Inside the Madrasas by William Dalrymple (NYRB) by Rich on Sat 17 Mar 2007 04:25 PM PDT Permanent Link Inside the Madrasas By William Dalrymple
The debate about the alleged links between madrasas and terrorism has tended to obscure both the madrasas' long histories and the differences among them. Throughout much of Islamic history, madrasas were the major source of religious and scientific learning, just as church schools and the universities were in Europe. Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, madrasas produced free-thinking luminaries such as Alberuni, Ibn Sina, and al-Khwarizmi. They also produced America's bestselling poet throughout the 1990s, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet of love and longing, Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who, it is often forgotten, was trained as a Muslim jurist, and throughout his life taught Sharia law in a madrasa in Konya. It is true that Rumi rejected the rigidity of thought and spirituality characteristic of the ulema of his day, but he did so as an insider, from within the system.
None of this should be a surprise. In the entire Koran there are only about two hundred verses directly commanding believers to pray and three times that number commanding the believers to reflect, to ponder, and to analyze God's magnificence in nature, plants, stars, and the solar system. The oldest and greatest of all the madrasas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the modern sense—a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects under a number of teachers—is generally regarded as an innovation first developed at al-Azhar.
In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having "fellows" holding a "chair," or students "reading" a subject and obtaining "degrees," as well as practices such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels, and academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrasas. It was in cities not far from Islamic Spain and Sicily—Salerno, Naples, Bologna, and Montpellier— that the first universities in Christendom were developed, while the very first college in Europe, that of Paris, was founded by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim newly returned from the Middle East.[7] Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars such as Adelard of Bath would travel to the Islamic world to study the advanced learning available in the madrasas. Alvaro of Córdoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under Muslim rule, wrote in the fourteenth century:
None of this should be a surprise. In the entire Koran there are only about two hundred verses directly commanding believers to pray and three times that number commanding the believers to reflect, to ponder, and to analyze God's magnificence in nature, plants, stars, and the solar system. The oldest and greatest of all the madrasas, the al-Azhar university in Cairo, has a good claim to being the most sophisticated school in the entire Mediterranean world during the early Middle Ages. Indeed the very idea of a university in the modern sense—a place where students congregate to study a variety of subjects under a number of teachers—is generally regarded as an innovation first developed at al-Azhar.
In The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, George Makdisi has demonstrated how terms such as having "fellows" holding a "chair," or students "reading" a subject and obtaining "degrees," as well as practices such as inaugural lectures, the oral defense, even mortar boards, tassels, and academic robes, can all be traced back to the practices of madrasas. It was in cities not far from Islamic Spain and Sicily—Salerno, Naples, Bologna, and Montpellier— that the first universities in Christendom were developed, while the very first college in Europe, that of Paris, was founded by Jocius de Londoniis, a pilgrim newly returned from the Middle East.[7] Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian scholars such as Adelard of Bath would travel to the Islamic world to study the advanced learning available in the madrasas. Alvaro of Córdoba, a Mozarab, or Christian living under Muslim rule, wrote in the fourteenth century:
My fellow Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the work of Muslim theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads Latin commentaries on Holy scripture? At the mention of Christian books they disdainfully protest that such works are unworthy of their notice.
When the Mongol invasions destroyed the institutions of learning in the Islamic heartlands, many learned refugees fled to Delhi, turning northern India for the first time into a major center of scholarship. By the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century, the curriculum in Indian madrasas blended the learning of the Islamic Middle East with that of the teachings of Hindu India, so that Hindu and Muslim students would together study the Koran (in Arabic), the Sufi poetry of Sa'adi (in Persian), and the philosophy of Vedanta (in Sanskrit), as well as ethics, astronomy, medicine, logic, history, and the natural sciences. Many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasas.
However, following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence that accompanied the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858, disillusioned scholars founded an influential but narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, a hundred miles north of the former Mughal capital in Delhi. Feeling that their backs were against the wall, the madrasa's founders reacted against what they saw as the degenerate ways of the old elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.[8]
However, following the collapse of Islamic self-confidence that accompanied the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in 1858, disillusioned scholars founded an influential but narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, a hundred miles north of the former Mughal capital in Delhi. Feeling that their backs were against the wall, the madrasa's founders reacted against what they saw as the degenerate ways of the old elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.[8]
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