Muslim culture valued learning, especially religious learning, because knowledge provided the guidelines by which men and women should live. Parents thus established elementary schools for the training of their children. From the eighth century onward, formal education for young men involved reading, writing, and the study of the Qur’an, believed essential for its religious message and for its training in proper grammar and syntax.

Islam is a religion of the law, taught at madrasas (muh-DRA-suhs), schools for the study of Muslim law and religion. Schools were urban phenomena. Wealthy merchants endowed them, providing salaries for teachers, stipends for students, and living accommodations for both. All Islamic higher education rested on a close relationship between teacher and students, so in selecting a teacher, the student (or his father) considered the character and intellectual reputation of the teacher, not that of the institution. Students built their subsequent careers on the reputation of their teachers.

Learning depended heavily on memorization. In primary school, which was often attached to an institution of higher learning, a boy began his education by memorizing the entire Qur’an. In adolescence a student learned by heart an introductory work in one of the branches of knowledge, such as jurisprudence or grammar. Later he analyzed the texts in detail. Every class day, the teacher examined the student on the previous day’s learning and determined whether the student fully understood what he had memorized. Students, of course, learned to write, for they had to record the teacher’s commentary on a particular text. But the overwhelming emphasis was on the oral transmission of knowledge.

Because Islamic education focused on particular books, when the student had mastered a text to his teacher’s satisfaction, the teacher issued the student a certificate stating that he had studied the book or collection of traditions with his teacher. The certificate allowed the student to transmit a text to the next generation on the authority of his teacher.

As the importance of books suggests, the Muslim transmission and improvement of papermaking techniques had special significance to education. After Chinese papermaking techniques spread westward, Muslim papermakers improved on them by adding starch to fill the pores in the surfaces of the sheets. Muslims carried this new method to Baghdad in Iraq, Damascus in Syria, Cairo in Egypt, and the Maghrib (North Africa), from which it entered Spain. Even before the invention of printing, papermaking had a revolutionary impact on the collection and diffusion of knowledge.

Muslim higher education, apart from its fundamental goal of preparing men to live wisely and in accordance with God’s law, aimed at preparing them to perform religious and legal functions as Qur’an — or hadith — readers; as preachers in the mosques; as professors, educators, or copyists; and especially as judges. Judges issued fatwas, or legal opinions, in the public courts; their training was in the Qur’an, hadith, or some text forming part of the shari’a.

On the issue of female education, Islamic culture was ambivalent. Tradition holds that Muhammad said, “The seeking of knowledge is a duty of every Muslim,” but, because of the basic Islamic principle that “men are the guardians of women, because God has set the one over the other,” the law excluded women from participating in the legal, religious, or civic occupations for which the madrasa prepared young men. Moreover, educational theorists insisted that men should study in a sexually isolated environment. Nevertheless, many young women received substantial educations at home. According to one biographical dictionary covering the lives of 1,075 women, 411 of them had memorized the Qur’an, studied with a particular teacher, and received a certificate.

In comparing Islamic higher education during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries with that available in Europe or China at the same time (see “The Scholar-Officials and Neo-Confucianism” in Chapter 13, “Universities and Scholasticism” in Chapter 14), there are some striking similarities and some major differences. In both Europe and the Islamic countries religious authorities ran most schools, while in China the government, local villages, and lineages ran schools, and private tutoring was very common. In the Islamic world, as in China, the personal relationship of teacher and student was seen as key to education. In Europe the reward for satisfactorily completing a course of study was a degree granted by the university. In China, at the very highest levels, the state ran a civil service examination system that rewarded achievement with appointments in the state bureaucracy. In Muslim culture, by contrast, it was not the school or the state but the individual teacher whose evaluation mattered and who granted certificates.

Still, there were also some striking similarities in the practice of education. Students in all three cultures had to master a sacred language. In all three cultures education rested heavily on the study of basic religious, legal, or philosophical texts. Also, in all three cultures memorization played a large role in the acquisition and transmission of learning. Furthermore, teachers in all three societies lectured on particular passages, and leading teachers might disagree fiercely about the correct interpretations of a particular text, forcing students to question, to think critically, and to choose among divergent opinions. All these similarities in educational practice contributed to cultural cohesion and ties among the educated living in scattered localities.

In the Muslim world the spread of the Arabic language, not only among the educated classes but also among all the people, was the decisive element in the creation of a common culture. Arabic became the official language of the state and its bureaucracies in former Byzantine and Sassanid territories, and Muslim conquerors forbade Persian-speaking people to use their native language. Islamic rulers required tribute from monotheistic peoples — the Persians and Greeks — but they did not force them to change their religions. Conquered peoples were, however, compelled to submit to a linguistic conversion — to adopt the Arabic language. In time Arabic produced a cohesive and “international” culture over a large part of the Eurasian world. Among those who wrote in Arabic was the erudite Gregory Bar-Hebraeus (1226–1286), a bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church.

As a result of Muslim creativity and vitality, modern scholars consider the years from 800 to 1300 to be one of the most brilliant periods in the world’s history. Near the beginning of this period the Persian scholar al-Khwarizmi (d. ca. 850) harmonized Greek and Indian findings to produce astronomical tables that formed the basis for later Eastern and Western research. Al-Khwarizmi’s textbook on algebra (from the Arabic al-Jabr) was the first work in which the word algebra is used to mean the “transposing of negative terms in an equation to the opposite side.”

Muslim medical knowledge far surpassed that of the West. Muslim medical science reached its peak in the work of Ibn Sina of Bukhara (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna. His al-Qanun codified all Greco-Arabic medical thought, described the contagious nature of tuberculosis and the spreading of diseases, and listed 760 drugs.

Muslim scholars also wrote works on geography, jurisprudence, and philosophy. Al-Kindi (d. ca. 870) was the first Muslim thinker to try to harmonize Greek philosophy and the religious precepts of the Qur’an. Avicenna maintained that the truths found by human reason cannot conflict with the truths revealed in the Qur’an. Ibn Rushid, or Averroës (1126–1198), of Córdoba, paraphrased and commented on the works of Aristotle. He insisted on the right to subject all knowledge, except the dogmas of faith, to the test of reason and on the essential harmony of religion and philosophy.