Learning · a Light

The certificate was written on your copy of the book

In the Muslim scholarly tradition the qualification belonged to a person, not to a building. A teacher who was satisfied that a student had read a book with him, correctly and in full, wrote an ijaza on the student's copy: a licence to transmit that text, naming the teacher's own teachers back to the author. Some ijazas run for pages and list a chain of thirty names across seven centuries. There was a separate licence to teach law and issue legal opinions, which is the nearest thing to a professional qualification. The historian George Makdisi argued that this practice shaped the European licence to teach; other historians think the resemblance is not close enough to prove a debt.

Ijaza · classical Muslim scholarship