Education and Learning in Mamluk Lands

From 1250 to 1517, the Mamluk sultanate, the state ruled by Mamluk military elites, governed Egypt and Syria. Its sultans were sovereign rulers, and Cairo and Damascus were major centers of teaching. Children learned in a kuttab, or children’s school; advanced students studied with scholars in a madrasa, a school for advanced study. Instruction also took place in homes and military barracks, where teachers, endowments and personal ties shaped different routes into learning.

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Children’s schools and endowed study

In Cairo, a kuttab taught children to recite the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred scripture, and increasingly also to read and write. Historian Konrad Hirschler describes pupils first practicing letters and reading on wooden slates, which could be wiped and reused; as they advanced, some worked from paper sheets and manuscripts. Endowment deeds from the fourteenth century specify reading, writing and sometimes arithmetic alongside recitation. From the late thirteenth century, some schoolmasters received regular salaries from a waqf, a charitable endowment of property or income for continuing services. A late-fifteenth-century Sabil-Kuttab-Wikala of Sultan Qaitbay joined such a school to a sabil, a public water station, and a wikala, a commercial inn with storerooms and rooms for merchants. Its street-facing school and fountain placed instruction within everyday Cairo traffic.

Advanced study followed a different course. Founded in Cairo in 1356, the Madrasa of Sarghatmish was endowed for Hanafi law, one of the Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and hadith, reports about the Prophet Muhammad’s words and actions. Its endowment shaped teaching appointments and courses; Qur’anic interpretation was also taught there. Students could live in cells around the courtyard, while scholars led lessons in legal texts and traditions. The institution’s waqf provided continuing income for its school and staff.

Texts, teachers and permission to transmit

An ijaza was a teacher’s authorization to transmit a particular text or body of teaching. In hadith study, a certificate could record that a student heard a text dictated or studied it under a named scholar. It might appear in a book’s margin, on its final pages or on its cover. By naming teacher, student and text, the certificate identified what the student could pass on and connected that student to earlier transmitters. In a separate advanced exercise, students first memorized standard texts and then recited passages selected by examiners. In 1399–1400, a thirteen-year-old presented al-Nawawi’s text on Shafi‘i law, another Sunni school of Islamic law, for such an examination before receiving certificates from scholars who verified his memorization.

Some children entered learned networks before they could study a text themselves. Historian Yossef Rapoport notes that parents sometimes brought infants to dictation sessions of prominent hadith transmitters so they could receive certificates of attendance. A shorter chain of transmitters reaching back to early authorities carried scholarly value; the certificates could later document a student’s claimed connection to an earlier source.

Women and hadith assemblies

Rapoport describes hundreds of female hadith transmitters in Mamluk biographical dictionaries. Many were associated with the Hanbali circles of al-Salihiya, a Damascus suburb; Hanbali was another Sunni school of Islamic law. Zaynab bint al-Kamal (1248–1339) lived into her nineties and became renowned in her sixties. Students sought her lessons because she could transmit reports through earlier teachers.

Women held hadith assemblies in their own homes and in the homes of others. Men and women attended together, listened to reports and received certificates of transmission. Rapoport distinguishes this scholarly work from salaried madrasa teaching posts, which women did not hold in his account. Home gatherings thus gave women an important role in preserving and transmitting hadith.

Lessons in the barracks

Military recruits could study religious and legal material alongside practical training. A manuscript now in Istanbul, Turkey, at the Süleymaniye Library, Ayasofya MS 1448, was produced in the Burhaniyya, a Mamluk barracks, during Sultan Qaytbay’s reign, between 1468 and 1494–95. Historian Kristof D’hulster interprets its bilingual commentary on al-Samarqandi’s Muqaddimah, an introductory religious text, as class notes associated with the recruit Qayt Sharifi. The teacher worked through selected Arabic phrases, adding Qur’anic verses and hadith with Turkic translations and explanations for the recruits.

The manuscript also preserves Arabic writing on a flyleaf, a blank leaf at the front or back of a book. D’hulster tentatively identifies Tamurbay as its writer. His name and early Arabic script suggest a younger recruit practicing written Arabic, while the commentary records a more advanced lesson. Together, the pages show different stages of learning within the multilingual communities of Mamluk lands.