ABSTRACT
Matthias Norberg was born in Natra, the Ångermanland province of north Sweden in 1747. In 1768, he enrolled at Uppsala University and obtained his Master of Arts in 1773. In 1774, he was awarded a Doctorate in Greek. After being educated at Uppsala, he traveled to Göttingen in 1777, where he met the biblical scholar Johan David Michaelis, the son of Christian Benedikt Michaelis, a prominent Lutheran theologian. Michaelis encouraged Norberg to study the pre-Islamic Mandaean religion and language. In the opening of his dissertation, Norberg dismisses the popular notion that the Turks are savage barbarians. He concedes that the Ottomans engage in brutality and plunder, but he admires their love of learning and education, which he thinks his Western contemporaries underestimate. Norberg begins his account of education in the Islamic world with the colleges of the early Caliphate. In these schools, students were taught about religion and law, rendering them superstitious and hostile to the humanities.
