Learning · a Light

She spent an inheritance on a mosque that became a university

Fatima al-Fihri came from a family that migrated from Kairouan to Fez in the early ninth century. When her father died she used her share of his estate to build a mosque in 859 in the quarter where the migrants had settled, and tradition holds that she fasted while the work went on. That mosque, al-Qarawiyyin, acquired teaching circles, then a library, then salaried professors and issued certificates, and it has never closed. UNESCO and Guinness both list it as the oldest existing degree granting institution. Almost everything told about Fatima herself comes from Ibn Abi Zar's chronicle written some five centuries later, and historians say plainly that earlier evidence for her life is thin.

Fatima al-Fihri · Fez, 859 CE