Education in Islamic History
From the very earliest
days of Islam, the issue of education has been at the forefront at the minds of
the Muslims. The very first word of the Quran that was revealed to Prophet
Muhammad ﷺ was, in fact, “Read”. Prophet
Muhammad ﷺ once stated that “Seeking knowledge is
mandatory for all Muslims.” With such a direct command to go out and seek
knowledge, Muslims have placed huge emphasis on the educational system in order
to fulfill this obligation placed on them by the Prophet ﷺ.
Throughout Islamic
history, education was a point of pride and a field Muslims have always
excelled in. Muslims built great libraries and learning centers in places such
as Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo. They established the first primary schools for
children and universities for continuing education. They advanced sciences by
incredible leaps and bounds through such institutions, leading up to today’s
modern world.
Attitudes Towards Education
Today, education of
children is not limited to the information and facts they are expected to learn.
Rather, educators take into account the emotional, social, and physical
well-being of the student in addition to the information they must master.
Medieval Islamic education was no different. The 12th century Syrian physician
al-Shayzari wrote extensively about the treatment of students. He noted that
they should not be treated harshly, nor made to do busy work that doesn’t
benefit them at all. The great Islamic scholar al-Ghazali also noted that
“prevention of the child from playing games and constant insistence on learning
deadens his heart, blunts his sharpness of wit and burdens his life. Thus, he
looks for a ruse to escape his studies altogether.” Instead, he believed that
educating students should be mixed with fun activities such as puppet theater,
sports, and playing with toy animals.
The First Schools
Ibn Khaldun states in
his Muqaddimah, “It should be known that instructing children in
the Qur’an is a symbol of Islam. Muslims have, and practice, such instruction
in all their cities, because it imbues hearts with a firm belief (in Islam) and
its articles of faith, which are (derived) from the verses of the Qur’an and
certain Prophetic traditions.”
A miniature from the
Ottoman period of students and their teacher
The very first
educational institutions of the Islamic world were quite informal. Mosques were
used as a meeting place where people can gather around a learned scholar,
attend his lectures, read books with him/her, and gain knowledge. Some of the
greatest scholars of Islam learned in such a way, and taught their students
this way as well. All four founders of the Muslim schools of law – Imams Abu
Hanifa, Malik, Shafi’i, and Ibn Hanbal – gained their immense knowledge by
sitting in gatherings with other scholars (usually in the mosques) to discuss
and learn Islamic law.
Some schools
throughout the Muslim world continue this tradition of informal education. At
the three holiest sites of Islam – the
Haram in Makkah, Masjid al-Nabawi in Madinah, and Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem
– scholars regularly sit and give lectures in the mosque that are open to
anyone who would like to join and benefit from their knowledge. However, as
time went on, Muslims began to build formal institutions dedicated to
education.
From Primary to Higher Education
Dating back to at
least the 900s, young students were educated in a primary school called a maktab.
Commonly, maktabs were attached to a mosque, where the
resident scholars and imams would hold classes for children. These classes
would cover topics such as basic Arabic reading and writing, arithmetic,
and Islamic laws. Most of the local population was educated by such primary
schools throughout their childhood. After completing the curriculum of
the maktab, students could go on to their adult life and find an
occupation, or move on to higher education in a madrasa, the
Arabic world for “school”.
The Registan complex
in Samarkand, Uzbekistan contains three madrasas in the same square
Madrasas were usually attached to a large mosque.
Examples include al-Azhar University in
Cairo, Egypt (founded in 970) and al-Karaouine in Fes, Morocco (founded in 859).
Later, numerous madrasas were established across the Muslim
world by the great Seljuk vizier, Nizam al-Mulk. At a madrasa,
students would be educated further in religious sciences, Arabic, and secular
studies such as medicine, mathematics, astronomy, history,
and geography, among many other topics. In the 1100s, there were 75 madrasas in
Cairo, 51 in Damascus, and 44 in Aleppo. There were hundreds more in Muslim
Spain at this time as well.
