Qarawiyyin Mosque

A woman’s inheritance is said to have built a mosque in Fez that grew into what Guinness World Records lists as the oldest continually operating educational institution.

This is the Qarawiyyin Mosque in the old city of Fez, Morocco, often called the world’s oldest university.

According to chronicles written centuries later, around the year 859 a woman named Fatima al-Fihri spent her whole inheritance on the mosque.

An inscription found in the twentieth century names a different founder, Dawud ibn Idris, and the year 877. Historians still debate which account is right.

In the twelfth century the Almoravids enlarged the prayer hall and added carved plaster ceilings. Students studied law, medicine, mathematics and astronomy there, and scholars such as Ibn Khaldun are linked to it.

In 1349 the Marinid sultan Abu Inan founded a library beside it. In 1963 a royal decree made the institution a university, and in 2016, after a restoration led by the architect Aziza Chaouni, the library reopened.

Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest continually operating educational institution in the world, though scholars debate whether the word university fits before 1963.

Sources differ on the founder (Fatima al-Fihri in later chronicles, Dawud ibn Idris on an inscription) and on when the institution became a university.