ALMA MA'TER (Lat., nourishing mother) is a name given to a university in relation to those who have studied at it, to distinguish it from inferior schools of learning. The word alma (nourishing, sustaining, or kind) was applied by the Latin authors to such of the deities as were friendly to men—Ceres, Venus, etc., and also to the earth, the light, the day, wine, and the soil.
AL-MAMtN', or AL-MAMOUN, Ara0L-AnnAs-AnDALLAri, b. 786; a renowned caliph of the Abbasides, son of Harun Al-Raschid. When Harun died, Mamun was governor of Khorassan, and his brother Amin took the Bagdad caliphate; but his treatment of 3Iamun led to war, and after five years of fighting Amin was slain and Manilla took his place, Oct. 4, 813. The early part of his reign was disturbed by revolts and heresies; but when affairs settled down he fostered the cultivation of literature and science in all his empire, and Bagdad became the seat of academical instruction and the center of intelligence. He had books translated from old and living languages, founded astro nomical observatories, determined the inclination of the ecliptic, had a degree of the meridian measured on the plane of Shinar, and constructed astronomical tables of remarkable accuracy. He paid more respect to science than to orthodoxy, and drew his
men from all countries and all creeds. This liberalism resulted in the caliph's conver sion in 827 to the heterodoxy of the Motasali, who asserted the free will of man and denied the eternity of the Koran.. In the latter years of his reign he was in hostilities with the Greek emperor Theophilus; broke out in various parts of his empire; Spain and n.w. Africa asserted their independence, and Egypt and Syria were inclined to follow. In 833, after quelling a disturbance in Egypt, he marched into Cilicia against the Greeks, but died suddenly near Tarsus, his crown to Motassern, a younger brother. Mamfin was the author of Inquiries into the Koran, a tract on Signs of Prophecy, and one on The Rhetoric of the Priests and Panegyrists of the Caliphs.