ABSTRACT
The mental world of the medieval Muslim religious scholar is becoming increasingly well mapped, but the world of education in which he lived his life is still largely unexplored. No comprehensive history of Islamic education covering the premadrasa period has been written, and much that has been written about the institution of the madrasa itself remains problematic. ( 1 ) This lacuna in our knowledge is particularly regrettable because it deprives the researcher engaged in the study of a single medieval intellectual figure of a background against which to measure his subject while at the same time it leaves the social historian with a major gap in his understanding of medieval urban society.
