Book Review: Makdisi, George. 1981. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 356 pp. $140.00 (hardcover)

It is unusual to review a book published more than three decades ago. However, the importance, relevance, and yet continued obscurity of George Makdisi’s The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, justifies a contemporary review. This volume details the non-western origins of the college as an organizational form and its later manifestations in the West. Makdisi focuses primarily on religious, scholastic, financial, and community contexts that existed in eleventh century Baghdad which contributed to the further creation and operation of colleges in that location and surrounding region. His study does not remain in that time and place exclusively. It also includes valuable analyses of “. . . the many parallels between Islam’s institutions and those which developed later in the Christian west” including some colleges of colonial America (xiii). In the process, deeper and more complex historical and multicultural understandings of the origins of the collegiate form emerge than what are provided within western-focused educational history texts.