There are tens of thousands of extant Islamic scientific treatises currently located in research repositories throughout the world, many of them teaching textbooks. The standard approach to the pedagogy of science in premodern Islam tends to promote its history as one of discrete episodes and dependent in the main on courtly patronage or individual initiatives, i.e., outside the core institutional structures of Islamic society. Unfortunately, this view also tends to reinforce Eurocentric claims that there was no set curriculum in contrast to what one finds with the rise of the university in the Latin West. Downplayed are the questions of where Islamic scholars and students materialized from, and how such an alleged marginal enterprise was sustained, indeed thrived, for over a millennium. It is my contention that courtly patronage and individual initiatives can take us only so far in explaining this long-lived scientific tradition. This paper will discuss and challenge many of the prevailing assumptions about an Islamic scientific education, such as “an education was judged not on loci but on personae”, and that Islamic religious institutions, especially the madrasas, played a limited role. My focus will be on two extremely popular introductory scientific textbooks composed by Maḥmūd al-Jaghmīnī in the late 12th/early-13th centuries under the auspices of the Khwārizm Shāhs in Central Asia, a period often considered as one of scientific stagnation. The first is Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa al-basīṭa, an elementary work on Ptolemaic astronomy, which was studied and used as a propaedeutic for more advanced teaching texts well into the 19th century. Among other things, its extensive commentary tradition shows that even after “European science” came on the scene, Islamic scholars were attempting to seek approaches that could accommodate the older Islamic scientific traditions along with new (jadīd) scientific developments. The second work I will discuss is Jaghmīnī’s equally popular medical textbook al-Qānūnča, “the little Qānūn,” an abridgment of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb, which was said to have been used in schools of medicine, and that “students were as familiar with it as with the midday sun.” In highlighting the influence of Jaghmīnī’s two scientific treatises and their ensuing commentaries, I hope to provide strong evidence of a continuity of institutionalized scientific learning within Islamic lands; and also strongly suggest that the underlying demand for scientific works did not rest solely with individual initiatives but resulted from the society’s need to promote a scientific education.