Fatima al-Fihri

Behind nearly every great physician in Islamic history stands a place where he was permitted to learn. One of the oldest of these places was endowed by a woman.

Fatima al-Fihri was born around the year 800 in Kairouan, in present-day Tunisia. Her family emigrated to Fès in Morocco, where her father came to wealth as a merchant. When he died, Fatima and her sister Mariam inherited a fortune.

They could have led a comfortable life on it. Instead, both chose Sadaqa, a lasting gift to their community. Mariam, according to tradition, had a mosque built. And Fatima built something that would change the world.

In the year 859 she laid in Fès the foundation stone for the mosque of al-Qarawiyyīn, named after her home city of Kairouan. It is said that she fasted until the building was completed, and used only material from her own land, so that everything came from lawful possession. Out of this mosque grew a school, and out of the school a university.

Al-Qarawiyyīn is regarded today as the oldest continuously operating educational institution in the world, recognised by UNESCO and the Guinness Book of Records. Over the centuries, not only Qurʾan and law were taught there, but also medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Scholars such as Ibn Khaldūn studied and taught in Fès.

More than a thousand years ago, a woman transformed her inheritance into a wellspring of knowledge that has never run dry. Every Muslim physician, every nurse, and every learner stands, in some measure, in her debt. Her university still stands in Fès to this day. Her name, however, is known to very few. It is time that this changed.