A woman, an Arab revolutionary of her era, Fatima al-Fihri founded the first University in the world, Al-Qarawiyyīn University, way back in 859 AD. For the sake of comparison, the University of Belgrade was founded in 1808, almost 1000 years later, the University of Oxford was founded around 1096, while the Sorbonne in Paris was founded in 1253, about 400 years after Al-Qarawiyyina University.

Fatima bint Muhammed al-Fihri Al-Qarashiya was born at the beginning of the 9th century on the territory of today’s Tunisia, as the daughter of the rich merchant Muhammed Al Fihri.

After the death of her father, Fatima and her sister Merjem inherited a large fortune.

Being extremely educated, they decided to devote their lives and wealth to the development and improvement of their society.

First, they built several mosques, among which the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque stands out, the construction of which was personally supervised by Fatima.

Immediately around this mosque in 859, the oldest university in the world, Al-Qarawiyyin University, was founded, which has been operating continuously since then.

Therefore, UNESCO and the Guinness Book of Records consider it to be the oldest University and the oldest higher education institution in the world that has been working without interruption for almost 1,200 years.

At this University, in addition to Islamic sciences, grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy, geography, history and music were also studied. With its diverse program and quality of education, it quickly gained the reputation of a good University, so it immediately began to attract students and scientists from the entire Arab-Islamic world.

It is considered that Al-Qarawiyyin University played an important role as an intellectual-educational bridge between the scientifically superior Islamic world and Europe and that the knowledge transmitted in Europe over that bridge was generated in the European Renaissance.

The library of Al-Qarawiyyīn is considered to be the oldest library in the world.

It is estimated that there are about 4000 manuscripts in it. Among the most valuable are the 9th-century Koran, written in the Kufic script on camel skin, the oldest biography of the Prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq, as well as the original copy of the text of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima.