Madrasa

The madrasa is the college of Islamic law, and in its classical form it was as much a legal and financial arrangement as a building, brought into being by the endowment that paid for it.

Chair, stipend, students

In the classical period the madrasa was a specific institutional form: a building endowed as a waqf, with a professor holding a stipended chair in a particular school of law, students supported by the same endowment, and a curriculum centred on jurisprudence and the sciences that serve it. The endowment fixed the whole arrangement in perpetuity, naming the subject, the school and often the family from whom the teachers were to be drawn, so the college depended on private charitable capital rather than on a state.

Spread and transformation

From the eleventh century the model spread across the Islamic world, the Nizamiyya colleges of the Seljuk lands being the celebrated early examples, and it became the principal institution of higher religious learning from Morocco to Central Asia. In the modern period the word has broadened to cover schools of many kinds, and state education systems have absorbed or displaced much of the older endowed structure, so that a term once denoting a precise endowed law college now names religious schools of very different character, a shift that mirrors the fate of the waqf that founded them.

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.