Look towards the centre of Fez and you see roofs of green ceramic tiles. Beneath them, learning has gone on for centuries at the University of Al-Qarawiyyin.
Fez, an ancient city in Morocco in Muslim-majority North Africa, is ringed by hills, and motor vehicles still cannot enter its narrow, winding lanes.
Founded in 859, Al-Qarawiyyin is recognised by UNESCO and Guinness World Records as the oldest university in the world still operating. The University of Bologna in Italy, known as Europe’s oldest, began more than two centuries later, in 1088, and Oxford and Cambridge came later still.
Most remarkable of all, Al-Qarawiyyin was founded by a Muslim woman, Fatima al-Fihri.
Who was Fatima al-Fihri
Much of what is known about her comes from Rawd al-Qirtas, a 14th-century work by the historian Ibn Abi Zar. She descended from the noble Quraysh tribe of Arabia, and her family were merchants who travelled across Asia and Africa.
Fatima was born in about 800 in Kairouan, in present-day Tunisia. Her full name was Fatima bint Muhammad al-Fihri al-Qurashiyya. Her father, Muhammad al-Fihri, moved the family to Morocco for trade and finally settled in Fez, where he prospered. Within the family Fatima studied Islamic learning, including the Quran, hadith and jurisprudence.
A few years after her marriage she lost her husband, and around the same time her father and brother, so that she and her sister Mariam al-Fihri inherited great wealth.
A mosque and a place of learning
The two sisters chose to spend their inheritance on public good rather than luxury. Mariam used much of hers to build the Al-Andalus mosque, and Fatima built a large mosque and centre of learning. According to historians, building began on 1 Ramadan in 859. The main mosque was finished within two years, but the full complex took many more years to complete.
Historical accounts say Fatima supervised the building herself. When it was finished she named it Al-Qarawiyyin after Kairouan, her birthplace.
From mosque to university
At first Al-Qarawiyyin was mainly a mosque and a centre of Islamic education. Over time it began teaching linguistics, grammar, law, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, astronomy and other subjects. Historical accounts say Jewish and Christian students studied there alongside Muslims in the Middle Ages.
Scholars such as the historian Ibn Khaldun, the Maliki judge Ibn al-Arabi and the astronomer Nur al-Din al-Bitruji were associated with it at various times. According to the Moroccan historian Mohammed al-Manouni, Al-Qarawiyyin became a formal institution of higher learning between about 1040 and 1147, and certificates were awarded to students on merit.
A rich library
The library is a central part of the complex. It was restored and expanded in 1359 under the Marinid dynasty and holds more than 20,000 medieval handwritten books, about 4,000 of them rare works and manuscripts.
Its collection includes manuscripts of Imam Malik ibn Anas’s Al-Muwatta, Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah and Kitab al-Ibar, as well as an ancient manuscript of the Quran.
A royal decree in 1963 began the conversion of Al-Qarawiyyin into a modern university, and the word “university” was formally added to its name in 1965.
More than a thousand years on, Al-Qarawiyyin still stands at the heart of Fez: not only a place of learning, but a landmark in the long history of education and scholarship in the Muslim world.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report