These madrasas can
be considered the first modern universities. They had separate faculties for
different subjects, with resident scholars that had expertise in their fields.
Students would pick a concentration of study and spend a number of years
studying under numerous professors. Ibn Khaldun notes that in Morocco at his
time, the madrasas had a curriculum which spanned sixteen
years. He argues that this is the “shortest [amount of time] in which a student
can obtain the scientific habit he desires, or can realize that he will never
be able to obtain it.”
When a student
completed their course of study, they would be granted an ijaza, or a license certifying that they have
completed that program and are qualified to teach it as well. Ijazas could
be given by an individual teacher who can personally attest to his/her
student’s knowledge, or by an institution such as a madrasa, in
recognition of a student finishing their course of study. Ijazas today
can be most closely compared to diplomas granted from higher educational
institutions.
Education and Women
Throughout Islamic
history, educating women has been a high priority. Women were not seen as
incapable of attaining knowledge nor of being able to teach others themselves.
The precedent for this was set with Prophet Muhammad’s own wife, Aisha, who was
one of the leading scholars of her time and was known as a teacher of many
people in Madinah after the Prophet’s ﷺ death.
Later Islamic history
also shows the influence of women. Women throughout the Muslim world were
able to attend lectures in mosques, attend madrasas, and
in many cases were teachers themselves. For example, the 12th century scholar
Ibn ‘Asakir (most famous for his book on the history of Damascus, Tarikh
Dimashq) traveled extensively in the search for knowledge and
studied under 80 different female teachers.
Women also played a
major role as supporters of education:
The University of
al-Karaouine in Fes, Morocco was founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859
§ The first formal madrasa of
the Muslim world, the University of
al-Karaouine in Fes was established by a wealthy merchant by the name of
Fatima al-Fihri.
§ The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid’s wife,
Zubayda, personally funded many construction projects for mosques, roads, and
wells in the Hijaz, which greatly benefit the many students
that traveled through these areas.
§ The wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleyman, Hurrem
Sultan, endowned numerous madrasas, in addition to other
charitable works such as hospitals, public baths, and soup kitchens.
§ During the Ayyubid period of Damascus (1174 to
1260) 26 religious endownments (including madrasas, mosques, and
religious monuments) were built by women.
Unlike Europe during
the Middle Ages (and even up until the 1800s and 1900s), women played a major
role in Islamic education in the past 1400 years. Rather than being seen as
second-class citizens, women played an active role in public life, particularly
in the field of education.
Modern History
The tradition of madrasas and
other classical forms of Islamic education continues until today, although in a
much more diminshed form. The defining factor for this was the encroachment of
European powers on Muslim lands throughout the 1800s. In the Ottoman Empire,
for example, French secularist advisors to the sultans advocated a complete
reform of the educational system to remove religion from the curriculum and
only teach secular sciences. Public schools thus began to teach a European
curriculum based on European books in place of the traditional fields of
knowledge that had been taught for hundreds of years. Although Islamic madrasas continued
to exist, without government support they lost much of their relevance in the
modern Muslim world.
Today, much of the
former Ottoman Empire still runs education along European lines. For example,
what you are allowed to major in at the university level depends on how you do
on a certain standardized test at the end of your high school career. If you
obtain the highest possible grades on the test, you can study sciences such as
medicine or engineering. If one scores on the lower end of the spectrum, they
are only allowed to study topics such as Islamic sciences and education.
Despite the new
systems in place in much of the Muslim world, traditional education still
survives. Universities such as al-Azhar, al-Karaouine, and Darul Uloom in
Deoband, India continue to offer traditional curricula that bring
together Islamic and secular sciences. Such an intellectual tradition rooted in
the great institutions of the past that produced some of the greatest scholars
of Islamic history and continues to spread the message and knowledge of Islam
to the masses.