The Al-Muradiyya Madrasa

In Souq Saruja, northwest of the walls. Its full name is al-Madrasa al-Muradiyya al-Barraniyya, and some sources call it al-Naqshbandiyya al-Barraniyya. It is Ottoman, and before it became a madrasa the building was a khan for drinking and gambling. Its endowment deed almost reads as an answer to that past: neither a married man nor a tobacco smoker could lodge in it.

Who founded it

The founder was Sheikh Murad ibn Ali al-Bukhari, born in Samarkand. He moved to India, took the Naqshbandi path there, made the pilgrimage, passed through several countries, and settled in Damascus after 1669. When the Ottoman sultan Mustafa II granted him a few villages of the Damascus district, he built this madrasa.

Two separate buildings in Damascus carry the name Murad, and the two are often confused. This madrasa is a sheikh’s foundation; the Naqshbandi Mosque in Midan is the 1568 work of the governor Murad Pasha. Same order, similar name, two different centuries and two different quarters.

Why the Azhar of Damascus

The madrasa was founded with a valuable library and became the place where the scholars gathered. The Hanbali scholar Ibn Badran al-Dimashqi described it like this: it was the halting place of the eminent, full of scholars and students, and they drew enough from its endowments to live on. Its library was so large that people called it the Azhar of Damascus.

The same Ibn Badran also wrote its end. The trustees sold part of the endowment and cut the students’ stipends, and the building turned into somewhere with no teaching in it, lived in by the poor and by men with no work. Most of the library was stolen; 260 manuscripts remain.

What to see

The courtyard is paved in mosaic, and along its north and west sides are seven rooms for the resident students. To the south stand three arches, and behind them a wide prayer hall under one great arch, with its mihrab and minbar. The walls of the fine dome to the right of the mihrab are decorated; beneath it lie two large graves, and a slab over the grave carries lines of verse. The great door was walled up later and its outline still shows; a small door was opened in its place. Beside it a round minaret rises in black and white stone, carrying an inscription on its square base.

Don’t miss

Not reading that inscription as a foundation date. The date on it is thought to belong to the rebuilding of the minaret after the earthquake of 1759. No record gives the madrasa’s founding year; all there is is the date the sheikh settled in Damascus, and the building went up after that.

How long it takes

20 minutes. A large fire in Souq Saruja in July 2023 threatened the historic fabric of the quarter and this madrasa with it, so ask about the state of the building before going. Its coordinates are missing from the open data sets as well, so this page carries no map and the address stays at quarter level.