The Vizier Who Turned Study Circles into Colleges

Before the madrasa existed as a defined institution, Islamic legal study happened informally, in circles that gathered around a scholar inside a mosque with no separate building, no fixed stipend and no guarantee the circle would outlive its teacher. The madrasa as a standing, endowed college is credited to the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who founded the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad in 1065 and then a network of sister institutions across Khurasan and Iraq, each funded by waqf income and built specifically to give one school of Sunni law a permanent home with a paid professor, resident students and a library.

Historians generally read the surge of such foundations as a deliberate response to the spread of rival Ismaili teaching from Fatimid Cairo, giving Sunni scholarship an institutional base of its own rather than leaving it to informal circles that could not compete with an organized missionary effort. The Baghdad Nizamiyya became famous chiefly through one appointment: the theologian and jurist al-Ghazali taught there in the late eleventh century before his own crisis of conscience led him to leave teaching altogether, and his time at the college is still the example most often cited of what the Nizamiyya model was built to produce.