Medieval Muslim Scholars, like intellectuals in any time and place, cannot be faulted for their humility. In this Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, a prominent Egyptian teacher and jurist of the late fifteenth century, differed little from his peers, although perhaps his claims were somewhat more controversial. In his autobiography, al-Suyuti set forth his own very generous reckoning of his achievements in different fields of intellectual endeavor. At the bottom of his list, along with medicine, al-Suyuti mentioned the science of the variant versions of reading and reciting the Quran (qira'at). This subject, al-Suyuti confessed, he did not presume to teach, because in it he had had no teacher.The problem was not that he was unlearned -- on the contrary, he wrote a book on the subject -- but that he would be unable to transmit his knowledge on the authority of any recognized shaykh.
The personal connection -- the educational model relying not simply on close study of a text, but on intensive, personal interaction with a shaykh -- has always been central to Islamic education, not simply in Mamluk Egypt. The famous historian Ibn Khaldun, himself a Maghribi, described in his Muqaddimah how, after an intellectually barren period under the Almohad dynasty, rigorous "scientific" learning returned to northwest Africa during the course of the thirteenth century. The triumph of learning there arose not through the reception of unknown or forgotten texts, but through the personal efforts of individual scholars who traveled to the Muslim East, studied there with prominent professors and their pupils, and returned to the Maghrib to pass on thetraditions to their own students. Where traditional Islamic education has survived into the modern period, this personal model has remained more or less intact. Muslim education in early twentieth-century Morocco was built around a vibrant, personal system for the transmission of knowledge remarkably similar to the medieval model, in which the intimate relationships established between students and teachers proved determinative in shaping a student's later career.
Islamic higher education, in late medieval Egypt as in other periods,rested entirely on the character of the relationship a student maintained with his teachers, and not on the reputation of any institution. Cities suchas Cairo and Kairouan in North Africa might acquire reputations as centers of learning and scholarship, but nothing like a degree system formally attached to particular institutions of learning was ever established.The choice of a professor, and even of a text to be studied, had alwaysbeen a highly personal matter, and the spread of institutions devoted specifically to education between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries did little to change that. On the contrary, the inner dynamic of Islamic educational traditions, which had their origins in the earliest decades of the accumulation and transmission of Muslim learning, triumphed over the temporary attempt to channel instruction into particular institutions. The establishment and endowment of schools and mosques that provided financial support to teachers and students did have profound impact on the educated elite and on social relations within that group, as we shall see in subsequent chapters. But the critical factor that a successful student considered was always the character, intellectual quality, and reputation of his instructor. Treatises on education, both those written during the Mamluk period and those of an earlier era that circulated widely in the later Middle Ages, repeated over and over the qualities to be looked for in a teacher. "Regarding the choice of a teacher," claimed a tract widely popular in the Mamluk period, "it is important to select the most learned, the most pious and the most advanced in years." Other writers on education laid out similar guidelines. The choice was so important that a student arriving in a new city or country was urged to take as long as two months in choosing the proper teacher. The early fourteenth-century scholar and jurist Badr al-Din Ibn Jama'a, too, recognized in his treatise on education that "it is important that the student look ahead [yuqaddimu 'I-nazar] and ask God to indicate to him from whom he should study," a choice to be made on the basis of the shaykh's learning, age, and character.
The importance of the personal, as opposed to the institutional, connection is immediately apparent in the principal sources on the educated ellte of the Mamluk period. The biographical dictionaries of medieval scholars, written by their contemporaries, tell us little about where important medieval Muslims studied -- aside from an occasional remark that an individual studied a collection of hadith or some other text at a particular madrasa, the dictionaries are virtually silent regarding the schools in which a young pupil received his training. Their silence, however, speaks volumes. It was not that information about an individual's education was unavailable. On the contrary, historians and biographers routinely supplied long lists of a scholar's teachers, a sort of curriculum vitae in which the critical element consisted of the names of those on whose authority one transmitted the texts of Muslim learning. In a fairly typical passage, the historian Shams al-Din Muhammad al-Sakhawi included in his biography of the Cairene jurist 'Alam al-Din Salih al-Bulqini (d. 1464) the names of more than a dozen of his teachers and shaykhs, but no information at all about where 'Alam al-Din had been educated. The message is clear: one's teachers mattered, but venue did not.
An education was judged not on loci but on personae. Students built their careers on the reputations of their teachers." Naturally, to have studied in some capacity with an especially prominent scholar was an honor eagerly sought after. A biographer, for example, might write of an outstanding jurist such as the Shafi'i Wali 'l-Din Ahmad Ibn al-'Iraqi(d. 1423) that "the number of his students and those who studied with him increased until there were few outstanding students of any rite who had not studied with him.'' A student would seek out the most reputable and distinguished teachers he could, in part, of course, because doing so increased his chances of actually learning something. But respected shaylkhs imparted to their pupils more than mere knowledge; they also imparted authority, an authority over texts and over a body of learning that was intensely personal, and that could be transmitted only through some form of direct personal contact.
