George Makdisi, who died on 6 September 2002, was one of the greatest scholars of the Islamic world, as the preface to this book declares, “of his or any generation”. At the very heart of his work was his concern to set out the role of law and education, in particular as expressed through the institution of the madrasa, in the making of Muslim societies. Up to 1970 his output covered a range of medieval Islamic subjects from theology and traditionalism through to eleventh-century Baghdad, and included his first publication on the great eleventh-century scholastic and humanist Ibn ‘Aqil. Then, from the 1970s, with two important articles ‘Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages’Footnote ¹ and ‘The Madrasa as a Charitable Trust and the University as A Corporation in the Middle Ages’Footnote ² he began to address not just Islamic scholars but medievalists in general, arguing for a comparative study of institutions of higher learning in Islam and western Europe. This was followed by a series of conferences in the 1970s and 1980s designed to bring together Islamic and European medievalists to encourage the development of comparative study, which resulted in a series of major publications. As he stimulated this development, Makdisi published The Rise of Colleges in 1981Footnote ³, which set out the development of education, its curriculum and institutions in the Islamic world and then noted the similarity of subsequent educational developments in the Christian West, and The Rise of Humanism in 1990Footnote ⁴, which demonstrated that Christian medieval scholasticism and the humanism of the European Renaissance both had their roots deep in Islamic soil. There followed his last great body of work, which meant a return to one of his earliest enthusiasms, his edition of the al-Wadih fi usul al-fiqh of Ibn ‘Aqil in five volumes, beginning in 1996, and his monograph on this great eleventh-century scholastic and humanist of 1997.Footnote ⁵

Law and Education in Medieval Islam is a festschrift for George Makdisi prepared while he was still alive. In it students and former colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania pay tribute to his legacy and do so primarily in the area he made so much his own, law and education. The outcome is thus, unusually for a festschrift, a coherent contribution to the field. It begins with a helpful contextualising encomium ‘The Trail and Scent of Learning’ by Edward Peters, fellow medievalist, friend and colleague, an introduction by the editors and a bibliography of Makdisi's publications. With a pleasing sense of art the first six of the eight main contributions are arranged according to the chronology of the education of a medieval Muslim scholar. So Sherman Jackson opens the collection with a discussion of a treatise written by Ibn Hajar al-Haytami advising a colleague who had taken a teaching job in a maktab; it bears the title ‘Discipline and Duty in a Medieval Muslim Elementary School’. Drawing on ninth-century hadith collections and biographies, Christopher Melchert establishes aspects of the everyday workings of the medieval study circle (halqah) and the etiquette associated with it. Devin Stewart in ‘The Doctorate of Islamic Law in Mamluk Egypt and Syria’ examines the ijazat al-ifta wal -tadris (licence to grant legal opinions and teach law), which Makdisi likened to a doctorate of law, and argued, against recent studies, that it was a legal document and a recognized credential. Drawing on an autobiography of ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162–1231), Shawkat Toorawa shows how a medieval scholar could combine the study of Arabic grammar, lexicology and poetry with the Islamic sciences of law and hadith and the foreign and ancient sciences of mathematics, medicine, philosophy and alchemy. Bernard Weiss explains the logical organisation of al-Amidi's great work of jurisprudence al-Ihkam fi usul al-ahkam, and Joseph Lowry examines how al-Shafi'i's pupil al-Muzani both draws on his master's concept of Amr and Nahy (command and prohibition) and also goes beyond his teacher's discussion in presenting them symmetrically. Two final studies deal with larger aspects of Islamic legal education. William Granara's ‘Islamic Education and the Transmission of knowledge in Muslim Sicily’ shows the importance of the Maliki madhhab there, in particular the tradition of the jurist Sahnun, and explores the flowering of Islamic learning under the Kalbid governors of Palermo. And, finally, Gary Leiser in ‘The Madrasah and the Islamization of Anatolia Before the Ottomans’ shows how the madrasa played as important a role in the Islamisation of Anatolia as it had in post-Fatimid Egypt. These articles illustrate the richness of the field of medieval Islamic education and learning which Makdisi did so much to develop; they also hint at how much more there is to be done. They are a fitting tribute to George Makdisi.