The madrasa system was created as an ideological counter-weapon against Isma’ili Shiism.

Evidence

In the madrasa, Sunni Islam created a new and crucial weapon in the struggle for religious unity. In these great colleges, spreading all over the East, the scholars and theologians of the Sunna devised and taught the orthodox answer to the Isma ili intellectual challenge. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 380

Categorization

• SEED: An angle: the university as a weapon of orthodoxy — how a specific institutional form (the madrasa) was engineered to counter a specific intellectual threat, paralleling modern think tanks and ideological training institutions.