What was the first university in the world?
In 859, a woman’s endowment founded a university in Fez that never closed its doors — the oldest on earth, and the model Europe would later copy.
Last updated: October 2026
Eleven centuries before anyone debated who invented the university, one had already been built — in Fez, by a woman, from her own inheritance. It never closed.
The oldest university in the world that is still in operation is the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859. It began as a mosque, endowed by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, and grew into a centre of learning that has taught continuously for more than eleven centuries. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, and Guinness World Records both describe al-Qarawiyyin as the oldest existing university in the world. That is the short answer, and it is worth pausing on: the oldest university in the world was founded by a woman, in Africa, a century before the first European universities existed.
The claim needs a careful definition, because university is a word with a history. If a university means a community of teachers and students, organised as an institution, teaching a range of subjects and granting recognised qualifications, then al-Qarawiyyin qualifies. If it means a European-style university with the specific legal form that developed in Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century, then the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest in that tradition. The distinction matters, and both claims are true in their own terms. What is not in doubt is that al-Qarawiyyin was teaching, in an organised institution, centuries before Bologna, and that it never closed.
The university still operates today, in Fez, as part of Morocco’s public university system, and its mosque remains one of the great religious buildings of the Islamic world. Its library, one of the oldest in the world, holds thousands of manuscripts, including a ninth-century copy of the Quran and works on astronomy, medicine, law, and grammar. Its story is the story of how learning was organised, funded, and passed on, and it begins with a family of refugees.
Fatima al-Fihri was the daughter of Muhammad al-Fihri, a merchant from Kairouan, in what is now Tunisia, who moved his family to Fez in the early ninth century. Fez was then a young city, founded at the beginning of the ninth century by the Idrisid rulers of Morocco, and it was growing fast with the arrival of families from Kairouan and from Cordoba in Muslim Spain. Muhammad al-Fihri prospered, and when he died he left a substantial fortune to his two daughters, Fatima and Maryam. The sisters decided to spend their inheritance on public works for the community.
Maryam funded the construction of the al-Andalus mosque in Fez, for the community of families from Muslim Spain. Fatima bought land and, in 859, founded the mosque that became al-Qarawiyyin, named for the community from Kairouan, al-Qarawiyyin meaning the people of Kairouan. The mosque was built to serve the Kairouanese quarter of the city, and it grew rapidly: a place of worship, a place of teaching, and a centre of the neighbourhood’s life. Fatima is said to have fasted throughout the construction, and to have prayed in the mosque the day it opened. The story may be legend, but the building is real, and its founding is recorded in the chronicles of Fez.
The endowment was the key. Fatima did not only build a mosque; she endowed it with property whose revenues would support it, a waqf, an Islamic charitable endowment, in the tradition that funded schools, hospitals, and mosques across the Islamic world. The waqf model meant the institution did not depend on a single ruler’s favour or on fees from students. It had its own income, and it could outlast dynasties. That financial independence is one reason al-Qarawiyyin survived for eleven centuries, through changes of dynasty, empire, and colonial rule.
Al-Qarawiyyin began as a mosque school, teaching the Quran, Islamic law, and the Arabic language, and it grew into a university in the full sense. Over the centuries its curriculum came to include grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, mathematics, geography, chemistry, and medicine, alongside theology and law. The teaching method was the circle, the halqa, in which a scholar sat with students around a pillar of the mosque and expounded a text, and students progressed by mastering texts and earning the licence of their teacher, the ijaza, a permission to teach a particular book. The ijaza is one ancestor of the modern degree.
The scholars of al-Qarawiyyin included some of the great minds of the medieval Islamic world. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian and thinker often called the father of sociology, studied and taught in Fez and is associated with the university. Ibn al-Arabi, the mystic philosopher, and Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle, moved in the same intellectual world. The university also drew students from across North Africa and Muslim Spain, and its reputation reached Europe. A long tradition holds that Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II, studied in the Islamic world of Spain and Morocco and carried Arabic numerals and the astrolabe to Christian Europe. The tradition is debated, but it captures a real truth: the learning of Fez was known in Europe, and it flowed north.
Al-Qarawiyyin’s library grew with the university. Scholars and rulers donated manuscripts, and the library became one of the great collections of the medieval world. It holds an original ninth-century Quran, written in Kufic script on camel skin, a fourteenth-century copy of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, and works on medicine, astronomy, and law that are among the oldest surviving copies of their kind. The library was restored in the 2010s by the Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni, and it is now open to researchers, a living archive of eleven centuries of learning.
Europe’s universities came later, and they borrowed more than they admitted. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in the European tradition, organised by students and teachers as a guild, a universitas, with the legal right to grant degrees. The University of Paris, founded around 1150, and the University of Oxford, where teaching is recorded from 1096, followed the same model, and the word university itself comes from the Latin universitas, the guild of masters and scholars. The European universities differed from al-Qarawiyyin in form, with faculties, formal examinations, and degrees granted by the institution rather than by individual teachers, but they shared the essential idea: an independent community of learning, protected by law, that outlived its founders.
The older centres of learning that preceded al-Qarawiyyin are worth naming, because they show that the university has many ancestors. The Academy of Plato in Athens, founded in the fourth century BCE, was a school of philosophy that lasted for centuries. The Library and Museum of Alexandria, founded in the third century BCE, was a research institution without students in the modern sense. Nalanda in India, founded in the fifth century CE, was a great Buddhist university with thousands of students, which declined and closed in the twelfth century. Al-Azhar in Cairo, founded in 970, is older than Bologna and still operates, and it is sometimes put forward as the oldest university. The reason al-Qarawiyyin holds the record is that it combines antiquity, continuity, and the institutional form of a university, and it never closed its doors.
The debate over the first university is, in the end, a debate about definitions. If the question is which institution has taught longest without interruption, the answer is al-Qarawiyyin. If the question is which institution first used the European legal form, the answer is Bologna. Both answers are correct, and the comparison itself is revealing: the idea of the university was not invented once, in one place, but built up across civilisations, from the mosque schools of the Islamic world to the guilds of medieval Europe.
Al-Qarawiyyin survived because it was useful and because it was endowed. It served the rulers of Fez, the scholars of North Africa, and the students of the whole Maghreb. It survived the fall of dynasties, the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish on the Moroccan coast, the French protectorate of the twentieth century, and the transformation of Morocco after independence. In 1963 it was integrated into Morocco’s modern public university system, and today it teaches Islamic studies, law, Arabic, and other subjects to thousands of students, while its mosque remains a place of worship.
The university’s modern significance is as a reminder. The history of higher education is often told as a European story, beginning at Bologna and spreading outward. Al-Qarawiyyin shows that the story is older and wider: that the university, as an institution that preserves knowledge across generations, was built by many civilisations, and that its oldest living example was founded by a woman in Fez in 859. The next time a university celebrates its founding, it is worth remembering that a woman’s endowment in Morocco got there first, and that it never stopped teaching.
This entry draws on UNESCO’s descriptions of the University of al-Qarawiyyin, Guinness World Records’ listing of the oldest existing university, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the chronicles of Fez, and the standard histories of Islamic education and of the medieval university. The founding date of 859 and the role of Fatima al-Fihri are as given in those sources.