1. University of Al Quaraouiyine

The oldest university in the world is the University of Al Quaraouiyine, in Fez, Morocco. It was originally founded as a mosque in 859, before developing into one of the leading spiritual and educational centres of the Islamic Golden Age. 

Founded in 859 A.D. by Tunisian-born Fatima al-Fihri in Morocco’s Fez, the university is not only the oldest higher education institution on Earth but also the first to be founded by a woman, and a Muslim one at that. Fatima used her inheritance from her merchant father’s wealth to found the university which started as an associated school – known as a madrasa – and a mosque that eventually grew into a place of higher education. It also introduced the system of awarding degrees according to different levels of study in a range of fields, such as religious studies, grammar and rhetoric. Though the university first focused on religious instruction, its fields of study quickly expanded to include logic, medicine, mathematics and astronomy, among many others.

In 1963, it officially became a part of Morocco’s modern state university system, and is now widely known for being the oldest continuously operating university in the world. 

The university has contributed significantly to global Islamic education, and has played a massive role in shaping intellectual and cultural traditions. The classes taught there concentrate heavily on the Islamic religious and legal sciences, with a particular focus on Classical Arabic grammar and linguistics and Maliki law. 

The mosque building itself features elements from various periods of Moroccan history, becoming an important architectural landmark.

(NB: Although many scholars consider the University of Al Quaraouiyine to be the oldest university in the world, some scholars consider that it operated as an Islamic madrasa until after WWII and only became a university in 1963.)

The library currently hosts more than 4,000 valuable manuscripts in a range of fields, including historic copies of Islam’s holy book, the Quran. Some of these precious texts include the 14th-century work of “Al-Muqaddimah” and an original copy of “Al-‘Ibar” by the famous Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, a pioneer in sociology. Other pieces such as the famous “Al-Muwatta” – the earliest collection of hadith texts (the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings) gathered by Malik, considered to be one of the first legal texts to incorporate both hadiths and fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.

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