Fatima al-Fihri: The Woman Who Founded the World's Oldest University
The institution that the modern university most resembles in its origins was not founded in Bologna or Paris or Oxford. It was founded in the Moroccan city of Fez in the year 859, and the person who founded it, with her own inherited money, was a woman named Fatima al-Fihri.
The woman and her city
Fatima came from a family that had migrated to Fez from Kairouan, in what is now Tunisia, part of a wave of settlers who gave one of the city's quarters its name. Her father was a successful merchant, and when he died he left his wealth to his two daughters. The accounts tell that Fatima and her sister Mariam each chose to spend their inheritance on a mosque for their growing community. Fatima's became the Qarawiyyin, named for the Kairouan migrants among whom she had grown up.
From mosque to university
In the medieval Muslim world the great mosque was rarely only a place of prayer. It was where teaching happened, where scholars sat against the pillars with circles of students around them, working through law, grammar, theology and the sciences. The Qarawiyyin grew into exactly this kind of centre. It drew teachers and students from across the Muslim world and the Mediterranean, built one of the great libraries of the age, and in time issued the certifications that marked a student as qualified in a given field. UNESCO and the Guinness Book of Records both recognise it as the oldest existing educational institution in the world that has continuously granted degrees, and it is still working as a university today, more than eleven hundred years after Fatima paid for the first stones.
What the story corrects
The plain facts of it cut against a lazy assumption that learning, and the institutions built to house it, were invented in Europe and handed to everyone else. The oldest continuously operating university on earth was endowed in North Africa, by a Muslim woman, at a time when much of Europe could not have organised anything comparable. Little is known about Fatima al-Fihri as a person, and some of the surviving detail is late, but the building she funded is solid, real, and still teaching.
The Fatima al-Fihri print belongs to the Riwayah Women of Legacy collection. You can view the print.
Fatima was one of many women the record refuses to forget. For more, see the women who built Islamic history.