Buddhism made its appearance in China by the third century AD. Its ascetic and non-aggressive doctrine found popularity at the time of material dislocation surrounding the collapse of the Han empire into competing kingdoms. In disunited China there were significant attempts at promoting institutions of higher learning, but the instaurations all seem to resemble the various ephemeral and unsuccessful universities of medieval Europe. Around the beginning of the fifth century, for example, the Northern Wei established an imperial school in their capital; the name soon changed to the Central Book School, reflecting its concern with the Confucian classics, for which an anthology, or codex, had recently been prepared.
Chinese civilization emerged from divisions and rivalries to create a golden age under the autocratic Sui and then the Thang. About 583 the first Sui emperor, Wen Ti, revived the nobles’ school (Kuo Hsüeh), a school for meritorious commoners (T’ai Hsüeh), and a preparatory school (the Four Gates School), each of which had five professors; he also created for the first time a separate mathematics school with two professors. The purpose of higher education under the Thang was still to prepare students for a government position, and this could be attained by success in a national examination. An inflexible form of this system emerged much later, in the Yüan, when the mandarinate drew exclusively from students who had mastered the Confucian classics. The system did not entirely ignore natural knowledge (from the Thang onward there were separate mathematics examinations), but science undoubtedly constituted the lowest path to success.
A later Thang emperor, Hsüan Tsung, assembled an independent group of high officials to advise him in scholarly matters – the Hanlin (literally, ‘Forest of Pencils’). The Hanlin Academy, as it came to be called, emerged as the premier learned authority in China. Awarded the title of Learned Scholar in 738, Hanlin associates – men who were practical as well as erudite – became, by the middle of the century, China’s court society of government advisers. Hanlin academicians were charged with emending and authenticating the Confucian corpus that served as the basis of the civil-service examinations. By the Ming period, membership was an exclusive prerogative of senior and accomplished scholars. The Academy extended its authority straight through the Chhing (Manchu), and it expired only in 1911.
The Hanlin Academy regulated orthodox scholarship. Furthermore, the genre of scholarship to be regulated – the Confucian classics – offered scant place for treatises in natural knowledge. The Hanlin did, however, directly supervise an advanced imperial school, revived in the middle of the eighth century, and over the next five hundred years there are persistent intrusions of extra Confucian discourses into diverse state schools. In part this reflects the syncretic evolution of devotional thought, where Buddhist and Taoist notions were incorporated into Confucianism; in part it was a desire to train adepts in medicine, agriculture, and possibly also geography. The time of the Yüan, under the Mongols, again saw the introduction of foreign ideas, the expected result of an empire that stretched from Budapest to the Pacific Ocean. Interest in things Islamic continued with the establishment of the Ming dynasty in 1368. As Chinese traditions merged with those of the Mongols, it becomes appropriate to turn to the institutions of higher learning in medieval Islam.
A little more than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in 632, Muslim rule in the form of the caliphate (the successors of the prophet) extended from Samarqand to Barcelona, stopped only by the Byzantines and the Franks. After a century or so of imperial rule, the caliphate devolved into a number of autonomous kingdoms and regimes, the periphery seceding first, organized under a diverse spectrum of caliphs, sultans, maliks, emirs, wazirs, and so on. The notion of a pan-Islamic world survived internecine wars and foreign invasions. Islamic rights were not restricted by political regime, and they entailed no national citizenship. All Muslims were equal before Quranic law in any Muslim jurisdiction, and this equality received continual reinforcement from trade and from the experience of the hadj, the pilgrimage to Mecca made by pious Muslims.
Because there was no Islamic pope to decide doctrinal matters (and disputes about dogma precipitated a number of schisms beginning with the earliest caliphs), the teaching of Islamic law became a practical necessity. By the ninth century, nonresidential law schools, or masjids, retailing Islamic knowledge in the context of everyday problems, emerged in association with mosques in most large Islamic centres; students lived in khans, nonprofit Islamic hostels for pilgrims and transients. From the masjid and the khan came the madrasa, the signal educational institution of Islam. It dominated learned life from the end of the tenth century until the nineteenth century.
Masjids and madrasas owed their existence to the charitable donation, or waqf. The usual inspirations for charity – piety and pride – lie behind the endowment of madrasas, but Islamic law provided special encouragement for it. A waqf donation, made in person or in a will, circumvented the divisions of an estate among a man’s sons, which resulted in the dissolution of private fortunes. By analogy with today’s philanthropies, an Islamic waqf could prevent fortunes from being taxed. Furthermore, the donor exercised complete liberty about the conditions of his waqf, provided that he did not contravene Islamic law. He could, for example, purchase or construct an institution, endow it, install himself as director, and specify that direction pass to his descendants. The waqf was inviolate, and it could be broken only if its object was heretical or uncharitable. It comes as no surprise that breaking a waqf – like breaking a modern will – was a regular occurrence.
The madrasas were waqf-endowed colleges for Islamic wisdom, complete with buildings, libraries, curators, service staff, dormitories, and (one imagines) dining commons. Professors and fellows, appointed by terms of the waqf, taught students in numbers from a dozen to more than a hundred. The madrasas had no corporate identity beyond the terms of the waqf, however; Islamic law gave rights only to individuals. There were, then, no corporate diplomas. A disciple received a written commendation from an individual master, his madrasa professor. By implication, madrasas had no sinecures. A professor was paid not to write books, but rather to train students in the art of debating Islamic truth. If he had no students, he could not receive a waqf-endowed salary, and the exercise of dazzling rhetoric was the way to attract students away from hundreds of competing madrasas.
The individualistic approach to higher learning (the lack of which in modern universities educators so often decry) extended to the matter of documentation. A madrasa student aspired to a certificate of mastery signed by a professor. The competent authority – always a man – authorized the acolyte to teach law or issue legal opinions. This licence to teach was a unique development. The Islamic certification, it may be argued, is the origin of the facultas ubique docendi – the authorization to teach a particular subject anywhere – issued corporately by professors or by the church at the early Christian universities in Europe.
The madrasa curriculum generally excluded the so-called ancient sciences, the inheritance from the schools and museums of the Hellenistic-Roman world, which in the ninth century, under the patronage of caliphs Harun al-Rashid and especially al-Mamûn, had been translated into Arabic. The exclusion has been seen as a conservative rejection of heretical, or at least contentious, doctrines. Yet the madrasas do seem to have instituted just the method of disputation that dominated the Hellenistic schools, survived into the late medieval period at Constantinople, and formed the basis of scholarly interchange at Christian universities in medieval Europe. Despite contempt for and amusement directed at the ancients, classical works in science did not suffer the opprobrium of a universal ban. Students informally read treatises in natural science and medicine with madrasa professors. Twelfth-century Iberian-based Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in the Latin world as Averroës, is illustrative. A professor of Islamic jurisprudence, he wrote major treatises on astronomy and medicine. Although his philosophical works were anathematized and burned at Córdoba