page_title: Ulama
section_title: Islamic revival and the origin of extremism
hierarchical_section_title: Ulama / Political and cultural history / Islamic revival and the origin of extremism
caption_attribution_description: English: Wazir Khan Mosque This is a photo of a monument in Pakistan identified as the PB-100
context_page_description: In Islam, the ulama are the guardians, transmitters, and interpreters of religious knowledge in Islam, including Islamic doctrine and law.
  By longstanding tradition, ulama are educated in religious institutions. The Quran and sunnah are the scriptural sources of traditional Islamic law.
context_section_description: Islam, unlike Christianity, does not know a centralised process of ordination of its clergy. The traditional way of education and training relied largely on personal relationships between a teacher and his students. Whenever Islamic national governments tried to influence their regional ulama, they did so by controlling their income, or by establishing state-controlled schools and high schools. Traditional madrasas, representing merely decentralised "places of learning" and not institutions comparable to Western universities, often remained beyond state control. Whenever the state failed to control the resources of the madrasas, e.g., by controlling the income from religious endowments, or collecting Muslim taxes on behalf of the clergy, the ulama also retained the independence of their teaching. In particular, this held to be true in the Arabian provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arabian national states which arose out of the empire after the First World War.
  For many people living in the poorer Islamic countries of today, especially those without natural resources like petroleum, the madrasa system, privately sponsored by foreign aid and not or insufficiently controlled by the state, often constitutes their only access to some form of education and social rise. Saudi Arabian humanitarian organizations use the madrasas they sponsor to spread their  wahhabitic doctrine, whilst Shiite madrasas are frequently influenced by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic revival originated largely from institutions which were financially independent from the state, and beyond its control. This led to a resurgence of the social and political influence of the traditional ulama in at least some countries. Insufficient state control over the educational institutions and the frequently insufficient qualification of the teachers remain an issue, as does the ideologic indoctrination and the future professional perspectives of the graduates.
caption: Quran studies class in the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore