The high degree of learning and scholarship in Islam, particularly during the ʿAbbāsid period in eastern Islam and the later Umayyads in western Islam, encouraged the development of bookshops, copyists, and book dealers in large, important Islamic cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, and Córdoba. Scholars and students spent many hours in these bookshop schools browsing, examining, and studying available books or purchasing favourite selections for their private libraries. Book dealers traveled to famous bookstores in search of rare manuscripts for purchase and resale to collectors and scholars and thus contributed to the spread of learning. Many such manuscripts found their way to private libraries of famous Muslim scholars such as Avicenna, al-Ghazālī, and al-Fārābī, who in turn made their homes centres of scholarly pursuits for their favourite students.
Fundamental to Muslim education though the circle schools, the maktabs, and the palace schools were, they embodied definite educational limitations. Their curricula were limited; they could not always attract well-trained teachers; physical facilities were not always conducive to a congenial educational environment; and conflicts between religious and secular aims in these schools were almost irreconcilable. Most importantly, these schools could not meet the growing need for trained personnel or provide sufficient educational opportunities for those who wished to continue their studies. These pressures led to the creation of a new type of school, the madrasa, which became the crown and glory of medieval Muslim education. The madrasa was an outgrowth of the masjid, a type of mosque college dating to the 8th century. The differences between these two institutions are still being studied, but most scholars believe that the masjid was also a place of worship and that, unlike the madrasa, its endowment supported only the faculty and not the students as well. A third type of college, the meshed (shrine college), was usually a madrasa built next to a pilgrimage centre. Whatever their particularities, all three types of college specialized in legal instruction, each turning out experts in one of the four schools of Sunni, or orthodox, Islamic law.
Madrasas may have existed as early as the 9th century, but the most famous one was founded in 1057 by the vizier Niẓām al-Mulk in Baghdad. The Niẓāmīyah, devoted to Sunni learning, served as a model for the establishment of an extensive network of such institutions throughout the eastern Islamic world, especially in Cairo, which had 75 madrasas; in Damascus, which had 51; and in Aleppo, where the number of madrasas rose from 6 to 44 between 1155 and 1260.
Important institutions also developed in western Islam, under the Umayyads, in the Spanish cities of Córdoba, Sevilla (Seville), Toledo, Granada, Murcia, Almería, Valencia, and Cádiz. The madrasas had no standard curriculum; the founder of each school determined the specific courses that would be taught, but they generally offered instruction in both the religious sciences and the physical sciences.
The contribution of these institutions to the advancement of knowledge was vast. Muslim scholars calculated the angle of the ecliptic; measured the size of the Earth; calculated the precession of the equinoxes; explained, in the field of optics and physics, such phenomena as refraction of light, gravity, capillary attraction, and twilight; and developed observatories for the empirical study of heavenly bodies. They made advances in the uses of drugs, herbs, and foods for medication; established hospitals with a system of interns and externs; discovered causes of certain diseases and developed correct diagnoses of them; proposed new concepts of hygiene; made use of anesthetics in surgery with newly innovated surgical tools; and introduced the science of dissection in anatomy. They furthered the scientific breeding of horses and cattle; found new ways of grafting to produce new types of flowers and fruits; introduced new concepts of irrigation, fertilization, and soil cultivation; and improved upon the science of navigation. In the area of chemistry, Muslim scholarship led to the discovery of such substances as potash, alcohol, nitrate of silver, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and mercury chloride. It also developed to a high degree of perfection the arts of textiles, ceramics, and metallurgy. Major periods of Muslim education and learning
The renaissance of Islamic culture and scholarship developed largely under the ʿAbbāsid administration in eastern Islam and later under the Umayyads in western Islam, mainly in Spain, between 800 and 1000. This latter period, the golden age of Islamic scholarship, was largely a period of translation and interpretation of Classical thoughts and their adaptation to Islamic theology and philosophy. The period also witnessed the introduction and assimilation of Hellenistic, Persian, and Hindu mathematics, astronomy, algebra, trigonometry, and medicine into Muslim culture.
Whereas the 8th and 9th centuries—mainly between 750 and 900—were characterized by the introduction of Classical learning and its refinement and adaptation to Islamic culture, the 10th and 11th were centuries of interpretation, criticism, and further adaptation. There followed a period of modification and significant additions to Classical culture through Muslim scholarship. Creative scholarship in Islam from the 10th to the 12th century included works by such scholars as Omar Khayyam, al-Bīrūnī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), al-Ṭabarī, Avempace (Ibn Bājjah), and Averroës (Ibn Rushd). During the 12th and 13th centuries, most of the works of Classical learning and the creative Muslim additions were translated from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin. These translations were instrumental in bringing about the early phases of the European intellectual awakening, which coincided with the decline of Muslim scholarship. Influence of Islamic learning on the West
As Europe was absorbing the fruits of Islam’s centuries of creative productivity, signs of Latin Christian awakening were evident throughout the European continent. The 12th century was one of intensified traffic of Muslim learning into the Western world through many hundreds of translations of Muslim works, which helped Europe seize the initiative from Islam when political conditions in Islam brought about a decline in Muslim scholarship. By 1300, European scholars stood once again on the solid ground of Hellenistic thought, enriched or modified through Muslim and Byzantine efforts. Mehdi K. Nakosteen Joseph S. Szyliowicz Europe in the Middle Ages The background of early Christian education From the beginnings to the 4th century
Initially, Christianity found most of its adherents among the poor and illiterate, making little headway—as St. Paul observed (1 Corinthians 1:26)—among the worldly-wise, the mighty, and those of high rank. But during the 2nd century ce and afterward, it appealed more and more to the educated class and to leading citizens. These individuals naturally wanted their children to have at least as good an education as they themselves had, but the only schools available were the grammar and rhetoric schools with their Greco-Roman, non-Christian culture. There were different opinions among Christian leaders about the right attitude to this dilemma that confronted all Christians who sought a good education for their children. The Greek Fathers—especially the Christian Platonists Clement of Alexandria and Origen—sought to prove that the Christian view of the universe was compatible with Greek thought and even regarded Christianity as the culmination of philosophy, to which the way must be sought through liberal studies. Without a liberal education, the Christian could live a life of faith and obedience but could not expect to attain an intellectual understanding of the mysteries of the faith or expect to appreciate the significance of the Gospel as the meeting ground of Hellenism and Judaism. St. Augustine and St. Basil also tolerated the use of the secular schools by Christians, maintaining that literary and rhetorical culture is valuable so long as it is kept subservient to the Christian life. The Roman theologian Tertullian, on the other hand, was suspicious of pagan culture, but he admitted the necessity (though deploring it) of making use of the educational facilities available.