Higher
Education in the Islamic World
There were institutions of learning in the Muslim world even before the madrassa came up. The first such institutions were centered in the mosque and were known as majlis, halqa, maktab and kuttab. The last two, however, were for elementary education. Then there were libraries, hospitals and Dar ul Ilm kind of institutions. As Greek learning came into the Muslim world in the 8th century, these came to be associated with rationalism or Mutazila doctrines.
The madrassa was created as a college for needy students. It was based on the law of waqf or charitable trust. This law allowed a private founder to reserve his wealth, or part of it, for a charitable purpose such as the lodging and teaching of students in order to gain religious merit. Such teaching consisted primarily of the religious law but subjects helpful for that purpose were also allowed. Greek philosophy was obviously not cosher. Thus the rise of the madrassa also led to the confinement of the Western or purely rationalist subjects to the world of private and unorganized instruction. The madrassa was a private institution even if founded by powerful members of the ruling elite, including the ruler himself, but it was organized. And the cardinal principle of this organization was that religious knowledge was its aim and inspiration.
In Europe the university was not a charitable trust; the colleges were. For instance, the first known college was founded in 1180 by Dominos Jocius de Londoniis who had returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is just possible that he knew of the Muslim madrassas established by waqf. Similarly William of Durham established the University College at Oxford in 1249. These colleges were charitable institutions, just like madrassas, and meant primarily for poor students.
The European university, however, was not the equivalent of the Islamic madrassa. It was an incorporated institution which had a legal personality i.e. it could inherit property; could sue and be sued; and so on. These corporate bodies were formed by the masters and students themselves or, which was more usual, by ecclesiastical or mundane authority i.e. bishops, popes and kings. The madrassas, on the other hand, were not corporate bodies nor were they established by religious or secular authorities.
One thing, however, was common to both institutions. The faculty, or fellows, of both types of institutions decided what was to be taught and how. They were, of course, circumscribed by the parameters of orthodoxy but within those parameters there was much autonomy. In Islam, indeed, the autonomy was even more than in the West because every individual teacher proceeded exactly how he pleased. He taught books and did not have to abide by the syllabi prescribed by others. Also, there was no central authority which set the examination papers or conducted any kind of quality control. Once the madrassa professor or shaikh (as he was called for all subjects other than law when he was called mudarris) decided that a student could teach and issue legal decrees on his own he gave him permission to do so. This was called the Ijaza tul Tadris wal Ifta. In the Western university the professors decided whether a student was fit for teaching but this licentiae docendi was not given by the professors on their own authority (except in the beginning in some places). It was generally given in the name of, and on the authority of, the established legal authorities (spiritual or secular). In short, the Islamic system gave more autonomy to the faculty than the West but, because of the fact that every teacher was his own authority, the system was too individualistic to be standardized. The boards of madrassas we see in Pakistan are a borrowing from the West and have curbed autonomy while ensuring uniformity and standardization.
There is a common misunderstanding that the medieval system of teaching was based on memorization and, therefore, discouraged the use of reason or analytical skills. This is not entirely true. Memorization was valued and did play a major role in medieval education. In Islamic societies anyone who claimed to be learned had to have some passages of classical texts on the fingertips. However, these facts had to be used with rational skills to argue with one’s opponents. This was the dialectical method of disputation (munazara) which needed a sharp mind, rhetorical skill and, of course, a command over the sources. Disputation was valued and one made one’s reputation or lost it in a munazara. The disputation did sometimes lead to bitter quarrels and even violence but it hardly permitted people to memorize a few text and disgorge them before students as the colonial system of Western education created in South Asia. Even the debates in our educational institutions, though reminiscent of the disputation model, are feats of memorization and polemics rather than knowledge, skills and logic.
The West appears to have borrowed the method of disputation, the scholastic method, from Islamic societies. The method is one which Hegel and Marx later referred to i.e. thesis, its counter-thesis and arguments arising from this confrontation. The Western system of higher education also borrows other elements---except the university as a corporate body---from Islam. George Makdisi in his book The Rise of Colleges (1981) gives a list of these parallel developments.
These stages of development are so identical in nature and so well documented in the sources as to remove the likelihood of parallel development due to mere chance. The development in Islam took place more than a century before any part of it began in the Christian West; and the technical terms involved convey the same contents and are, in most cases, exact translations of their Arabic antecedents (p. 276).
Why is it then that Western universities progressed and knowledge became stagnant---despite the munazara---in the Islamic world? There are no easy answers. Most people blame the Mongol invasions which, they say, made the orthodox so fearful of survival that they clamped down upon innovative thinking (ijtihad) in order to conserve what was dear to them. This, however, is not the whole truth. Another answer is that there was a great inquisition (the Mihna) in the 9th century because of the conflict between the Rationalists (Mu ‘tazilis) and the traditionalists. The Rationalists started it first by the patronage of the caliphs al-Mamun, al-Mu ‘tasim, al-Wathiq and al-Mutawakkil. During the second year of Mutawakkil’s reign the Rationalists began to be routed and the traditionalists won out. After this, despite the disputations, orthodoxy defined what could be disputed. The most important subject now was law and mental energy could only be spent upon interpretation within the limits of the law but not outside it. In the West, on the other hand, secularization removed the limits so that all kinds of subjects could be touched upon and all hypotheses disputed.
Yet another explanation, this time by George Makdisi, is that Islam’s form of perpetuity (waqf) was tied down to the wishes of the original benefactor and even this benefactor could not allow any teaching contrary to the religious law. The West had another form of perpetuity, the corporation, which could change with time and finally made the transition from the religious to the secular---as did the universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.
Yet another explanation, again by Makdisi, is that it was in the thirteenth century that the judges (Qazis) and faqihs (Jurisconsults) were appointed by the state. This curbed the freedom of jurisconsults to issue fatwas according to their learning and interpretation. This closed the gates of ‘ijtihad’ rather than the Mongol hordes. If this is true then the Muslim rulers, in order to consolidate their power, did away with the autonomy of the scholars and this did away with diversity.
Whatever the truth, and all explanations could be contributory factors, the West improved on much that it had initially borrowed from Islam. It also used some elements of its own societal institutions and values to produce those very powerful laboratories of ideas we call the universities. It is high time that we in Pakistan borrowed these powerful laboratories instead of resting content with the colonial university which we inherited from the British and are trying to improve by bits and pieces. What we need is the faculty-governed, autonomous, technically sophisticated, resource rich, research oriented institution called the great university in West. We do need them; don’t we?
Dr.
Tariq Rahman