Founding of the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque in Fez

Fez consisted of two settlements facing each other across the Fez river: Madinat Fas, founded by Idris I in 789, and al-Aliya, founded by his son Idris II in 809, which became the Idrisid capital. In the early 9th century both were filled with Arab immigrants: families expelled from Córdoba after a revolt against the emir al-Hakam I in 817–818 settled in Madinat Fas, and families from Kairouan in the other town; the two districts became known as the ‘bank of the Andalusians’ and the ‘bank of the Qarawiyyin’, the people of Kairouan.

According to the Rawd al-Qirtas of Ibn Abi Zar’, written in the 14th century, Fatima, daughter of the wealthy Kairouan merchant Muhammad al-Fihri, spent her inheritance on a mosque for her community and laid its foundations on the first day of Ramadan in the year 245 (859); the stone was quarried on the site and water drawn from a well dug there, and she fasted until the work was done. Her sister Mariam is said to have founded the Mosque of the Andalusians across the river at the same time. Modern historians such as Roger Le Tourneau and Jonathan Bloom find the symmetry of two sisters founding the two chief mosques of Fez too neat and treat the story as pious legend; Bloom notes that no part of the present building is older than the 10th century. A foundation inscription carved in cedar wood, uncovered during 20th-century renovations above the probable site of the original mihrab and deciphered by Gaston Deverdun, records instead that ‘this mosque’ was founded by Dawud ibn Idris, a son of Idris II, in Dhu al-Qa'da 263 (July–August 877). Deverdun thought the panels might have been brought from another mosque in the 15th or 16th century; Chafik Benchekroun argues that they are al-Qarawiyyin’s own foundation inscription and that Fatima may be a legendary figure.

The mosque grew in prestige in the 10th century, when the Friday sermon was transferred to it (in 919 or 933), and it was greatly enlarged by the Almoravids. Teaching probably went on there from an early date, as in other great mosques, but when it became a formal institution of learning is unclear; under the Marinids, in the 13th–14th centuries, it was one of the leading intellectual centres of the Islamic West. Reorganised in the 20th century, it became a state university in 1963. The claims that al-Qarawiyyin is the oldest continuously operating university in the world and that Fatima al-Fihri founded a university and a library are disputed by historians.