“His schools of knowledge are well-known, and no country was left without them, even the island of Ibn Omar, which is in a corner of the earth that he does not care about, in which he built a large and good school.”


(Historian Shihab al-Din Abu Shama al-Maqdisi in his description of the schools of the vizier Nizam al-Malik al-Tusi)

Mosques and mosques remained - until the fourth century AH - a primary purpose of knowledge and its dissemination, in addition to its religious and devotional role. The jurists were among the most numerous scholars in the presence of students, and this - as Adam Metz explains - was natural; Because the jurists teach the science that qualifies its owners to take up positions from which they live. Abu Hamid bin Muhammad Al-Asfaraini (d. 406 AH / 1015 AD) was the imam of the companions of al-Shafi’i. Between three hundred and seven hundred scholars.

In the past, dictation was considered the highest level of education, and often speakers and linguists in the third century AH followed a special method of dictation. A book from which a student reads, and the teacher explains, and it is said that the last of the linguists who dictated it was Abu al-Qasim al-Zajji, who died in 339 AH / 950 AD, but the dictation of the hadith remains as it is dear to him and the shaw[1].

Schools before the king's regime

We have seen the race of people from all strata of society, and in all Islamic countries, in building the schools, the role of science, and finally schools. The change in the method of education has led to the creation of a new type of scientific institution. This is because when the method of teaching spread, schools arose. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons for this was that mosques were not properly allocated for teaching; Because of the debate and controversy that follows, he may deviate from his companions - sometimes - from the etiquette that must be observed for the mosque; It was the fourth century that revealed these new institutions that have survived to this day[2].

In most cases, the endowers or founders of these schools/colleges were the ones who had the right to develop the appropriate program for them and the purposes of study in these scientific institutes. Qazvin Judge Abd al-Hamid ibn Abd al-Aziz built a school for Shafi’i jurists in his city of Qazvin, and he was buried at his death in the year 557 AH in this school[3]. This Ayyubid princess, Set al-Sham Zumurud Khatun, sister of Sultan Salah al-Din, donates her vast house in Damascus, and makes it a waqf for the establishment of a school that was later one of the major schools of jurisprudence and hadith in the Levant. She also built another school/college; That is why it was known in history as “The Waqif of the Two Shams in Damascus”[4], one of these two schools overlooking a festive view at the Barada River.

Perhaps the most famous of those who built schools in the history of medieval Islam was the minister and writer Nizam al-Malik al-Tusi (d. 485 AH / 1092 AD), the most famous Seljuk minister;

However, historians of Islam have noted that the school system existed at least a century before the birth of the regime of the Tusi king. This al-Subki states that his sheikh, the scholar Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi (d. 748 AH / 1349 AD) says that the Bayhaqi school was established a century before the birth of the king’s regime [5], This is confirmed by the Sheikh of Historians, Al-Allama Al-Maqrizi (d. 845 AH / 1441 AD), saying: “The schools are from what happened in Islam, and they were not known during the time of the Companions or the followers, but their work occurred after the four hundred years of the migration, and the first to remember is that he built a school in Islam The people of Nishapur, so the al-Bayhaqi school was built in it, and Prince Nasr bin Sobaktekin also built a school there, and the brother of Sultan Mahmud bin Sobaktekin built a school in it, and he also built the Saidiya School, and he also built a fourth school in it”[6].

Minister and writer Nizam al-Malik al-Tusi.

Entering schools as secondary and university education at the time, was also not due to respect for the privacy of mosques, and the development of teaching systems and methods;

But it was at times under the weight of purely political reasons, and under the pressure of the opposition parties to the authority, these schools were established to educate people according to the ideas and principles of these movements, as well as to raise their intellectual level[7].

During the third and fourth centuries AH, schools developed in form and content. Teaching included grammar, morphology, philology, rhetoric, literature, logic and mathematics. The students sitting around the teacher received oral rather than written education, and in most cases they went far to listen and teach at the hands of the great scholars in Mecca And Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and on their way they found shelter, food and education everywhere free.