The world of traditional Muslim learning retained the notion, developed in the early Islamic period, that personal instruction with a shaykh,and in particular the oral transmission of a text, was superior to privatestudy. Even the various words used to describe the process of education and transmission reflect this bias. Much of the content of Muslim learning was encapsulated in written texts -- large compendia or small collections of hadlth, scholarly treatises, textbooks, and abridgments. A student did not, however, simply read a book to himself, and in this way acquire knowledge. The operative verbs stress the personal and oral nature of study and instruction. An author published his book not so much through writing and transcription as through dictation (imla'), which he might give either from a written copy or from memory. By the same token, a pupil would not simply read a text silently to himself; rather, he "heard from" some individual a particular text, that is, he heard the text read or recited from memory by its author, or by one who had himself previously studied the work with another shaykh. Alternatively he might himself "read to" a teacher, out loud, hisown transcription of the text. The preference for personal instruction as opposed to private reading and study, and the belief that only oral transmission is truly legitimate, lies deeply embedded in the Islamic educational system. In places where traditional education has survived into the modern world, this bias has survived even the introduction of printed texts.
To be sure, written texts played an important role in education, and the immense number of manuscripts that survive from, say, the fifteenth century, testify to the important role of the book in a highly literate academic world that remained vibrant throughout the Middle Ages. Ibn Jama'a found it necessary to reprove students who used their books as pillows, as fans, or to squash bedbugs, but most viewed them as an indispensable intellectual resource. Schools and mosques in Mamluk Cairo frequently housed large collections of books available for use by the institution's teachers and students, or by visiting scholars. These libraries attracted copyists, sometimes from great distances: al-Suyuti proudly recounted the tale of one Syrian student who wrote "with a good hand" who spent a year in his cell at the Shaykhuniyya khanqah in Cairo, copying more than thirty of the scholar's books, and who later returned to copy twenty more. Ibn Jama'a urged students to purchase the texts that they needed whenever possible, but books were expensive, and most were probably forced to undertake the arduous task of transcribing their own copies. The process of writing could help to reinforce that which was learned through the mediation of the shaykh, and through memorization, and to that extent was approved. "The student should always have with him an inkwell, so as to be able to write down what useful things he hears," in the words of one treatise. "What is memorized, flies way," went an aphorism of the famous Naslr al-Din Tusi; "what is written down, remains.'' Copying books and writing down notes, however, even those taken at a teacher's dictation, meant little if their content was not fully understood. Ibn Jama'a went to some lengths to point out that acquiring books, even large numbers of them, did not itself promote knowledge and understanding. Medieval educators, like their modern counterparts, although perhaps with greater success, urged their students to seize every opportunity to read: he who kept no book in his sleeve, it was said, could have little wisdom in his heart.
But the idea that only individuals could impart true knowledge and grant authority carried over into the very texts transmitted from one generation of scholars to the next. Intellectual activity in the civilizations on both sides of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages -- during what Franz Rosenthal has accurately called the "manuscript age" -- consisted largely of replicating, and commenting upon, the literary productions of previous generations. Muslim scholars, however, and especially those in the fields of jurisprudence and tradition, carefully cited authorities for the traditions, verses, or anecdotes they repeated. Long excerpts from earlier works were directly incorporated into new literary productions, a process well illustrated by the prolific author al-Sakhawl, whose immense biographical dictionary al-Dav' al-lami', in addition to preserving his own recollections of individual subjects, also simply replicates passages from Inba' al-ghumr, a biographical work by his teacher Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, as well as information from other late Mamluk historians. The need to rely on some individual or group of individuals for authority implies a generally conservative attitude toward knowledge and learning, an attitude that found expression in the aphorism, "a good teacher hands on what he has been taught, neither more nor less.''
Despite such precautions, the overall attitude toward writing and the physical, written book as a means of transmitting knowledge remained ambivalent. Private reading and note-taking did not in any way obviate the student's obligation to check his reading of a text against that of his shaykh. True knowledge derives only from a learned person, insisted Ibn Jama'a, and not from books; those who attempted to rest their education only on the written word were guilty of "one of the most scandalous of acts.'' Learning requires that one "read with a shaykh [who is] a guide to the correct path, upright, and sincere, and not to proceed independently, [relying on] one's self and one's intelligence." The same, of course, had to be strictly applied to the teachers one chose.
"One should not study with another who himself studied only from books, without having read [them] to a learned shaykh. Taking knowledge from books [alone] leads to spelling errors and mistakes ] and mis-pronunciation.Whoever does not take his learning ['ilm] from the mouths of men is like he who learns courage without ever facing battle."
