse of the Shi'i governments that had dominated the Islamic East during the tenth and eleventh centuries. By the death of Saladin in 1193, there were already thirty madrasas in Damascus; between the end of the twelfth century and the Mongol invasions in the mid-thirteenth, sixty new madrasas were established in the Syrian capital. In Egypt, no doubt because of the lingering presence of the Fatimid regime, which followed the Isma'ili branch of Shi'ism, the madrasa was a relative latecomer. Egypt's first madrasa may have been established as early as 1097, and several founded by Sunni ministers to the late Fatimid caliphs were already functioning in Alexandria by the time Saladin abolished the Shi'i caliphate and established his Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin did establish the first madrasa in the Egyptian capital itself, or, more precisely, in the neighboring city of al-Fustat, in 1170. Under his patronage, and that of his successors and other individuals, at least thirty-two madrasas for instruction in Islamic jurisprudence and related subjects were founded in the urban metropolis of Cairo/al-Fustat by the time of the Mamluk coup against the last Egyptian Ayyubid.
Thus, by the middle of the thirteenth century the madrasa had established itself as the primary forum for religious education throughout the Islamic Middle East, and in particular in the Egyptian and Syrian provinces of the Mamluk empire. The institution, like higher education itself, was a largely urban phenomenon. The principal cities of Syria—Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and others—were home to numerous madrasas and to many of the most reputable scholars of the later Middle Ages, and consequently attracted students from other Muslim countries as well as from the Syrian hinterland. In Egypt, the port city of Alexandria boasted a number of these schools, as did several of the smaller towns of the Nile Delta and the southern provinces. But it was Cairo, more than any other city of the later Middle Ages, that developed a reputation as a vital center of traditional Muslim learning. With the devastation of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and the destructive, albeit temporary invasions suffered successively by Syria from the mid-thirteenth century on, Cairo became a haven for scholars and other refugees. But another, more important factor contributed to the city's standing as the principal seat of Muslim scholarship and instruction. Under the aegis and through the munificence of the Mamluk military elite that ruled much of the Near East in the later Middle Ages, the Egyptian capital became the cultural hub of the central Islamic world.
The Mamluk Regime, 1250–1517
In 1250, following the defeat of the Sixth Crusade led by Louis IX of France and the death of the last effective sultan of Saladin's dynasty, al-Malik al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyflb, the government of Egypt passed into the hands of a warrior caste of slave origins, the Mamluks (literally, "those who are owned," "slaves"). This is not the place for a detailed review of Mamluk history; a growing literature on the subject now includes several works of a general nature in addition to more focused studies. But a brief review of the structure of the sultanate and the character of its ruling elite will provide background essential to understanding the social history of Islamic education in the Mamluk capital.
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Excerpted from The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo by Jonathan Berkey. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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