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Madrasas (Higher Education) Higher education in Muslim period was imparted through the institution called Madrasas. These Madrasas worked as the international centers of learning. Students from other Muslim countries were attracted to these centers.
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On what place Muslim education is given?

Education in pre-modern Islam – The centrality of scripture and its study in the Islamic tradition helped to make education a central pillar of the religion in virtually all times and places in the history of Islam. The importance of learning in the Islamic tradition is reflected in a number of hadiths attributed to Muhammad, including one that instructs the faithful to “seek knowledge, even in China”. Education would begin at a young age with study of Arabic and the Quran, either at home or in a primary school, which was often attached to a mosque, Some students would then proceed to training in tafsir (Quranic exegesis) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which was seen as particularly important.

1. Education focused on memorization, but also trained the more advanced students to participate as readers and writers in the tradition of commentary on the studied texts.
2. It also involved a process of socialization of aspiring scholars, who came from virtually all social backgrounds, into the ranks of the ulema.

The Islamic Empire, spanning for almost 1,000 years, saw at least 60 major learning centers throughout the Middle East and North Africa, some of the most prominent among these being Baghdad in the East and Cordoba in the West. For the first few centuries of Islam, educational settings were entirely informal, but beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, the ruling elites began to establish institutions of higher religious learning known as madrasas in an effort to secure support and cooperation of the ulema.

• Madrasas soon multiplied throughout the Islamic world, which helped to spread Islamic learning beyond urban centers and to unite diverse Islamic communities in a shared cultural project.
• Nevertheless, instruction remained focused on individual relationships between students and their teacher.
• The formal attestation of educational attainment, ijaza, was granted by a particular scholar rather than the institution, and it placed its holder within a genealogy of scholars, which was the only recognized hierarchy in the educational system.

While formal studies in madrasas were open only to men, women of prominent urban families were commonly educated in private settings and many of them received and later issued ijazas in hadith studies, calligraphy and poetry recitation. Working women learned religious texts and practical skills primarily from each other, though they also received some instruction together with men in mosques and private homes.

From the 8th century to the 12th century, the primary mode of receiving education in the Islamic world was from private tutors for wealthy families who could afford a formal education, not madrasas. This formal education was most readily available to members of the caliphal court including the viziers, administrative officers, and wealthy merchants.

These private instructors were well known scholars who taught their students Arabic, literature, religion, mathematics, and philosophy. Islamic Sassanian tradition praises the idea of a ‘just ruler’ or a king learned in the ways of philosophy. This concept of an ‘enlightened philosopher-king’ served as a catalyst for the spread of education to the populous.

Madrasas were devoted principally to the study of law, but they also offered other subjects such as theology, medicine, and mathematics. The madrasa complex usually consisted of a mosque, boarding house, and a library. It was maintained by a waqf (charitable endowment), which paid salaries of professors, stipends of students, and defrayed the costs of construction and maintenance.

The madrasa was unlike a modern college in that it lacked a standardized curriculum or institutionalized system of certification. Madrasa education taught medicine and pharmacology primarily on the basis of humoral pathology, The Greek physician Hippocrates is credited for developing the theory of the four humors, also known as humoral pathology.

• The humors influence bodily health and emotion and it was thought that sickness and disease stemmed from an imbalance in a person’s humors, and health could only be restored by finding humoral equilibrium through remedies of food or bloodletting.
• Each humor is thought to be related to a universal element and every humor expresses specific properties.

The interpenetration of the individual effects of each humor on the body are called mizādj. Black Bile is related to the earth element and expresses cold and dry properties, yellow bile is related to fire and subsequently is dry and warm, phlegm is related to water and it expresses moist and cold properties, and blood is air displaying moist and warm qualities.

To aid in medical efforts to fight disease and sickness, Ibn Sina also known as Avicenna, wrote the Canon of Medicine, This was a five-book encyclopedia compilation of Avicenna’s research towards healing illnesses, and it was widely used for centuries across Eurasia as a medical textbook. Many of Avicenna’s ideas came from al-Razi’s al-Hawi,

Muslims distinguished disciplines inherited from pre-Islamic civilizations, such as philosophy and medicine, which they called “sciences of the ancients” or “rational sciences”, from Islamic religious sciences. Sciences of the former type flourished for several centuries, and their transmission formed part of the educational framework in classical and medieval Islam.

1. In some cases, they were supported by institutions such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, but more often they were transmitted informally from teacher to student.
2. The University of Al Karaouine, founded in 859 AD, is listed in The Guinness Book Of Records as the world’s oldest degree-granting university.