Ibn Jama'a, who wrote an extended treatise as a guide to education, warned students not to seek their instruction from those "who have studied the hidden meaning of pages but who are notknown to keep the company of well-versed shaykhs." Ibn Khal-dun reported that some overly eager students felt impelled to study thejurisprudence of the Zahiris, a school of law that had become"extinct" before he wrote in the late fourteenth century, and whose doctrines survived "only in books, which have eternal life." By doing so, however, the great historian suggested that they exposed themselves to the charge of illicit innovation, "as they accept knowledge from books for which no key is provided by scholars." When the Sufis of Andalusia became embroiled in a dispute in the fourteenth century over whether or not one could rely solely on books as guides to a proper and complete mystical experience, to the exclusion of Sufi spiritual masters, it was polntedly recognized by some that they were not questioning the necessity of having a teaching master.
Of course, a student could not study at all times under the direct supervision of a shaykh, but certain features of traditional Islamic instruction and study techniques implied the continued presence of the teacher's authority. After classes, and after the departure of their teachers, students were encouraged to study together, to drill each other in their lessons, and, when alone, an individual student shoul drill himself." But even the act of reading to oneself was not usually a silent one, consisting rather of audibly pronouncing the words of a text.A student should raise his voice in his studies, according to a treatise entitled "The Encouragement to the Search for Knowledge," so that he hears himself read, for "what the ear hears becomes firmly established in the heart," and also because reading out loud keeps the student more attentive. Reading or studying was sometimes described as being accompanied by a "mumbling" or "buzzing".
A comparative experience may suggest the significance of this. During the manuscript age, silent reading was the exception rather than the rule in Europe as well. There, at least in the early Middle Ages, because of manuscript traditions in which words were routinely run together, comprehension of the written word required the actual pronunciation of the words of the text. The spread of silent reading had to await certain developments in the art of writing -- in particular the use of a cursive script, the clear separation of words in texts, and the use of punctuation. Once established, however, silent, and therefore private reading may have contributed to the development and diffusion of heretical and heterodox teachings. Despite its lack of written vowels, certain peculiarities of Arabic orthography - - such as the initial, medial, and final forms for each letter -- meant that students could read silently and privately, that the audible pronunciation of each word was not absolutely essential to conveying at least the obvious meaning of the written word. But nonetheless the system clearly preferred reading aloud and the oral transmission of texts, and thereby sought the exact and undeviating replication of the knowledge transmitted through any given book. The practice of audibly pronouncing the words of a book as one read, even as one read to oneself, may have served indirectly to reinforce the authority of a student's shaykh, since, ultimately, a student's reading of a text had to be checked against that of his teacher, and therefore also the authority of the religious tradition for which the shaykh was only the most recent link in a long chain.
More immediately, however, the practice of reading out loud also aided in the process of memorization. Memorization of course played a critical role in the process of mastering virtually any of the Islamic sciences, as it did also in Jewish religious instruction. A young boy would begin his education by committing the Quran to memory, often by the age of seven or eight. The primary schools (maktab, kuttab) frequently annexed to the various institutions of higher learning in medieval Cairo commonly made provisions for supporting the education of various numbers of boys until they reached the age of puberty; once they had moved into adolescence they were to be replaced, "unless they had only a little of the Quran left to memorize." A student continued his religious education by learning by heart a compendium or introductory work in the several fields of knowledge -- jurisprudence and its foundations, for example, or grammar -- before going on to study and analyze the texts and subjects in greater detail. To assist young students in the process of memorization, popular instructional texts were often set to verse. Such transpositions were extraordinarily common, to judge from the frequency with which Haci Khalfa mentions them in his seventeenth-century encyclopedia of Muslim learning. These versifications aided students in the memorization process, and incidentally served to preserve the memory of the otherwise forgettable scholars who usually wrote them. Ibn Muzaffar, for example, an obscure figure of the late fifteenth century who studied with prominent teachers but who found employment only as a notary, a copyist, and possibly as a deputy qadl, nonetheless left his mark on the world of education by versifying a number of important pedagogical works, including a compendium of Shafi'l law and a short treatise on the science of hadlth.
The science of traditions placed special emphasis on memory, and the most proficient traditionists were known as "those who have memorized traditions" , but the other religious subjects relied on memory as well. Biographical dictionaries from the Mamluk as well earlier periods are replete with entries extolling the praises of scholars with prodigious feats of memorization to their credit. Some of these men were blessed with near-photographic memories, such as the jurist and professorof Malikite law Ibn Ukht Bahram (d. 1440), who astounded his peers with his ability to memorize an entire page of text after only two or three readings. More often, however, students and scholars memorized their texts through a rigorous training that stressed the role of memory and through sheer force of will; learning by heart four or five hundred manuscript lines per day was considered a noteworthy achievement. To asist the faint of heart, treatises on education listed those things which aided the memory (including honey, the use of toothpicks, and eating twenty-one raisins per day) as well as foods (such as coriander, eggplant, and bitter apples) that made one forgetful. The emphasis on memorization was not unique to Islamic education, but linked it to broader patterns of traditional and religious instruction in Near Eastern societies. The transmission of Jewish learning, for example, also relied heavily on memory, and this pedagogical similarity did not escape the notice of contemporaries. The fifteenth-century Muslim historian alMaqrizi s hortly before his own death, commemorated the passing in 1441 of a Jewish physician and scholar and, in language similar to that used to describe Muslims, mourned the fact that "he left not his equal in memorizing the Torah and the books of the Prophets among the Jews of Egypt." Nor did memorization play a role only in religious and legal subjects: the mosque of Ibn Tulun hired a professor of medicine who, like his colleagues in the traditional sciences, required his students "to memorize what he selected from among the books ofl medicine." These common patterns ran deep, and where traditional Islamic education has survived in the modern world, memorization of the Quran and other texts remains one of its central features.
