missing is the dynamic role of the monasteries of Christian Europe, both in
amassing wealth and power for an autonomous church sector, and in providing
a base for intellectual networks.
The papacy had some parallel in the caliphate, but the trajectory was
different. The leader of Islam was simultaneously a military and a political
ruler. Islam emerged as a successful military conquest, whereas Christianity in
northern Europe made its way by conversion and cooperation with the tribal
rulers, who eventually became a feudal aristocracy. Islam initially was a the-
ocracy such that the strongest popes of the 1200s dreamed of becoming. Even
when the caliphate after 900 crumbled into de facto independent secular states,
Muslim religious movements aimed at the reconquest of political power. Is-
lamic religious organization was less autonomous, more tied to the families of
the ruling aristocracy; the various ShiÀite movements all aimed to restore the
purity of dynastic succession. This gave a particularistic emphasis to Islamic
theology and made a social basis for the long-standing opposition to rational
theology, which shifted to more universalistic grounds.
Because of its political connection, Islamic religion never became a bureau-
cratically organized church, and there was no specialized (and celibate) priest-
hood. Rulers were expected to uphold Islamic law, to appoint religious judges,
and to provide for the material upkeep of mosques; the church itself had no
property. Pious laymen could take the initiative in learning and expounding
Islamic texts and traditions; the learned Àulama, something like the Jewish
rabbis (teachers, not priests), were simultaneously religious, legal, and political
leaders of the community. They provided a quasi-democratic (or at least
decentralizing) counterbalance against the rulers, and in times of government
weakness became de facto political dominants. They formed the basis of a
religious intellectual life, but one which was closely attached to the politics and
the indigenous symbolic life of the community. As a structural base for ideas,
they supported particularism and traditionalism more than did the autono-
mous Christian Church.
Universities in a strict sense did not exist in Islam. One can speak loosely
of the Baghdad House of Wisdom or the Córdoba library in this way, but these
were not centers of instruction with bodies of teachers and students, much less
universities which granted degrees and monopolistic licenses over the higher
professions. In the period of the strong caliphate, the centers of higher educa-
tion were in the mosques, where circles of pupils gathered around particular
teachers. The rational theologians emerged in this way in the mosque at Basra
and developed circles elsewhere; the most common type of teaching circle,
however, consisted of those that formed around teachers of law. After 1050
more formally organized schools became widespread. The madrasas were waqf
endowed colleges, providing salaries for teachers and dormitories and stipends
460 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths