The Women Who Built Islamic History

The history of Islamic civilisation is usually told through its men. The records do not actually require that. They are full of women who founded institutions, issued legal rulings and taught the scholars whose names are now better remembered than theirs.

The founder

The oldest continuously operating degree-granting university in the world was established by a woman. Fatima al-Fihri founded the Qarawiyyin in Fez in the ninth century. It is still running. The institutions Europe likes to name as the first universities came later.

The scholars and the mystic

Lubna of Cordoba ran the library of the Umayyad palace and was counted among the finest mathematicians and scribes of her city. Zaynab bint al-Kamal of Damascus became one of the most sought-after teachers of hadith of her age, with students travelling considerable distances to study under her. Rabia al-Adawiyya reshaped the spiritual vocabulary of early Islam so thoroughly that the mystics who followed quoted her for centuries.

The queen

Sayyida al-Hurra governed Tetouan in the sixteenth century and held real authority across the western Mediterranean, the last woman in the Islamic west to carry the title al-Hurra, the sovereign. These were not anomalies smuggled into the footnotes. They were documented public figures, recorded by the historians of their own time and largely forgotten by everyone since.

The Women of Legacy collection takes its subjects from exactly this record.