But memorization, too, like reading, was an interactive process that drew the student firmly under the authority of his shaykh. It involved, in the first place, a habit of repetition to ensure that that which was memorized was retained. The student should repeat each day that which he had learned on previous days, five times if necessary, gradually reducing the number of repetitions until the text was fixed firmly in his mind. Silently reviewing his lessons would not suffice, however; it was "essential not to become accustomed to repeating silently since it is necessary that learning and repetition be carried on with vigor and zeal." And some memorizing, like reading, became a noisy, oral project in which the student repeated his lessons aloud, and thereby submitted his studies to the supervision of his teacher. He should periodically repeat the texts that he has memorized to his shaykh for correction or approval, and the shaykh should himself require his students to repeat the texts in his presence. Academic authorities agreed that attempting to memorize a text on one's own was, like unsupervised reading, a dangerous and scandalous act.
The generally conservative Muslim attitude toward knowledge and learning, which could only have been reinforced by the emphasis on memory, should in no way be taken as an indication that scholarship was sterile and static. Commentators agreed that memorization alone was insufficient: to put his learning to use, a student must understand as well as memorize. "Memorizing two words is better than hearing two pages, but understanding two words is better than memorizing two pages" -- an aphorism perhaps more elegant in Arabic, but that even in translation powerfully conveys a point. Serious educators maintained a distinction between riwaya, the capacity simply to memorize and transmit, and diraya, the ability to use critically the materials memorized and apply them to particular academic and legal problems. Muslim scholars produced vigorous critiques of both ancient and contemporary writers, and academic exchange, at least at the higher levels of the study of jurisprudence, often revolved around the organized disputation of controversial questions. 4This distinction between the means by which hadlth and the basic texts of law were transmitted and the more rigorous and dialectical instruction at the advanced stages of jurisprudence is an important one, and should be borne in mind; it will have consequences for the participation of certain groups, such as women, in the transmission of religious knowledge. But for our present purposes, the important point is that here, too, as in simple reading and memorization, the supervisory role of a shaykh was paramount. In a famous passage in which he likened scientific learning to a "craft" (sina'a), Ibn Khaldun acknowledged the importance of engaging actively in discussion and disputation, rather than relying solely on memory. But, as in any craft, such learning required instruction, and therefore also "a tradition of famous teachers."
Since individual teachers played the decisive role in the shaping of a student's academic identity, the transmission of knowledge was regulated, not by any formal system of institutional degrees, but by the license issued by a particular shaykh to a particular student. The license may have originated as a device for securing the accurate transmission of hadith, but quickly became the standard means by which all Muslim learning was passed on, from teacher to pupil, and from one generation to another. Ultimately, the license took many forms, including that of a general permission which might be granted by a teacher to individual students of advanced standing to teach jurisprudence or issue legal opinions. For most individuals, however, Islamic education continued to focus on particular books or texts and their simple transmission. Consequently, in its most common form, the license certified that a student had studied a particular book or collection of traditions with his teacher: the student had heard the teacher dictate the work and had transcribed what he had heard, or he had himself read his transcription to the teacher, who corrected any mistakes in the student's recitation and copy. The license acted in turn as a license to its recipient to transmit the text, on the authority of his teacher, his teacher's teachers, and all those in a chain of authority (sanad, isnad) reaching back to the author of the book or, in the case of hadith, to the Prophet himself or his Companions.
To be sure, the license system grew subject to abuse over the course of the Middle Ages. The chains of authority on which an license's value depended might contain fictive transmissions: chronological gaps between the death of one transmitter and the birth of the next, or transmitters, because of their youth or geographical distance, could not possibly have received a genuine personal authorization from the shaykh who formed the preceeding link in the chain. Such abuses stretched back to the earliest Islamic periods, when the transmission of hadlth was in its early, formative stages. Distinguishing genuine from spurious chains of authority formed one of the principal tasks for those who studied hadlth,and an elaborate science to secure the authenticity of transmissions developed; one of its lasting contributions to Muslim civilization was the genre of the "biographical dictionary," which allows us to reconstruct in such fine detail the world of learning in the Middle Ages. But with the general reliance on licenses to certify the transmission of all texts in virtually all fields of Muslim intellectual endeavor, the system grew subject to a diminished discipline and rigor. Licences were issued that were not so much disingenuous as they were diluted, deprived of meaning. A shaykh might issue a blanket license for every book or subject that he himself was authorized to transmit. He might authorize a license for a student whomhe had encountered only briefly, or who had never actually heard his dictation; licenses might be issued simply on the basis of a written request and the pupil's reputation (or that of his family) for scholarship. Such was the inflation of licenses that even leading scholars of the Mamluk period,such as Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, saw little shame in reporting having received ijazas from transmitters whom they had not met, or with whomthey had had only the most fleeting contact.
