Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

104 Ahmed El Shamsy
theory and practice of the ‘‘path to God’’. There were also regular
occasions on which the public was able to participate in the ceremonies
by listening to spiritual poetry, celebrating the birthday of the Prophet or
a saintly individual, or simply by enjoying the blessed presence of the
master. Certain particularly influential orders even counted sultans
among their members. In addition, Sufi lodges functioned as places
where unmarried or widowed women found shelter, where the wealthy
distributed food in times of famine, and where people sought refuge from
the law or from persecution.
Even within these new institutions, however, education, learning
and research remained fundamentally informal in nature up to the
Ottoman period. Institutions of learning never developed a corporate
character: students did not graduate with ‘‘degrees’’ from particular
madrasas, but rather received a number of certificates and teaching
licences from individual, named teachers. Madrasas and Sufi lodges
functioned as meeting-points for scholars and students and were a
source of income for both, but they never monopolised higher education.
Their contingent nature is evident in the format of the pre-modern
version of the academic curriculum vitae, namely the relevant entry in a
biographical dictionary. In such entries, we learn the names of the
scholar’s teachers, and the titles of the books taught; but whether this
instruction took place in a mosque, a private home or a madrasa does
not seem to have been thought relevant and is rarely mentioned. While
institutions such as madrasas contributed to the professionalisation of
the scholarly community by providing funding that liberated scholars
from the need to practise other occupations, they did not initially change
the personal nature of Islamic education.
A significant shift in the nature of the madrasa took place with the
maturation of the imperial Ottoman educational system. Sultan
Meh _
med II (d. 1481) established a hierarchy of madrasas within the
empire and outlined a fixed career path that permitted students and
teachers to move gradually up the ladder according to merit and/or
personal connections: the higher the position of the madrasa in the
hierarchy, the higher the wages paid to its teaching staff. The madrasa
hierarchy corresponded to a hierarchy in the judicial system, determining
the level of position within the judiciary to which a madrasa
teacher could transfer. The curriculum, hitherto determined by the
interests and expertise of individual students and teachers, was standardised,
with digests written by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
authors such as al- Ijı, al-Taftazanı, and al-Sharıf al-Jurjanı underpinning
the theological syllabus. The driver of this unprecedented formalisation
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