The Nizamiyya College of Baghdad

In 459 AH (1067 CE) the great Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk (rahimahu Allah) founded the Nizamiyya college of Baghdad, the most famous of a network of state-endowed Sunni madrasas he established across the Seljuk empire from Nishapur to Baghdad. Nizam al-Mulk was the model of the wise Sunni statesman, author of the Siyasatnama, the book of government, and the architect of the administrative and religious policy of the Seljuk sultanate during the Sunni revival. The Nizamiyya colleges were central to that revival. They were purpose-built institutions, endowed by the state, that trained scholars and officials in the law of the Shafi'i school, in hadith, and in Ash'ari theology, providing salaries for teachers and stipends and lodging for students, and so giving Sunni higher learning an institutional form and a steady footing against the Isma'ili and Shi'i currents of the age. Architecturally the madrasa helped fix the four-iwan courtyard plan, four great vaulted halls opening onto a central court with a pool, that the Seljuk age spread across the Islamic world and that would shape mosques, colleges, and caravanserais for centuries. The Baghdad Nizamiyya became the most prestigious centre of Sunni learning of its day; its most celebrated teacher, a generation after its founding, was Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (rahimahu Allah), Hujjat al-Islam, whose work would reshape Sunni theology and spirituality. Nothing of the building survives above ground, and its plan is known from descriptions and from the wider history of the madrasa. This scene depicts the college at work: the four-iwan court around its pool, teaching circles gathered in the halls, the library of manuscripts and the stipend register of an endowed institution, and the lodging cells of the students, the new architecture of a new and lasting Sunni institution of learning.