Riccoldo reframed Baghdad’s madrasas as deliberate anti-intellectual censorship.

Evidence

Here he resolves this apparent contradiction by bringing two elements together, making the founding of madrasas into a clever anti-intellectual ploy: the point of having government-funded educational institutes, he tries to make his reader believe, is precisely to squelch philosophical reading and speculation by assuring that only the Koran is read and taught, not any philosophical texts that will contradict it. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1268

Here Riccoldo has combined (and elaborated upon) two ideas from his Peregrinatio, where he praised Baghdad’s madrasas in his section on the positive portrayal of Saracen mores, only to lambast the anti-intellectual policies of Baghdad’s caliphs in his anti-Islamic section. Here he resolves this apparent contradiction by bringing two elements together, making the founding of madrasas into a clever anti-intellectual ploy: the point of having government-funded educational institutes, he tries to make his reader believe, is precisely to squelch philosophical reading and speculation by assuring that only the Koran is read and taught, not any philosophical texts that will contradict it. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1268

Categorization

• CANDY: A fun observation about how a 13th-century polemicist resolved his own self-contradiction by inventing a cynical motive for a rival civilization’s educational system.
• XREF: Shows how medieval polemic inverted a positive observation (madrasas as centers of learning praised elsewhere) into a sinister ‘government-funded religious indoctrination’ narrative — the structural ancestor of modern claims about madrasas breeding extremism.
• QUESTION: Does Riccoldo accurately describe the historical Nizamiyya/Mustansiriyya policies against philosophy, or is the anti-philosophy charge itself polemically distorted? Worth verifying against madrasa history.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1268