The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

by William Dalrymple

it was cities bordering the Islamic world – Bologna, Salerno, Naples, Montpellier and finally Paris – that first developed universities in Europe, the idea spreading northwards from there.46 But where did the Arabs get the idea from? Recent research in Central Asia has made a convincing case that the first Islamic madrasas were modelled on the design of the Buddhist viharas such as the Barmakids’ Naw Bahar that the Arabs came across when they seized Afghanistan and Sindh in the seventh century.47 Indeed the first ever recorded madrasa was built just a few days’ journey from Naw Bahar at Bost, in the unlikely location of Lashkar Gah, western Afghanistan. Like the Buddhist viharas of its day it had apartments and endowed scholarships for its students, domestic and foreign, as well as a good library.48 The courtyard plan of these early Buddhist monastery universities was first described in detail by Xuanzang at Nalanda, and is still visible there and at early Buddhist sites such as the Kushan-era vihara of Adzhina Tepe in Tajikistan, the Gandharan monastery of Takht-i-Bahi near Peshawar and Taxila near Islamabad. From there it passed to Persia: in eleventh-century Nishapur there were thirty-eight such madrasas pre-dating the founding of the greatest of these, the Nizamiyya, in 1038. Hence the idea of the college spread to al-Azhar in Cairo, then on across North Africa to al-Qarawiyyin University (now in Morocco), established in 956 and now recognised as the oldest living univ...