Education and Learning
Along with the establishment of Muslim political and administrative control over the sub-continent, educational institutions developed at all levels— maktabs for primary education and madrasahs for higher learning.
Some of these institutions were established by rulers or nobles while others were run by public charity. The Muizzi, the Nasiri and the Firuzi madrasahs were founded by the Delhi Sultans and were considered the highest seats of learning in the country. The Firuzi madrasah provided board and lodging to both the teachers and the taught. During the time of Muhammad bin Tugh- luq (1324—51) there were one thousand colleges in Delhi alone. In the early nineteenth century every small locality in Delhi had dozens of madrasahs. Though female education was confined to certain elite sections of society and was arranged inside the houses, there are some references to institutions for women in the Deccan.Indian educational institutions maintained close contact with the intellectual centres of Islamic lands. The works of Ibn al-Arabi, Rumi and other important thinkers became known to Indian scholars almost during the lifetime of these scholar-saints. Alam bin Ala had access to almost every important work on jurisprudence written by his contemporaries, while preparing his Fata wa-i-Tatar Khaniyah. From the Deccan Mahmud Gawan corresponded with Jami; the rulers of Bengal extended invitations to Hafiz. By the time of Akbar the desire to know about developments in the West also increased. Danishmand Khan, a Mogul noble of the seventeenth century, engaged Bernier, a French traveller, to explain to him theories about the circulation of blood.
The syllabus in the madrasahs was broadly categorised into ma’qulat (rational subjects) and manqulat (traditional subjects). The rational subjects included mathematics, philosophy, logic, medicine, and so on; the traditional subjects included Qur’an, hadith,fiqh (jurisprudence), tasawwuf (mysticism) and ilm-i-kalam (scholasticism). In the beginning there was greater emphasis on traditional subjects but by the close of the fifteenth century Maulana Abdullah of Tulanba and his brother increased the content of rational subjects in the syllabus. Although the influence of Mir Fathullah Shirazi (d. 1588) and Akbar worked in favour of rational subjects, the main thrust of education remained towards religious and traditional disciplines. In the eighteenth century Mulla Nizamuddin of Sihali (d. 1748) introduced some changes in the syllabus at Firangi Mahal, an outstanding seminary at Lucknow. The curriculum that he prescribed came to be known as the Dars-i Nizami (the syllabus of Nizami) and for more than a century and a half it remained the basis of instruction imparted in most madrasahs on the subcontinent.