for students. The madrasas resembled universities in some aspects, though with
crucial differences (Makdisi, 1981; Huff, 1993).
Whereas the European university was a self-governing corporation which
acquired privileges and immunities from local control, the madrasa was under
the control of the lay waqf donor. Most of the universities were guilds of
teachers, who pushed their internal autonomy to set sequences of degrees.
Teachers’ guilds existed in Islam to some extent, but these were separate from
any particular school and did not act as a corporate body in the actual
administration of school affairs. In effect the university was a combination of
guild and waqf in one corporate institution, whereas in Islamic education the
two components were separate. The Islamic teachers gave formal degrees in
the shape of certificates denoting that a pupil had learned a particular book,
and these eventually became licenses to teach and to issue legal opinions. The
Christian universities developed formal degrees more extensively: the sequences
of Master of Arts, Bachelor and Doctor of Laws, of Medicine, and of Divinity.
These were issued by the corporation rather than the individual teacher, and
validated by the charter of the pope or ruler. The university degrees elaborated
into a system of credentials, used both internally within the teaching world
and as a claim to positions within the church hierarchy. Whereas in Christen-
dom the bureaucratic papacy developed arm in arm with the expansion of the
monopolistic system of university credentials, in Islam the lack of a church
hierarchy, and eventually of any central religious authority at all, turned the
educational structure in a different direction.
The most fateful difference for intellectual matters was the much greater
differentiation of theology from law in the Christian universities, and the
resulting opening for philosophy. In Islam, both law and theology were based
on the same texts, the holy scriptures and traditions. Islam made no distinction
between civil and canon law, faculties which were separate in the Christian
universities. In the period before 900, Islamic law and rational theology were
differentiating, but the separation never became institutionalized and legiti-
mated. Since the teachers of law were also practicing judges, law was more
practical than theoretical; and since law was closely tied to scripture, lawyers
and theologians were rivals over the same turf. This difference in organiza-
tional bases is one reason why there was more conflict between literal scriptu-
ralism and rational theology in Islam than in Christendom. The rise of the
madrasas was simultaneously the victory of law in monopolizing formal teach-
ing institutions. There was no independent faculty of theology, nor along with
it a place where philosophical issues could become a specialty. Secular philoso-
phy from Greek and non-Islamic sources was officially excluded from the
madrasas as an enemy of orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, logic and dialectic found their way into the curriculum as
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^461