Moreover, it became routine for scholars to bring their children with them to sessions in which a collection of hadlth or some other book was being recited, and for the presiding shaykh to issue licenses to the children as well. It was not at all unusual for men or women to have received licenses at ages as young as four, three, or even two years. A man born at the end of the fourteenth century received an license "in the year of his birth."Jalal al-Din al-Suyub, the prominent and controversial scholar who was born in 1445, recorded that "I have no doubt that I have a license from[Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani, who died in 1449, since my father often attended his teaching circles." Especially in the transmission of hadlth, licenses issued to very young boys and girls became quite valuable in the pupils' later lives for two interconnected reasons. In the first place, a license held by a young child from an elderly person would rely upon an isnad with fewer names than one received from a younger man or woman; and the fewer names an isnad contained, the stronger i tseemed to contemporaries, on the theory that with fewer links in thechains of authority, errors in transmission were less likely to occur. In addition, a child who received a license at a young age might live to become the last surviving person to transmit a work on the authority of: some respected shaykh who had died several decades before.
Medieval Muslims themselves, of course, were aware of the dangersi mplicit in the liberal issuing of licenses, and responded accordingly. Con cerning the science of hadith, for example, they devised elaborate hierarchies consisting of as many as eight different levels on which hadlth might be transmitted. Always, however, the highest estimation was reserved for those who had personally heard the recitation of some text: from a recognized transmitter, and who possessed a license that at tested to the student's having received the text directly from the mouth of the shaykh.
The important element was thus one of personal contact, of entering through the teacher an unbroken chain of authority linking the student; to the author of a work of scholarship or, in the case of hadlth, to the Prophet or his Companions. Even when licenses were issued to strangers, those living in distant locales, or infants, they still represented the transmission of a text from one individual to another, independent of any institutional structure. Consequently, scholars of the Mamluk period continued the practice, developed earlier in the history of Muslim scholarship, of composing book-length lists of those with whom they studied and on whose authority they recited hadlth. These lists vary somewhat in form and in the amount of detail they record about an individual's education, but organized as they are around the names and qualities of particular teachers, they all implicitly stress the importance of the personal element in the transmission of Islamic knowledge.
Individual teachers thus transmitted to their students less an abstract body of knowledge embodied in particular texts than a personal authority over those texts, an authority that in the case of promising students was enhanced by the long and close personal relationship indicated by the Arabic word suhba. The concept of suhba lay at the core of Islamic higher education. The word means "companionship," although often the word "discipleship," with its implication of an authoritative relationship, is probably a better translation. The term described a pattern of personal relationship that permeated medieval Near Eastern society. It described the relationship between a prominent transmitter of the Prophetic traditions and his Mamluk patron, an avid student himself who employed his scholarly friend as a reader of hadlth. The model was one of close friendship, but could also indicate more precisely the relationship of master and disciple, as in the case of a young trader who performed commercial services for an older merchant who had previously initiated him into the practices of the business world.
In the context of education, suhba implied an extremely close personal and intellectual relationship between teacher and student, one fostered over the course of many years. Applied principally in the fields of hadlth and jurisprudence, suhba and its synonyms (especially mulazama) could in fact characterize a master-disciple relationship in any subject of instruction as well as in initiation to Sufi mysticism. But it is especially in its effect on the relationship between teacher and student that the concept interests us. In the Mamluk period, suhba continued to be the model for Islamic education, so that students were urged not to move"from one shaykh to another before mastering what was begun with the first, for to do so would be to tear down that which had been built up." Not all students were counted among the disciples (sahaba, sing. sahib) of a teacher, only those who devoted themselves to intensive study under him.
Such a close relationship could extend over many years, as it must have for Shihab al-Dm Ahmad ibn Asad (d. 1468), who attached himself to Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalam "until he had heard from him most of what was recited on his [authority] and most of his writings." Ibn Hajar himself proudly recalled that he had been the disciple of the prominent hadith scholar Zayn al-Din al-'Iraqi (d. 1403) for a period of ten years. On the other hand, as the biographical dictionaries attest, it was possible, and not altogether unusual, for a student to become the sahib of more than one shaykh. The prominent Syrian muhaddith (transmitter of the Prophetic traditions) Ibrahlm Sibt Ibn al-'Ajami (d. 1438), for example, is said to have "studied intensively" with three different shaykhs. Very often those who did so were especially bright and promising students, themselves destined for remarkable academic careers, such as Zayn al-Din al'Iraqi, Ibn Hajar's teacher, or Ibn Hajar himself, who developed this relationship with at least five different shaykhs, several of them in the same subject (jurisprudence).
