What does one do with a dissertation once it has been completed? For most historians, the usual expectation is that a PhD thesis will be published, lightly or more heavily revised, by a university press. Several generations of graduate students have emerged into the professional world with that expectation. Of course, not all dissertations appear as a published monograph, and not all deserve to. In some cases, however, the failure to publish limits the access of the scholarly community to an important resource. Gary Leiser's 1976 University of Pennsylvania dissertation, “The Restoration of Sunnism in Egypt: Madrasas and Mudarrisün 495–647/1101–1249,” is one of those, and historians of the medieval Middle East should be deeply grateful that the Lockwood Press has at last made this important work available to a larger audience.
Leiser was a student of the late George Makdisi, who more than anyone else established the parameters for the study of higher education in the medieval Islamic Middle East, a field which in the decades since has produced a veritable flood of publications—at least by the standards of the historiography of medieval Islam. Makdisi's seminal book The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, a broad study of the origins and development of the madrasa (pl. madāris) in the medieval Islamic world, was still several years away from publication when Leiser's dissertation was completed, but Makdisi had by that point already published several important studies of the subject, especially the foundational “Muslim Institutions of Learning in Eleventh-Century Baghdad” (BSOAS 24 (1961), 1–56). Leiser tells us, in a short preface to the present volume, that Makdisi himself suggested that, for his doctoral thesis, he undertake a study of the madāris of Ayyubid Egypt and those who taught in them. The resulting dissertation, while conceptually part of the larger project in which Makdisi was engaged, was in many ways a distinctive work. Makdisi's research had ranged broadly; while much of it rested on his deep familiarity with the religious culture of Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs, Buyid amirs, and Seljuq sultans, he drew freely on material from Syria, Egypt, Central Asia, and elsewhere. Leiser focused specifically on the situation in Egypt in the later Fatimid period and under the rule of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin, d. 1193) and his dynastic successors. The result was a comprehensive and exhaustive study of the madāris and those who taught and studied in them in a specific historical setting.
The volume under review replicates Leiser's 1976 thesis, for the most part without significant revision. Inevitably, that means that some portions are out of date. The opening chapter, for example, surveys the primary sources on which the study is based. As Leiser himself notes in his preface, many of these works, which fifty years ago he still had to consult in manuscript form, have since been published. Leiser consulted Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi's al-Mawaʿiz wa-l-Iʿtibar fi Dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-Athar in its well-known but defective 1853 Bulaq printing, but the work is now available in a much-improved scholarly edition. Even so, Leiser's survey remains an informative and useful account of the primary sources available to the historian of medieval Egypt, a tribute to the thoroughness of the author's work.
The core of this book consists of a study of the madāris founded in Egypt during the final decades of the Fatimid regime, then under Salah al-Din and his successors until the rise of the Mamluks in the middle of the 13th century. The story of Egyptian madāris probably begins with that founded by the Spanish scholar Abu Bakr al-Turtushi (d. 1126) in Alexandria. Al-Turtushi settled in Alexandria at the end of the 11th century after years of travel had taken him to (among other places) Baghdad, where he “very likely” (p. 78) studied in the famous madrasa established by the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092)—a madrasa which is frequently cited as an institutional model of sorts. In this way, a new institution, which, as Makdisi reported, had originated in Khurasan and then spread into Iran and Iraq through the patronage of Nizam al-Mulk and others, reached Egypt.
This development proved critical for the subsequent history not just of Egypt but of the Middle East more generally. An earlier generation of scholars had considered the madrasa an instrument in the struggle against Shiʿism associated with a period sometimes characterized as that of a “Sunni revival” after decades of Shiʿi political dominance in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere. Leiser shows that the madrasa in Egypt served less to combat Shiʿism—which, despite almost two centuries of rule by the Ismaʿili Fatimid caliphs, had remarkably few adherents in Egypt, at least outside some districts in Upper Egypt—than to organize and mobilize the Sunni community.
In chapters on the madāris established by Salah al-Din in and around Cairo, those founded by his Ayyubid successors, and especially in an important final chapter on “The Madrasa in Egyptian Society,” Leiser describes what this involved. By now this story is well known, but Leiser's dissertation anticipated many of the salient points developed in subsequent scholarship: the diversity of institutional types identified as madāris; the relationship between jurisprudence (fiqh) and its ancillary subjects in their curricula; the connections between professorships in the madāris and other offices and functions including that of the chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) of the Islamic courts; the veritable dynasties of scholars which sometimes exerted control over lucrative professorships; even the surprising role of women in the founding and operation of some madāris.
Under the Ayyubids’ successors, especially the Mamluk regime with its capital in Cairo, the madrasa became one of the most ubiquitous religious institutions in the medieval Islamic Middle East. Many subsequent scholars who have written about later madāris, the present reviewer included, have relied on Leiser's dissertation as both a model and a source of important detail and analysis. That dissertation, despite remaining unpublished until now, has been cited remarkably consistently in later scholarship. The field is fortunate indeed that a more accessible version has finally seen the light of day.
