The other medresseh, separated from this one by a straight easterly stretch of the new boulevard, is that of the Grand Vizier Amouja-zadeh Hüsseïn Pasha—the Son of the Uncle. I need hardly point out that Hüsseïn Pasha was not the son of his own uncle, but of that of a famous cousin of his. For he belonged to the great family of the Kyöprülü, who gave Turkey five of her best grand viziers. The head of the house, that iron old man who stopped for a time the decadence of the empire—and put to death thirty-six thousand people in five years—lies in the skeleton türbeh of marble and bronze on Divan Yolou, near the Burnt Column. Hüsseïn Pasha’s tomb is also open to the street and to the rains of heaven. Its tall stones and taller trees stand behind a cobweb grille to the left of his sebil, where an attendant gives cups of cold water to thirsty passers-by. Between the sebil and the gate are two grilles of bronze, set in two great windows of delicately chiselled marble, that do much to make this medresseh one of the most notable corners of Stamboul. There is a big L-shaped courtyard within, pleasant with trees and a central pagoda of a fountain, looked upon by white cloisters for students, by a library containing no books, by a ruined primary school, and by an octagonal mosque charmingly set in a square ambulatory of pillars.

I should be afraid to guess how many such institutions are in Stamboul or how many thousand students attend them at the expense of their founders. They are a wonderful tribute to the philanthropy of another day—the day of the great schools of Bagdad and Cairo and Cordova, the day of the mediæval cloisters. Stamboul has needed bitter lessons to learn that that day is past. Indeed, a good part of old Stamboul has taken refuge in these courtyards, and would still be true to the old order which made the mosque the centre of the community and supposed all knowledge to be in the Koran. For the race of men that likes Stamboul there is a great charm in these places, with their picturesqueness and their air, part gravity, part melancholy, familiar to the East and particular to all places that have known change and ruin. There is tragedy in them, too, and menace. For they teach too many men too little. But there is also a germ in them of something that might conceivably save Stamboul in spite of herself. “Seek knowledge, even though it be in China,” is one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet, and he taught his followers that the greater holy war was against ignorance. Halil Bey and Van Berchem, in their monumental Corps d’Inscriptions Arabes, quote an epigraph to the same effect from a thirteenth-century medresseh in Sîvas: “The pursuit of knowledge is an obligation imposed on every Moslem. The merit of science is greater than that of devotion.” And the medresseh of Ali Pasha in Stamboul has this written above the gate: “Whoever taught me a single word, I was his slave.” If the spirit that made such utterances could once touch Islam again, would it not be enough?