Nizam al-Mulk and the Nizamiyya Madrasas of the Seljuks

Nizam al-Mulk was the Persian vizier, or chief minister, who ran the Seljuk empire for almost thirty years under the sultans Alp Arslan and Malik-Shah. From 1065 he founded a network of richly endowed colleges of Islamic law, the Nizamiyya madrasas, beginning with the great school of Baghdad that opened in 1067. His assassination in 1092, followed weeks later by the death of Malik-Shah, marked the end of the empire’s period of unity.

Background: Turkish rulers, Persian administrators

The Seljuk Turks had taken Khurasan in 1040 and Baghdad in 1055. Their leaders were skilled soldiers from a nomadic background with little experience of governing great cities and farmlands. To collect taxes, keep records and manage provinces they relied on Persian officials trained in the bureaucratic traditions of earlier Iranian dynasties.

Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Ali, later known as Nizam al-Mulk, meaning Order of the Realm, was born in 1018 near Tus in Khurasan. His father was a tax official under the Ghaznavid dynasty. The young al-Hasan studied Islamic law and worked in Ghaznavid service before joining the Seljuks. He became chief administrator for Alp Arslan, then governor of Khurasan, and when Alp Arslan became sultan in 1063 he appointed Nizam al-Mulk vizier.

The vizier’s statecraft

After Alp Arslan was killed in 1072, Nizam al-Mulk helped the young Malik-Shah secure the throne and became the dominant figure in the state. Contemporaries describe him as the real ruler for much of Malik-Shah’s reign, with his many sons and relatives placed in key posts.

He developed the iqta, a system in which military commanders received the right to collect revenue from a district instead of a cash salary. The system paid the army without draining the treasury, but it also gave commanders local power that later weakened central control.

Nizam al-Mulk set out his ideas in the Siyasatnama, or Book of Government, a Persian work of advice for kings written around 1086–1091. It stresses justice for ordinary subjects, regular hearings of complaints, careful supervision of officials, the use of informers, and constant watchfulness against what he saw as heretical movements, especially the Ismailis.

The Nizamiyya madrasas

A madrasa was a college for teaching Islamic law and related subjects. Such schools already existed in Khurasan before the Seljuks, often founded by private scholars. Nizam al-Mulk turned the idea into a large, state-backed programme.

Work on the Nizamiyya of Baghdad began in 1065, and the college opened in 1067 beside the Tigris. Its endowment, a waqf of shops, lands and baths, paid salaries for professors, stipends and lodging for students, and the upkeep of a library. The famous jurist Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi was appointed its first professor, though he at first refused, and another scholar briefly taught in his place.

Similar colleges followed in Nishapur, where the theologian al-Juwayni taught, and in Isfahan, Balkh, Herat, Merv, Mosul, Basra and Amul. All taught the Shafi’i school of Sunni law and were associated with Ash’ari theology, the school followed by Nizam al-Mulk himself.

The most famous teacher at the Baghdad Nizamiyya was al-Ghazali, appointed in 1091. He left in 1095 after a personal crisis of faith and went on to write some of the most influential works of Islamic thought.

Life inside a Nizamiyya

A Nizamiyya was more than a lecture hall. The Baghdad college had teaching rooms, a mosque, living quarters for students and a library, all paid for by the endowment. The deed of foundation reportedly limited the professorship, the preacher’s post and the librarian’s post to followers of the Shafi’i school, so the institution served one legal tradition rather than all four Sunni schools.

Teaching was centred on the professor, who held the chair and lectured on law, while assistants repeated and explained lessons to students. Students learned the principles of jurisprudence, the rulings of their school and the art of disputation, a formal style of debate in which scholars defended positions on points of law. Many students went on to serve as judges, preachers, teachers or officials, carrying the vizier’s patronage network across the empire.

Appointments to the leading chairs were matters of state. The vizier, and later his family and successors, chose the professors, and the posts brought both prestige and political influence. Arguments over appointments, and riots between Shafi’is and members of the rival Hanbali school in Baghdad, show how closely the colleges were tied to the politics of the city.

The Baghdad Nizamiyya continued to function long after its founder’s death. It survived the Mongol sack of the city in 1258 and is recorded as still operating in the following century, though by then it was overshadowed by the Mustansiriyya, a college founded by the caliph al-Mustansir in 1233.

Purpose and debate

Historians have long debated why Nizam al-Mulk founded the Nizamiyyas. Older accounts saw them as a weapon against Shi’ism, especially the Ismaili propaganda of the Fatimids, and as a training ground for loyal officials. More recent scholarship stresses personal piety, patronage of a particular legal school and the vizier’s wish to build networks of influence among the learned elite.

What is clear is the effect. The model of an endowed college, with salaried teachers and a fixed curriculum in law, spread across the Middle East. Later rulers such as Nur al-Din and Saladin built madrasas in Syria and Egypt on a similar pattern.

Rivalry and assassination

In Malik-Shah’s later years the vizier’s power created enemies. The sultan’s wife Terken Khatun wanted her young son named heir and backed a rival administrator, Taj al-Mulk. Malik-Shah grew resentful of Nizam al-Mulk’s wealth and of the influence of his family.

On 14 October 1092, while travelling with the court from Isfahan towards Baghdad, Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed near Nahavand by a man dressed as a Sufi. He was about seventy-four. The murder is generally attributed to the Nizari Ismailis led by Hasan-i Sabbah, whose fortress at Alamut Seljuk forces had been trying to reduce, and it is often counted as their first famous killing. Some medieval writers suspected that Taj al-Mulk or the sultan himself had encouraged it; this remains unproven.

Malik-Shah died in Baghdad about a month later, in November 1092. A long succession struggle followed, and the unified Seljuk empire never fully recovered.

Myths and facts

A well-known story says that Nizam al-Mulk, the mathematician Omar Khayyam and Hasan-i Sabbah were schoolfriends who swore to help one another. The tale appears in later Persian writings and became popular in Europe through Edward FitzGerald’s introduction to the Rubaiyat in 1859. It is not true: Nizam al-Mulk was born in 1018, decades before the other two.

Timeline

• 1018: Birth of al-Hasan ibn Ali near Tus.
• 1063: Alp Arslan becomes sultan and appoints him vizier.
• 1065: Construction of the Nizamiyya of Baghdad begins.
• 1067: The Baghdad Nizamiyya opens.
• 1072: Malik-Shah succeeds Alp Arslan with Nizam al-Mulk’s support.
• c. 1086–1091: The Siyasatnama is composed.
• 1091: Al-Ghazali begins teaching at the Baghdad Nizamiyya.
• 1092, 14 October: Nizam al-Mulk is assassinated near Nahavand.
• 1092, November: Death of Malik-Shah.

Why it matters

Nizam al-Mulk showed how a Persian administrative class could run an empire for Turkish rulers, a pattern that lasted for centuries in the Islamic world. His madrasas made the endowed college a standard institution of Sunni learning, shaping education from Iran to Egypt.