Scholars occasionally call the University of Al Quaraouiyine (name given in 1963), founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihri in 859, a university, although some scholars such as Jacques Verger writes that this is done out of scholarly convenience. Several scholars consider that al-Qarawiyyin was founded and run as a madrasa until after World War II.

1. They date the transformation of the madrasa of al-Qarawiyyin into a university to its modern reorganization in 1963.
2. In the wake of these reforms, al-Qarawiyyin was officially renamed “University of Al Quaraouiyine” two years later.
3. The Al-Azhar University was another early university (madrasa).
4. The madrasa is one of the relics of the Fatimid caliphate.

The Fatimids traced their descent to Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah and named the institution using a variant of her honorific title Al-Zahra (the brilliant). Organized instruction in the Al-Azhar Mosque began in 978.
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Where was the primary education imparted during Muslim period?

Primary education was imparted in maktabs, and higher education was imparted in the madrasas. There was initiation of modern and innovative methods and strategies in the teaching and learning processes. Keywords: Medieval Period, Education, Educational Institutions.
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When was Muslim education started?

Islam – Education Muslim educational activity began in the 8th century, primarily in order to the teaching of the and the of the Prophet. The first task in this endeavour was to record the oral traditions and collect the written manuscripts. This information was systematically organized in the 2nd century ah, and in the following century a sound corpus was agreed upon.

This vast activity of “seeking knowledge” ( ṭalab al-ʿilm ) resulted in the creation of specifically sciences of tradition, history, and literature. When the introduction of the Greek sciences—,, and —created a body of lay knowledge, a creative reaction on the traditional religious base resulted in the rationalist theological movement of the,

Based on that Greek, from the 9th to the 12th century ce a brilliant philosophical movement flowered and presented a challenge to orthodoxy on the issues of the eternity of the world, the doctrine of, and the status of the, The met the challenges positively by formulating the religious,

1. At the same time, however, for fear of heresies, they began to draw a sharp distinction between religious and sciences.
2. The custodians of the Sharīʿah developed an unsympathetic attitude toward the secular and excluded them from the curriculum of the (college) system.
3. Their exclusion from the system of education proved fatal, not only for those disciplines but, in the long run, for religious thought in general because of the lack of challenge and stimulation.

A typical madrasah curriculum included (which was considered necessary as an “instrumental” science for the formal correctness of thinking procedure),, law,, Qurʾān commentary, and, Despite sporadic from certain quarters, the madrasah system remained to change.

One important feature of Muslim education was that (which consisted of Qurʾān reading, writing, and arithmetic) did not feed candidates to institutions of, and the two remained separate. In higher education, was on books rather than on subjects and on commentaries rather than on original works. This, coupled with the habit of learning by rote (which was developed from the basically traditional character of knowledge that encouraged learning more than thinking), impoverished intellectual creativity still further.

Despite these grave shortcomings, however, the madrasah produced one important advantage. Through the uniformity of its religio-legal content, it gave the ʿulamāʾ the opportunity to effect that overall cohesiveness and unity of thought and purpose that, despite great variations in local Muslim, has become a feature of the world Muslim,

This uniformity has withstood even the serious tension created against the seats of formal learning by through its peculiar and its own centres. In contrast to the Sunni attitude toward it, philosophy continued to be seriously among the, even though it developed a strong religious character. Indeed, philosophy has enjoyed an unbroken tradition in down to the present and has produced some highly original thinkers.

Both the Sunni and the Shiʿi systems of learning, however, have come face to face with the greatest challenge of all—the impact of modern education and thought. Organization of education developed naturally in the course of time. Evidence exists of small schools already established in the first century of Islam that were devoted to reading, writing, and instruction in the Qurʾān.

These schools of “primary” education were called s. The well-known governor of Iraq at the beginning of the 8th century, the ruthless, had been a schoolteacher in his early career. When higher learning in the form of tradition grew in the 8th and 9th centuries, it was centred around learned men to whom students travelled from far and near and from whom they obtained a certificate ( ijāzah ) to teach what they had learned.

Through the munificence of rulers and princes, large private and public libraries were built, and schools and colleges arose. In the early 9th century a significant incentive to learning came from the translations made of scientific and philosophical works from the (and partly ) at the famous (“house of wisdom”) at, which was officially sponsored by the,

The caliph set up a dār al-ḥikmah (“hall of wisdom”) in Cairo in the 10th–11th centuries. With the advent of the Turks, the famous vizier created an important college at Baghdad, devoted to Sunni learning, in the latter half of the 11th century. One of the world’s oldest surviving universities, al- at Cairo, was originally established by the Fāṭimids, but (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), after ousting the Fāṭimids, it to Sunni learning in the 12th century.

