This second selection of articles by George Makdisi concentrates on the schools of religious thought and legal learning in the medieval Islamic world and their defence of ’orthodoxy’.
In the present collection of his articles George Makdisi is first of all concerned with the local history and the topography of Baghdad.
Makdisi’s important work traces the development and organisational structure of learning institutions in Islam, and reassesses scholarship on the origins and growth of the Madrasa.
This biography of the Muslim scholastic and humanist Ibn 'Aqil sheds light on one of the most important periods of classical Islam, one which has had a significant impact on religious and intellectual culture in the Christian Latin West.