The Sunni Education Revolution.. Nizam King Schools

It seems that the Tusi regime was the first to allocate salaries and wages to teachers and all those working in its schools, and ensured the students' subsistence and all their expenses. Ibn Khallikan said about the efforts of the Seljuk minister Nizam al-Malik: “He built schools, connections and mosques, and he was the first to establish schools, so people followed his example, and he began building his school in Baghdad in the year four hundred and fifty” [8].


The regime of al-Malik al-Tusi hastened the establishment of the regular school, which has since become the model and standard on which people have woven the form of schools and the methods of education in them. The Turks, in Persia to the east, Egypt and the Levant regions subject to mystical influence, to the west.

Behind them stood a strong state in Egypt, the Fatimid state, which tried by all means to confront Sunni Islam militarily and culturally, and people in the areas of their presence in Persia and the Levant were affected at times under the sultan of oppression, and at other times ignorance of the doctrinal and intellectual propaganda of these esoteric ones, the effect of which was revealed by the expansion of mystical influence At that time, and it seems that this expansion prompted the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mustazhar Allah to commission Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali to write a book that “exposes” these beliefs that contradict the Sunnis and the group, which Al-Ghazali complied with by welcoming and accepting the authorship of his book “The Esoteric Scandals”.

Parallel to the most intense military confrontation, the Seljuk Minister Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Tusi expanded the confrontation in the field of culture and the formation of minds. The affairs of government and the management of politics composed it to serve as the model and constitution for the Seljuks, so the man was an educated man who was aware of this dangerous field before he became a system of king and minister.

The expansion of the dissemination of schools became a giant project in all the outskirts and centers of the Islamic state, which is what we understand through this very important text of the Damascene historian Shihab al-Din Abi Shama (d. Omar, which is in a corner of the land that he does not care about, built a large and good school in it, which is now known as the Rida al-Din School” [9], and the island of Ibn Omar, which Abu Shama referred to here, is located near Mosul in northern Iraq, and it was a quiet place, and the origin of For a family famous for science and literature, it is the ethereal family that gave birth to the scholars Izz al-Din ibn al-Atheer, Zia al-Din ibn al-Atheer and Majd al-Din ibn al-Atheer, all of whom excelled in the field of jurisprudence, hadith and history. Vizier Nizam al-Malik al-Tusi.

The Nizamiyya School in Baghdad and Nishapur for Truth was more than a school in our current sense. It was one of the largest international universities at the time. Minister Nizam al-Malik was keen to recruit senior sheikhs and scholars with different specializations who were attested to with solid knowledge, and the Nizamiyya School scholars in Baghdad were not From the people of Baghdad or Iraq only, a look at the list of scholars who taught in this school reveals to us that it was indeed a major international university, this Shafi’i scholar Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, the Shafi’i scholar in his time from the people of Firuzabad in Persia, it is said that Nizam al-Malik al-Tusi built the school for him The regularities in particular, and the sign of his time, was the sheikh of this school.

And this is Abu al-Qasim Ali bin Abi Ya’la al-Saghdi, who came from the area of ​​al-Saghd between Bukhara and Samarkand, ascended as a teacher in the regular school and “had a strong hand in arguing” and logic[10]. Also one of the scholars of this university or school, and the scholar Abu al-Qasim Abd al-Karim bin Hawazin al-Qushayri, who came from Nishapur (in the far eastern part of Iran now) is the imam of Usul, Sufism and Tafsir who taught in the same school in the year 469 AH. At that time, it was one of the largest and greatest fortresses of the Hanbali school of thought in the Islamic world. Rather, a number of senior scholars came from the West of the Islamic world to teach at this international university, such as Abu al-Qasim al-Bakri al-Maghribi al-Ash’ari, who was officially nicknamed in Baghdad as “the science of the Sunnah”[11].We have long lists of scholars who taught in this great school from all parts of the Islamic world that can be traced back to their biographies and translations in Ibn al-Dubaythi’s “Tareekh al-Baghdad” for example.

The Nizamiyya school remained a trust for the adherents of the Shafi’i school of thought, originally and as a branch, and perhaps this was due to the fact that the Seljuk minister owes this doctrine;

But despite that, these schools have produced generations of well-established scholars who enriched with their knowledge the countries of the entire Islamic world, and they were an indispensable cultural repelling factor against the esoteric and Crusader tide alike.