Dynastic History | Ben Youssef Madrasa, Marrakesh — A Hundred and Thirty-Odd Cells

The madrasa the Saadian sultan Abdallah al-Ghalib built here was finished in 972 AH, which falls across 1564 and 1565. A Marinid madrasa founded under Abu al-Hasan, who reigned from 1331 to 1348, had stood on the site; al-Ghalib rebuilt it, and a carved cedar lintel over the doors names him as the builder — an inscription is a claim, and this one is the sultan's.

Most of the building is accommodation. The monument's own site counts 134 student rooms; other accounts give 130, and the number of students housed is usually put at upwards of 800. They are small, dark, and stacked on two galleries around a courtyard with a long pool, and they are the point of the place: the carved plaster downstairs is what the endowment could afford, the cells upstairs are what it was for. Students came from across Morocco and from the Saharan trade towns to the south, kept on the income of endowed property rather than fees.

Court patronage of a madrasa was not charity. Its graduates staffed the qadis' courts, drafted the chancery's documents, and led the Friday prayer in which the sultan's name was pronounced.

It stopped functioning as a school in 1960 and opened as a historic site in 1982. It closed again in November 2018 and reopened in April 2022, after restoration by the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs, which owns the building. The medina around it has been on the World Heritage list since 1985.

📸 Cover: the upper gallery of the student quarters, doorways to the cells, Draceane, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons