World's oldest, continually operating university, was founded by a Muslim woman

When thinking of the oldest universities in the world, probably the first ones that come to most people's minds are Oxford and Bologna, but according to UNESCO and the Guinness World Records, Al-Qarawiyyin University (also written as Al-Karaouine) is the “oldest existing, and continually operating educational institution in the world.”

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. 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.

Thanks to the wide range of topics and the high quality of education it offered, scholars and students from all over the Muslim world visited and enrolled in the institution. Its popularity became so overwhelming that the university introduced a strict selection system, requiring students to know the Quran by heart and have a good knowledge of Arabic as well as general sciences. Sultans of the era supported the university with subsidies, gifts and especially books and manuscripts. This led to al-Qarawiyyin University having several libraries in its main and side buildings, housing countless influential works for its era.

The historical library is open to the public to this day and shows al-Fihri’s original diploma, which was chiseled onto a wooden board back in the day. 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.

https://www.dailysabah.com/life/history/al-qarawiyyin-worlds-oldest-continually-operating-university-was-founded-by-a-muslim-woman