It was one of the most important universities in the Islamic world in the Abbasid era. It gained special importance for teaching Arabic, religious sciences, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and pharmacy, and it included a private hospital to train its students.
The school is located on the side of Rusafa near Al-Shuhada Bridge and overlooks the Tigris River. This school was built during the Abbasid era of al-Mustansir Billah, the thirty-seventh caliph, whose caliphate lasted from 623 AH to 640 AH, and was named after him,. The construction of the school took six years, and the Abbasids allocated to the school about three quarters of a million gold dinars, and in order to perform its tasks, the endowments allocated to the same amounted to about one million gold dinars, generating an annual income equal to seventy thousand gold dinars.
The school was built on an approximately rectangular layout with a length of 104.8 m and a width of 44.20 m. In the middle of the school is a central courtyard of 1,710 square meters overlooking halls, and it consists of building units covered by large vaults and beautiful decorations open in all its breadth to the square. The school has rooms for student housing on two floors, study areas, and a library that contained about eighty thousand books, in addition to a pharmacy, hospital, orchard, a hadith house, and another for the Holy Qur’an.