For all their intimacy, however, instructional relationships were also characterized by the absolute authority of the shaykh, an authority that created an almost insuperable psychological gulf between teacher and student. It may be that any educational model implies some sort of power relationship between instructor and instructed. Certainly, however, the instructional framework envisaged by medieval Islamic texts on pedagogy reinforced an authoritative relationship between a shaykh and his students, a relationship whose way had been prepared during the course of a student's primary education. A passage in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah strikingly highlights in no uncertain terms the subservient relationship of a primary school student to his teacher. The great Malikl scholar and jurist urged that teachers not punish their students "with injustice and (tyrannical) force." Such severe punishment "makes them lazy and induces them to lie and be insincere, because they are afraid that they will have to suffer tyrannical treatment (if they tell the truth)." Sound advice, but what is significant is the scope of Ibn Khaldun's admonition: it is directed to the masters, not only of students, but of servants and slaves. Psychologically speaking, the relationship between more advanced students and their teachers was not altogether different. The shaykh was the possessor of a certain authority that he could, through various devices, transmit to his students. As we shall see, this had practical consequences for the society of the learned elite in the Mamluk period.
The very language and images of those Muslim scholars who wrote self-consciously about education reflect patterns of relationship built on the absolute authority of the teacher. Ibn Jama'a, in his treatise on education, employed a metaphor drawn from the world of medicine to describe the student-teacher relationship. A student, he wrote, should respect and obey his shaykh in all matters, "as the patient [obeys] the skillful doctor.'' More common, however, was the metaphor of a father and child.
"Every student and teacher should show respect for the other, especially the former [i. e., the student especially should be respectful], because his teacher is like the father, or even greater, since his father brought him into the world of perdition, [while] his teacher leads him to the world of eternal life."
A shaykh should treat his students gently, since, in their devotion to himin the pursuit of knowledge, they are "like his children." Teachers certainly saw their obligations to their closest students in parental terms. Some went as far as to provide their students with food and sweets on special occasions, or even to distribute to them their own salaries. Ofourse, the almost filial devotion expected from students went even deeper. In all respects a student was expected to behave toward his shaykh as a dutiful son to his father. His responsibilities extended to: physically shielding his shaykh from pressing crowds of people; approaching him only with clean clothing, clipped nails, and trimmed hair, and without unpleasant bodily odors; caring for his teacher's children and descendants; and, as a virtual member of his extended family, visiting the dead shaykh's tomb. Insubordination to a teacher, as to a father, drew especial reprobation, and if a student was rude to his shaykh, it was incumbent on his classmates to come quickly to the shaykh's defense, and to censure their ungrateful colleague.
By the same token, a shaykh possessed a broad license to supervise his students' lives with the firmness but also the sensitivity of a concerned parent. He was responsible not only for their intellectual growth, but for their moral behavior as well. Ibn Jama'a's treatise on this as on all subjects, displays an awareness of psychological realities that suggests that its author drew on his own extensive classroom experience, and which therefore confirms that the treatise accurately reflects actual classroom situations of the Mamluk period. It was, he wrote, the teacher's duty "to supervise the circumstances of [his] students in their behavior and direction and morals." If he uncovered an infraction, the shaykh should note and condemn the student's action in his presence, but, at least at first, without singling him out before his peers. If the misbehavior continued increasingly harsh steps were to be taken, culminating with the refractory student's expulsion from the class, especially if the shaykh feared the young man's influence on his fellowstudents. A teacher's responsibilities toward his students were of course especially important in schools in which many students were actually housed. Ibn Jama'a made it clear that the professor of a madrasa had a duty to set an example by his behavior to those who lived in the school, for example by diligently performing his prayers.
The authoritative character of educational relationships was evident in the very form of classroom arrangements. In describing the prescribed behavior of students in class, Ibn Jama'a made it clear that those who are to sit nearest the shaykh are those who are worthiest by virtue of their age, learning, or righteousness. But a significant physical, and immense psychological gap separated the teacher from even his most advanced stu dents. According to a twellth-century treatise on education that circulated widely in the Mamluk period, "it further behooves the student not to sit near the teacher during the lecture except under necessity, rather it is essential that the pupils sit in a semi-circle at a certain distance fromthe teacher, for indeed this is more appropriate to the respect due [theteacher]." The successful transmission of knowledge required the maintenance of a proper distance between the teacher and his pupils, and concerns for this prompted taboos that restricted the slightest physical contact. Respect for the teacher, according to Ibn Jama'a, required that a student carefully refrain from touching his shaykh's body, garment, or even the cushion on which he sat, with any part of his own body or clothing. Ibn al-Hajj, in his long fourteenth-century treatise describing contemporary practices of which he disapproved, condemned those scholars who, when delivering their lectures, sat on a raised dais or platform. Such behavior, he thought, smacked of conceit and an inappropriate sense of self-importance. But in fact the act of teaching from an elevated position must not have been unusual, or else Ibn al-Hajj would hardly have bothered to fulminate against it. The practice only reinforced an authority and awareness of superiority already implicit in the teacher-student relationship.
