Submitted 17 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/d99c49b3-9ac7-4a10-9353-22b208e60d07.jpeg
You know that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa hides the fact the town founder being a bad person because it’d make the town sad?
That is me trying to hold back that, upon research, I found out that Fatima al-Fihriya is probably not a real person :(
I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.
I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.
For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.
Its not healthy to bury yourself in a false reality.
Thats some crazy ass shit.
This is a crazy take. Misinformation is not all of the sudden good when it has a positive outcome.
👆 This is how we get Trump and reactionaries, it’s this idiotic take right here.
Hey cool a soulist
Sometimes legends are important.
I don’t agree here. Truth is important. The fact that women haven’t been visible in science is important. We need to explain why they weren’t visible. Creating historical figures is comforting but if their existence is not reliably documented, we should keep explaining why such figures couldn’t emerge, and why their absence is significant.
Yes to shitposts, no to fabrications (this lady looks like one - but I suppose it was in good faith)
Lies that white wash one of the most horrendous religions in the world are indeed important - just not the way you imply.
Difficult to verify does not mean untrue.
The actually reality is this:
Literally nothing is known about this woman outside of a single narrative written by a supposed 14th century Moroccan historian, Ibn Abi Zar’, who we know nothing about either outside of him being a historian. Actually, most academics doubt that he was any sort of scholar to begin with because the source of this information is not reliable.
There’s literally ZERO evidence to support that this historian was that or that this woman was even real. In fact there’s evidence that support this story is fake because the inscriptions inside the mosque use different scripts than what is claimed in the story. Most academics are skeptical of this her existence and her story is treated as a cultural legend rather than historical fact.
Also within the folktale story, which by the way was written over 600 years after her supposed death, claims that she, along with her sister, inherited the wealth from their wealthy merchant father, and they both decided to use that fortune to build two parallel mosques in the same city.
The thing is that mosques in the early islamic periods were more like community centers than purely religious institutions. So it wasn’t uncommon for mosques to have a learning center as a part of the complex. Keep in mind, these learning centers were islamic schools that taught islam. They weren’t centers for researching and preserving knowledge like modern universities.
Over time, these mosques were repurposed to the needs of their time. Some were turned into purely religious institutions, some were demolished, some were turned into political seats of power, some remained community centers, and some evolved into purely islamic madrasas. Al Qarawiyyin was one of the latter. So this post is nothing more than blatant misinformation.
Tl;dr: This story is fake, this person isn’t real, the historical source is unreliable, and the institution is not an actual university but a mosque that later became an islamic madrasa.
al-Qarawiyyin was started as a mosque-madrasa complex.
Science and spirituality were inexfricay tied during this era. As an example, Dharmic concepts of sunya led to the conceptualization of zero and its use in mathematical operations which is foundational to many subsequent advancements and necessary to our communication through this platform.
Part of what sets al-Qarawiyyin apart is that it offered degrees or certificates of scholarly achievement before other institutions.
This is why UNESCO’s World Heritage description of the Fez Medina explicitly calls al‑Qarawiyyin “the oldest university in the world,” and the Guinness entry lists it as the “oldest existing, continually operating higher‑learning institution”.
Nah I think OP is right. Googling around the story seems mostly made up for bragging points. It also started as religious school not sciences 100%.
As a woman I always want to comment but then I remember that men tricked the world into.calling people pro womens rights “islamophobes” and ban them from.opinion.
Ah yes Morocco - the 137th out of 148th countries when it comes to women rights.
If anything this “university” had an inverse effect this meme implies.
Both things can be true at the same time.
The oldest continuously operating university is in Bologna. The one that the post is about was actually a mosque and did not become a university until less than a century ago.
Al-Qarawayyin is recognized by UNESCO and Guinness as the world’s oldest running university.
If you want to go that way, a lot of places could qualify as oldest university, some christian monasteries way older than al-qarawiyyin are still inactivities and the main focus of monasteries is to learn and apply “god” teachings…
It was common for religious institutions to also be places of higher learning during this era.
The Nalanda Mahavihara (Buddhist grand monastery) is regarded as world’s oldest residential university. It is in present day India, though not operating today. Scholars such as Xuanzang (known as far Mokṣadeva in Sanskrit) travelled from China (in his case Luoyang) to Nalanda for his studies and returned with thousands of sutras. It was knowledge transfer through this university during the Tang dynasty that brought the number system we use (it’s original form created by Bhramagupta) today to China.
A lot of higheducation place were also a religious place. For a lot of time education was’t just seen as positive science also education of soul.
Are you saying the post is baloney ? 😁
It was more of a mosque until very recently, so not really.
That depends on the the view point. It is true that it was founded as a mosque, and became a teaching centre later. Since universities are considered a European invention by some, it is argued that it was a madrassa op until the 1960's. However, madrassa is basically Arabic for place of study, which this mosque was since the eleventh century or earlier. It was in any case a place of study before the foundation of the university of Bologna.
This Wikipedia page agrees with this comment: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_oldest_universities_in…. It lists University of Bologna as the oldest one in continuous operation from 1180–1190.
I mean…. It does and it doesn’t. Yes, al-Qarawiyyin was founded as a mosque. Yes, it became a “university” within the last 100 years. But there was a looong span of time between where it was an institution of higher learning not formally classified as a “university”
Paragraph 4 of the article you linked specifically notes that such institutions with mixed provenance were omitted from the list.
Ancient higher-learning institutions, such as those of … the Islamic world, are not included in this list owing to their cultural, historical, structural and legal differences from the medieval European university… These include the University of al-Qarawiyyin… founded as mosques in 859… These developed associated madrasas… by 1129 for al-Qarawiyyin…
Basically it is the oldest educational institution that is currently a university, as opposed to the institution having operated under the university model for the longest time.
That’s where the top boffins of the time invented spaghetti with tomato sauce, too!
Al-Qarawiyyin is recognized by UNESCO and Guinness as the world’s oldest running university.
Not long after hops became really popular as a beer ingredients. Coincidence?
Really what this points out to me is there’s no point in caring when there are squabbles about the oldest [thing all people do]. I guess it helps teach people that the education they received growing up was inherently biased towards their local culture, and that’s OK as long as you recognize it.
It’s just white washing history.
There has been a major propaganda campaing to claim thay Islam centers were there to bring light to people through education when, no fucking shit sherlock - everything else was punishable by death by the cut weeny cult.
Ahhhh yes…the Wikipedia quoting discussion, and let’s slip a bit of bigotry here , and nationalisme over here and you have thriving comment section, but again nothing new here
Yup, never let a pesky thing like the truth get on the way of a good story.
She looks very fresh for a millenarian.
Damn millenials. Founding universities and doing other woke shit.
But how is tha possible since Islam is meant to be inherently misogynistic, and each Quran comes with women oppression emitters?
Are you telling me that modern people are misinterpreting scripture in order to screw over women? I’m shocked, the king of Saudi Arabia would never behave like that.
You say “misinterpreting scripture” as if scripture has ever been more than some nonsense somebody cooked up to arbitrarily subjugate people.
Ow the edge
No, this story is simply not true.
Platon found it
Zerush@lemmy.ml 44 minutes ago
It is not on the list of the oldest universities, because, like the University of Egypt, which has also existed since the 10th century, they only received the status of University in the 20th century, that of Morocco in 1963 the one of Egypt 1961, before they were higher islamic schools (madrasa or originally founded as a mosque). Anyway the islamic states are way more advanced in science, medicine and mathematic in this era than the occidental oe, very limited by the catholic church.