Beneath green-tiled roofs at the heart of the old city of Fez, Morocco, Al Qarawiyyin has been a place of learning for more than 1,150 years. Founded in 859, it is recognised by UNESCO and Guinness World Records as the oldest university still in operation. A report in Naya Diganta tells the story of its founder, a Muslim woman named Fatima al-Fihri.
By comparison, the report notes, Europe's oldest university, Bologna in Italy, began in 1088, Oxford some years later and Cambridge early in the thirteenth century. The recognition applies to institutions still running; ancient centres of learning such as Taxila and Nalanda no longer exist.
Citing the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Abi Zar's history of Fez, Rawd al-Qirtas, the report says Fatima was born around 800 in Kairouan, Tunisia, into a Quraysh merchant family. Her father, Muhammad al-Fihri, moved to Morocco to restore his fortunes, became a wealthy trader in Fez and gave his children a religious education. Widowed young, and later losing her father and brother, Fatima and her sister Mariam inherited a large fortune.
The sisters decided to spend it for the public good. Mariam built the Al Andalus Mosque. Fatima built a mosque complex with a large madrasa; work began on the first of Ramadan in the year 245 of the Hijri calendar, 859 CE. The main building stood within two years, but the whole complex took 12 to 18 years, according to various accounts. Ibn Abi Zar wrote that Fatima supervised the work herself and fasted until it was finished. She named it Al Qarawiyyin after her birthplace, Kairouan.
First 100 feet long, the mosque was enlarged in 956 under Abd al-Rahman III of Cordoba, and twice more in the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. It is now about 272 feet long and holds some 22,000 worshippers. Its library, expanded under the Marinid dynasty in 1359, holds more than 20,000 medieval handwritten books, about 4,000 of them rare manuscripts, including volumes of Imam Malik's al-Muwatta, Ibn Ishaq's biography of the Prophet and Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah.
Al Qarawiyyin made Fez the leading centre of Islamic learning in Africa, the report says. Women could study there in separate spaces, and Fatima herself is said to have studied there. Teaching began with Islamic subjects and later took in linguistics, grammar, law and mathematics.
This report is based on a report published in Naya Diganta.
Photo: Younesberrada / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Naya Diganta
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