Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

The social construction of orthodoxy 101
not defined simply as the possession of an ability to process information,
but rather rested on a holistic model of personal transformation that was
to accompany and give meaning to the acquisition of information.
Medieval theoretical manuals of education thus stress that the teacher
needs to serve as a role model and a guide for the student’s personal
growth. On a more mundane level, scholars used their apprentices as
teaching assistants who handled the supervision of ordinary students,
explained to them the master’s lectures, and were available to answer
questions. Apprentices also typically took on the role of personal servants
to the master. Famous examples of this relationship in the ninth
century are the jurist al-Shafi‘ı and his close student al-Rabı‘ (who was
instrumental in spreading al-Shafi‘ı’s teachings after the latter’s death),
and the prominent Mu‘tazilite theologian al-Naz _
z _
am and al-Jah _
iz _
,the
apprentice who was to become one of the most influential figures of
classical Arabic belles-lettres.
places of learning
In the pre-Ottoman Islamic world, scholarship was not rooted in any
single specific venue. Nevertheless, the mosque has always been, and
remains to this day, an important place of teaching. In the first Islamic
cities, particularly the garrison towns built by the early Arab-Muslim
conquerors in the seventh century, the mosque represented the public
space par excellence. It was in the mosque that scholars sat between the
five daily prayers, lecturing to their students as well as to interested
passers-by. In the early centuries of Islam (and in some locations to the
present day) each city had a single central mosque where the communal
Friday prayer was held, which was at least in theory attended by every
free and healthy resident Muslim man. These central mosques were
places infused with the authority of the government. Only the representative
of the government, or someone appointed by it, could give the
Friday sermon, and the mentioning of the caliph or sultan in the sermon
was one of the most important insignia of government authority and
legitimacy. Such mosques were the preferred venues for teaching, as
they permitted teachers to attract the attention of ordinary worshippers.
There are countless anecdotes of distinguished scholars who had been
drawn into their fields by passing a mosque teaching-circle by chance
and pausing to listen in.
The importance of the congregational mosque as a teaching venue
declined in the following centuries. The growing population of Baghdad
and other urban centres simply could no longer fit into a single building,
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