The Al-Umariyya Madrasa

This madrasa is the reason the Salihiyya quarter exists. The Maqdisi family, fleeing the village of Jammail near Nablus in Palestine, reached Damascus in 1156. They stayed about three years at the mosque of Abu Salih outside Bab Sharqi, then moved to the slope of Mount Qasiyun beside the Yazid canal, where an abandoned monastery stood. There they built houses, shops, a bakery, mosques and this school. The newcomers were called the salihin, and the quarter took its name from them.

Who built it

Sheikh Abu Umar Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi. He founded the madrasa together with ten rooms for the poor, with a water works beneath them; the first foundation is said to have been laid in the time of Nur al-Din Zengi, around 1160. Abu Umar died in Salihiyya in 1210 and was buried on Qasiyun.

How large it was

When the chief judge al-Muradi built a second madrasa on the same plan against its east wall, the two joined into one. Later additions brought it to three storeys and 360 rooms. Students ate and slept here; bread was handed out daily, registers were kept, attendance was taken. Its library was among the richest of any madrasa in Damascus.

Getting there

In Salihiyya, in the Sheikh Muhyi al-Din quarter, on the same walk as the Ibn Arabi mosque and the line of tombs along the slope.

What is left to see

Little. The books leaked out volume by volume, and then the Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha ordered what remained gathered up and carried to the Zahiriyya Library — 600 manuscript volumes. A survey in 1910 counted 110 rooms, of which only five held students, some 20 of them. Later a wide street was cut through the southern front and took a large part of the building with it; the northern part was absorbed into neighbouring houses. What stands is essentially the stone qibla wall and the ground floor.

Don’t miss

The ground-floor rooms, now below street level. Residents have asked for years that the building be repaired and turned into a cultural centre for the quarter; another petition with hundreds of signatures went in during 2008. Nothing came of it, and that waiting is part of what you see here.