Law and Education in Medieval Islam: Studies in Memory of George Makdisi

This volume, focusing on legal education and its place in classical and medieval Islamic civilisation, comprises eight articles written in honour of Professor George Makdisi (1920-2002), seven of them by his former students at the University of Pennsylvania (William Granara, Sherman Jackson, Gary Leiser, Joseph Lowry, Christopher Melchert, Devin Stewart, and Shawkat Toorawa). One article is by George Makdisi’s friend and Islamicist colleague Bernard Weiss, and the Preface by George Makdisi’s friend and colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, the European medievalist Edward Peters. George Makdisi was one of the great scholars of Islamic law, theology and education, as well as a historian of Islam’s institutions and practices of learning. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1953-59, at Harvard University from 1959-73, and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973 until his retirement in 1990. In 1993 he received the Giorgio Della Vida Award for Excellence in Islamic Studies.