The practical matters of culture in pre-madrasa Baghdad

Modern scholarship has often, and with varying results, attempted to understand the system of education in the classical Islamic world. Makdisi, and many in his wake, have described a sophisticated organisation for the production of culture, while quantitative studies have shown who the producers of such culture were and where and how they lived. Few studies, however, focus on the time which is often described as the pre-madrasa period, a period in which the production of culture was still a fluid process, not codified enough to make for easy systematization. This paper identifies patterns in the careers of third/ninth and fourth/tenth century Baghdad intellectuals, concentrating in particular on the relation between learning on the one side and power and wealth on the other. The sources used are similar to those employed for quantitative studies; however, they will be mined neither for numerical data nor for references to a codified system, but for literary content: stories, opinions, remarks, which will help shed light on the less systematic aspects of cultural activities.