The Women Who Built Our Madrasas
Long before the modern Islamic school existed, women were among its most determined founders. Their names have faded, but their institutions endure.
History records the names of caliphs and scholars, but it is slower to acknowledge the women who endowed the buildings in which scholarship took place. From Fatima al-Fihri, who founded what many call the world’s oldest university in ninth-century Fez, to the Ottoman noblewomen whose waqf donations sustained hundreds of schools, the madrasa tradition has depended on female patronage more than it has ever admitted.
Today, researchers in Morocco, Turkey and Egypt are recovering these stories — sifting endowment documents, architectural inscriptions and travellers’ accounts to reconstruct a history of educational philanthropy in which women were not marginal but central. What they are finding challenges the assumption that Islamic education was always a male project.
