The Elementary School of the Early Islamic World

A maktab, sometimes called a kuttab, was the basic school of the premodern Islamic world, teaching young children to read and write and to memorize the Quran, typically attached to a mosque or run informally by a single teacher rather than housed in a purpose built institution of its own. It represented the first and most widely available rung of Islamic education, open in principle to children across the social scale rather than reserved to those already destined for a scholarly or legal career, and El Shamsy's study of the canonization of Islamic law situates the maktab as the broad base beneath a much narrower pyramid of advanced study that only a minority of its graduates ever pursued further.

Funding commonly came through waqf, charitable religious endowment, the same mechanism that supported mosques and the more advanced madrasas, which meant a maktab's survival depended on continued endowment income rather than on tuition collected from families able to pay it, and many maktabs served children regardless of a family's ability to contribute. Basic arithmetic and elementary composition were often taught alongside Quran memorization, so a maktab's curriculum, while religious in its center of gravity, was not purely religious in scope even in its earliest forms.