The burdens of such a relationship could at times prove inconvenient or embarrassing to the student. For example, the authority and impor-tance of the teacher also justified his "glorification and veneration" by those who sought instruction from him, effected by such practices as kissing the shaykh's hand. Certain humiliations had to be borne by the student; in particular, flattering one's teachers was inevitable. "Flattery is blameworthy except in the quest for knowledge," wroteal-Zarnuji, author of a treatise on education widely read and copied in the Middle Ages. "In order to learn from them, flattery of one's professor and associates is inevitable." Students might find the flattering of their teachers humiliating, but this and much more had to be borne in the pursuit of the greater goal, knowledge and the license to transmit it. Like other writers of educational treatises, Ibn Jama'a never ceased to counsel patience. A student must be patient in quarrels with his shaykh, or when the shaykh is of a bad disposition, and he must always give his shaykh's actions the best possible interpretation, for that "is most beneficial for the student in this world and the next." The student, he wrote,"should not tire of long companionship [suhba] with his professor, for he[i.e., the shaykh] is like a date palm, under which you wait for something to drop on you.
The problem was that it might take some time for the dates to fall. It is clear from Ibn Jama'a's repeated advice to the students of incompetent, slow-witted, or forgetful shaykhs that medieval Islamic educational models and patterns, while producing the authoritative relationship I have been describing, did not guarantee quality of instruction. If the shaykh began to recite something the student had already memorized, the student should listen attentively, and try to convey his great joy at hearing the recitation, as if for the first time. If asked if he has memorized the text, the student should not say simply "yes," which would imply he no longer needed his teacher's instruction on the point, nor should he say "no," for that would be untrue; he should instead respond by saying "I prefer to hear it from the shaykh," or "[I memorized it] long ago," or"from you it is more correct," or with some such delicate phrase extricate the shaykh from potential embarrassment. Again, if the shaykh made an error, the student should not point it out, but should gently give him an opportunity to correct the mistake, for example by repeating the error himself in the shaykh's presence; if the teacher persisted in his error, the confused student should simply take the question to another shaykh.
Within this general framework, actual patterns of classroom authority were complicated by a number of factors. In the first place, of course, some "students" might in fact be individuals of comparatively advanced age. A shaykh who transmitted a particular text through an especially reputable chain of authorities might find others of his own age, or even older, attending his recitations and lectures in order to receive a license from him, even for a work they had already studied with another scholar. We shall later encounter an individual who, although himself over the age of forty, nonetheless was installed as a student of hadlth in one of Cairo's leading schools. In addition, under some circumstances teaching assistants compensated for but also reinforced the psychological gap between instructor and instructed. The professor, ideally, was to do more than recite a text, or listen to and correct his students' recitations. He should also make himself available at an appointed hour every day and remain for a time after class, to listen to the students as they studied their Iessons, correct their mistakes, and answer their questions. But itseems that much of his responsibilities in that regard in fact devolved upon advanced students and young teachers, scholars whose careers had not yet advanced to the point where they could teach authoritatively on their own, and who therefore were not offered valuable professorships and whose reputations would not attract a sizeable body of students.
These "teaching assistants" were accorded a variety of titles: mustamli, mufid, and mu'id. The mustamli, usually an advanced and trusted student of a shaykh, was primarily associated with the transmission of the Prophetic traditions. In large circles in which hadith were recited, he repeated in a loud voice what the professor himself had dictated, and elucidated his words to the listeners. A previous scholar noted that by the fifteenth century, the term, although still in use, was not common. In fact, the biographical dictionaries of the period rarely employ the word, although the infrequency of its appearance may reflect only the writers' concern with other, more prominent aspects of students' and hadith transmitters' careers.
Far more common in the sources at our disposal were the terms mufid(and its verbal noun, if ada, "to benefit" or "to be of use," and by extension "to inform") and especially mu'ld (and i'ada, "to repeat"), terms similar in meaning to those describing teaching assistants in the medieval Jewish academies of the Near East. In the Mamluk period at least, the sources suggest no clear distinction of function and responsibility between the mufd ("one who benefits [another]") and the mu'ld (literally,"repetitor"). Both terms indicated teaching assistants who were deeply involved in repeating the professor's lesson, listening to the students repeat it from memory, and explaining obscure parts of the lesson to them. It is true that Taj al-Din al-Subki, himself an experienced educator, discussed mu'lds and mufds separately in his treatise "The Repetitor of Blessings and the Destroyer ofMisfortunes", a work devoted to defining the proper behavior of those employed in a variety of academic, religious, bureaucratic, and economic tasks. Regarding the mu'ld, al-Subkl wrote: "His responsibilities go beyond listening to the lesson, and include explaining [it] to some of thestudents, being of use to them, and doing what the term i'ada re-quires" -- that is, repeating and explaining the lessons dictated by the professor until the students under his charge had mastered them. By contrast, al-Subki outlined the mufid's duties as "to employ what he derives from the lesson as a benefit from study beyond that of most [students].'' But it is clear from the usual language in the biographical dictionaries that to be a mufid,like the mu'ld, to participate actively in the transmission of knowledge to students.
