High Middle Ages · Middle East · Culture

1065

Madrasa Nizamiyya founded in Baghdad

1065

The Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk endowed a great college in Baghdad to train Sunni Shafi'i scholars. Al-Ghazali would later teach there. The Nizamiyya system of state-funded religious colleges across Iran and Iraq shaped Islamic education for centuries and gave the Seljuks an ideological counterweight to Fatimid Shiism. The curriculum emphasized jurisprudence, theology, and Arabic grammar, producing the administrative class that held the empire together.