Education and Politics

Education is the key to people’s minds. This inquiry is associated with this spectrum as it investigated the relationship between education and politics. It identified the double role of education as a politicising and a politicised factor in the two consecutive eras of the Fatimids and the Ayyubids in medieval Egypt. The inquiry concluded that despite the existing political and religious affiliations in each epoch, formal and informal institutions of education were arenas in which power and politics received fundamental expression. This does not necessarily mean that the politicization of education during those two phases restricted the thought and prevented it from flourishing. On the contrary, learning was accessible for all and absolutely free. Students received stipends provided by abundant income from a chain of a deeply embedded institution in the thoughts and practices of medieval Islamic societies called waqf. The religious motive was fundamental in the functioning of Islamic medieval educational process and the ultimate role of education in both, Fatimid and Ayyubid epochs was the preservation of the Islamic faith and the shari’ah.