Throughout subsequent centuries, colleges and quasi-universities (called madrasah or ) arose throughout the from Spain (whence philosophy and science were transmitted to the Latin West) across to, In a new style of madrasah came into existence; it had four wings, for the teaching of the four schools of Sunni law.

• Professorial chairs were endowed in large colleges by princes and governments, and residential students were supported by college endowment funds.
• A of smaller centres of learning were endowed by private donations.
• Underneath the legal and creedal unity, the world of Islam harbours a tremendous of cultures, particularly in the outlying regions.

The expansion of Islam can be divided into two broad periods. In the first period of the Arab conquests, the assimilative activity of the conquering was far-reaching. Although Persia resurrected its own language and a measure of its national after the first three centuries of Islam, its culture and language had come under heavy Arab influence.

• Only after rule installed Shiʿism as a distinctive in the 16th century did Persia regain a kind of religious,
• The language of religion and thought, however, continued to be Arabic.
• In the second period, the spread of Islam was not conducted by the state with ʿulamāʾ influence but was largely the work of Sufi missionaries.

The Sufis, because of their latitudinarianism, with local customs and beliefs and left a great deal of the pre-Islamic legacy in every region intact. Thus, among the Central Asian Turks, were absorbed, while in Africa the man and his (an influence supposedly causing material and spiritual well-being) are survivors from the older,

In India there are large areas geographically distant from the Muslim religio-political centre of power in which customs are still and even pre-Hindu and in which people a motley of and deities in common with the Hindus. The custom of, under which a widow burned herself alive along with her dead husband, persisted in India even among some Muslims until late into the Mughal period.

The 18th- and 19th-century reform movements exerted themselves to “purify” Islam of these accretions and superstitions. affords a striking example of this phenomenon. Because Islam reached there late and soon thereafter came under European colonialism, the Indonesian society has retained its pre-Islamic worldview beneath an overlay of Islamic practices.

1. It keeps its customary law (called adat ) at the expense of the Sharīʿah; many of its tribes are still matriarchal; and culturally the Hindu epics and hold a high position in national life.
2. Since the 19th century, however, orthodox Islam has gained steadily in strength because of fresh contacts with the,

Apart from regional diversity, the main internal division within Islamic society is brought about by urban and village life. Islam originally grew up in the two cities of and, and, as it expanded, its peculiar appears to have developed in urban areas.

1. Culturally, it came under a heavy Persian influence in Iraq, where the Arabs learned the ways and style of life of their conquered people, who were culturally superior to them.
2. The custom of veiling women (which originally arose as a sign of but later served the purpose of segregating women from men—the ), for example, was acquired in Iraq.

Another social trait derived from outside cultures was the for agriculture and manual labour in general. Because the people of the town of Medina were mainly agriculturists, this disdain could not have been initially present. In general, Islam came to appropriate a strong feudal from the peoples it conquered.

1. Also, because the Muslims generally represented the administrative and military aristocracy and because the learned class (the ʿulamāʾ ) was an essential arm of the state, the higher culture of Islam became urban-based.
2. This city orientation explains and also underlines the traditional cleavage between the orthodox Islam of the ʿulamāʾ and the folk Islam espoused by the Sufi orders of the countryside.

In the modern period, the advent of education and rapid industrialization threatened to make this cleavage still wider. With the rise of a strong and widespread fundamentalist movement in the second half of the 20th century, this was decreased. : Islam – Education
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How did Muslims view education?

Islam placed a high value on education, and, as the faith spread among diverse peoples, education became an important channel through which to create a universal and cohesive social order. By the middle of the 9th century, knowledge was divided into three categories: the Islamic sciences, the philosophical and natural sciences (Greek knowledge), and the literary arts.

The Islamic sciences, which emphasized the study of the Qurʾān (the Islamic scripture) and the Ḥadīth (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad ) and their interpretation by leading scholars and theologians, were valued the most highly, but Greek scholarship was considered equally important, albeit less virtuous.

Early Muslim education emphasized practical studies, such as the application of technological expertise to the development of irrigation systems, architectural innovations, textiles, iron and steel products, earthenware, and leather products; the manufacture of paper and gunpowder; the advancement of commerce; and the maintenance of a merchant marine,

After the 11th century, however, denominational interests dominated higher learning, and the Islamic sciences achieved preeminence. Greek knowledge was studied in private, if at all, and the literary arts diminished in significance as educational policies encouraging academic freedom and new learning were replaced by a closed system characterized by an intolerance toward scientific innovations, secular subjects, and creative scholarship.

This denominational system spread throughout eastern Islam from Transoxania (roughly, modern-day Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and southwest Kazakhstan) to Egypt, with some 75 schools in existence between about 1050 and 1250.
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