Universities 🧑‍🎓

Invention/Contribution:

The world’s first degree-granting university was founded by a Muslim woman, Fatima al-Fihri, in 859 CE: Al-Qarawiyyin University in Fez, Morocco.
Al-Azhar University (Cairo, 970 CE) became another great center of scholarship, producing leading thinkers in law, medicine, mathematics, and philosophy.
These institutions offered structured curricula, libraries, dormitories, and examinations centuries before Europe’s first universities.
Subjects included both religious sciences and worldly knowledge like astronomy, medicine, and engineering.

Why it matters:

Preserved and expanded ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian knowledge.
Directly influenced the rise of European universities (e.g., Bologna, Paris, Oxford).
Showed how Muslims valued knowledge as a sacred duty.

Book Notes:

Muslims as they were urged throughout the Quran to seek knowledge, observe, and reflect. This meant that all over the Muslim world, advanced subjects were taught in mosques, schools, hospitals, observatories, and the homes of scholars - developing knowledge and learning that eventually spread to Europe.
Fatima al-Fihri built Al-Qarawiyyin, the oldest university in the world in Fez, Morocco in 859. She was well educated and vowed to building mosque-university suitable for her community in Fez. She put a design constraint on the build ing that all the building material should be from the same land. On launching the project she began a daily fast until the campus building was completed.
Al-Qarawiyyin expanded to all subjects, particularly the natural sciences, astronomy, thology, law, rhetoric, logic, prose & verse writing, arthimetic, geography, and medicine, grammar, Muslim history, chemistry, mathematics.
At the Zaytuna Mosque in Tunisia, there were manuscripts on grammar, logic, documentation, the etiquette of research, cosmology, arithmetic, geometry, minerals, and vocational training.
Medical courses were difficult. Anything less than a pass meant you couldn't medicine.
The law student had to get a certificate of authorization and a license before practicing. These certifications were called Ijazas, which is the origin for baccalareus, which Paris Universities called them. It meant you could teach on behalf of another.
Muslims insitutionalized higher level education with entrance exams, challenging finals, degree certificates, study circles, international students, and grants. Infect the methods used today are very similar to what Muslims used back then.
in 12th century, Muslims learning hit medieval Europe and massive translation exercise began from Arabic to Latin. At Chartres cathedral school in the 1140s, Thierry of Chartres taught that the scientific approach was compatible with the story of creation in the Bible, paving the way for the Renaissance.
First western Europe university was in Salerno, Italy. By 12th century, the intellectual powerhouse of the Western world had shifted to Paris, "a city of teachers" as the knowledge of Arabic works continued to spread with traveling scholars. Indeed, many historians today say that the blueprints of the earliest English universities, like Oxford, came with these traveling, open-minded scholars and returning Crusaders who, as well as visiting Muslim universities in places like Cordoba, brought back translated books based on rational thought rather than confined to religious thought.