The practical distinction between the terms mu'id and mufid arose in relation to their connection to the various institutions of education. The i'ada was usually a paid position for which the endowments of particular schools made provisions, and the biographical dictionaries frequently refer to it as such. By contrast, the sources comment simply that a mufid "benefited students. If he did so, however, the mufid must have functioned "informally," as a private assistant to a professor. The surviving deeds of endowment suggest that no institution in the Mamluk period ever supported an endowed position called ifada. Pointedly, al-Subh described the i'ada as a wazifa, but only referred to the "compensation" that a muid might receive.
A number of Cairene schools of the Mamluk period made specific provisions for the appointment of mu'ids, provisions that shed some light onthe mu'id's responsibilities in the transmission of knowledge to students. At the mosque of Sudun min Zada, for example, the mui-ds were to sit with the students either before or after the professor's lectures in order to "explain to [the students] what they had memorized fromtheir books and to elucidate what was obscure to them from the teachings of their rite." At the madrasa of Sarghitmish, the mu'lds apparently assumed even more responsibilities for the actual instruction, not surprisingly, since that school's professor faced at least sixty students of Hanafi jurisprudence, an exceptionally high ratio. During the class in that institution, each of three mu'lds was to read a "lesson" (dars) froma book chosen by the professor. The latter was then to provide the students with answers to any questions they might have, but the responsibility for more intimate intellectual contact was left to the mu'lds: each was to come to the majlis before the professor, and to remain after his departure, in order to help students with their problems or questions.
These teaching assistants occupied a stage in an individual's academic career intermediary between that of student and teacher; not surpri-ingly, therefore, many mu'ids were themselves perfectly competent scholars. Ahmad Ibn Isma'-il al-Hanaf (d. 1489), for example, at some point in his career held the assistantship in Hanafi law at the large congregational mosque of Ibn Tulun. Ibn Isma'il was an exemplary, if not outstanding scholar of his time. He studied with a number of prominent ulama of the late Mamluk period, including 'Alam al-Din al-Bulqml, al-Amm al-Aqsara'i, the historian al-Sakhawi, and others, taught informally or as substitute for the professors in various institutions, and held in hisown right several teaching posts. From all appearances, his appointmen tat Ibn Tulun represented simply a normal early step in the career of a successful late medieval scholar. Other prominent scholars who were mu'lds at early stages in their careers included 'Iz al-Din 'Abd al-Salam al-Baghdadli(d. 1455), who assisted in Hanafi jurisprudence at the mosque of Ibn Tulun and the Janibakiyya madrasa, and the famous judge and jurist Siraj al-Din al-Bulqml (d. 1403), who was mu'id at the Kha-rubiyya madrasa before becoming its professor of Shafi'l jurisprudence.
Teaching assistants, by whatever term they were described, thus functioned as intermediaries between the shaykh on the one hand and his pupils and any others who might attend his classes on the other. Nonetheless, the authority that was passed was that of the shaykh himself. It was upon this authority, and the personal relationships established between individual teachers and particular students, rather than any formal affiliation to an institution, that Islamic education rested. An education was judged primarily by the number and character of the links that astudent forged with prominent transmitters of the Islamic sciences.Those relationships were close and intense, at least in the case of advanced and promising students, even though their authoritative nature could produce a significant psychological barrier between the pupil and his teacher. But the ties were persistent, and followed a student beyond the close of his formal education. Indeed, they shaped not only the char-acter of instruction and pedagogy, but also the course of a student's lateracademic career, an issue that we shall address in a later chapter.
The overwhellming preference for oral transmission, and the weight of personal connections in evaluating an individual's academic training, should suggest to us the need to look beyond the formal outlines of particular institutions of learning -- one scholar even gave his lessons while walking with his students up and down the main street of Cairo. The social consequences of this aspect of Islamic culture were immense. We shall see in later chapters how the prejudices of the system -- for example, the value accorded to a license issued by an elderly man to a young pupil, and the personal authority such an act conveyed -- facilitated the participation of disparate segments of the Muslim population in the transmission of Islamic learning. The social horizons of education in late medieval cairo were very broad indeed, and were limited not by institutional structure, but by the informal system of which the various schools were a part. Despite this caveat, however, it is also true that many teachers in late medieval Cairo taught, and most students studied, in one or more of the city's many institutions of learning, and it is to those schools that we now turn our attention.