Mir Arab Madrasah - RW12

Mir-i Arab Madrassah: Bukhara Uzbekistan

The Mir-i-Arab Madrassah in Bukhara has ranked as the most prestigious educational establishment in Bukhara for centuries. Today this tourist place stands at the forefront of Uzbekistan’s Islamic renaissance, a place where the past, the present and the future blur into one and where, as the Soviet century recedes to dim memory, the 16th century looms on the near horizon.

In 1535 the Shaybani Ubaydullah Khan sold his share of a consignment of 3,000 Persian slaves for a profit that apparently lay heavy on his soul, for almost immediately afterwards he commissioned a Mir-i-Arab Madrasah to face his newly-built Kalon Mosque. Responsibility for its construction fell to his close friend and spiritual adviser Sheikh Abdullah of Yemen, the Prince of the Arabs (Mir-i-Arab), at whose feet the khan was eventually buried in the northern domed darskhana of the madrassah in Bukhara.

Even today the tombs are marked on the northern wall of the madrassah with a goat’s tail and white flag, the customary symbols of sainthood.

The life of a madrassah student has changed little over the years. Up to the end of the 19th century, students received a religious stipend from the state and could freely marry, as long as their wives did not cross the holy threshold of the college.

Tuition was solely in Arabic, writing and mathematics were deeply frowned upon and any student caught in the heinous study of literature, history or poetry was expelled on the spot. As Bukharan isolation intensified, the Mir-i-Arab Madrassah slid into a bastion of religious obscurantism and dogmatic fanaticism.

At present approximately 125 resident students study a four-year course of Arabic, theology and the Koran at the Mir-i-Arab Madrassah and its spill-over classrooms in the Kalon Mosque, on the first step to becoming fully fledged imams. Thus the mir-i-Arab Madrassah in bukhara is formally closed to tourists, who can only squint through the entrance grill at the intense tilework of its inner court.