Mohammed.Amin.comFresh thinking from a British Muslim
Summary
14 April 2010
I regularly read comments online and in many other places from people questioning what the Muslim world has contributed to modern civilisation. Accordingly I thought that it would be illuminating to look at some concrete examples, and have started with an institution that is integral to civilisation: the university.
Forty years ago, I had the privilege of attending Clare College, the second oldest college in Cambridge University. I have never forgotten the story of how Lady Elizabeth de Clare was widowed three times before the age of 30, getting richer each time! She then decided not to remarry, and endowed Clare College which had been founded in 1326. There were many wealthy widows at that time, now forgotten, but unlike theirs her name will live forever due to her generosity and vision.
I can think of no other institution more fundamental to our modern civilisation than universities. From them have come most of our greatest scientific achievements, and also our greatest advances in the humanities.
So what makes a university? In my view, universities have the following characteristics:
Not all universities have all of the above characteristics; for example some may have no endowment, others might do no research or have no residential student facilities.
While it is hard to imagine a time before universities, they did not always exist.
Cambridge itself was founded in 1209 by scholars who had left Oxford after a dispute. Oxford is the oldest university in Britain, and dates back to at least 1096 although its precise date of origin is apparently unknown. However, Oxford was modelled on the University of Paris, which British scholars used to attend until Henry II stopped them from going. The oldest university in Christian Europe appears to be Bologna which dates back to 1088.
However, the above mentioned universities are in fact substantially younger than their predecessors in some Muslim majority countries. Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which President Obama chose for his speech to the Muslim world, dates back to 970, but the oldest university of all is Al-Qarawiyin in Fez, Morocco, which was founded in 841. The founder was actually a woman, Fatima al-Fihri who was educated herself and who inherited a fortune from her father which she devoted to building and endowing this institution.
The campus included residential facilities for the students, who paid no fees but instead received food and accommodation allowances from the endowment. Demand for places exceeded availability, so there was a selection process based upon testing for knowledge of Arabic, the Quran and general science. As well as religion, studies included law, arithmetic, geography, medicine and astronomy.
The scholars who taught and researched at Al-Qarawiyin were not just Muslims. Probably the most famous non-Muslim who was there is Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides.
At that time, there was no “iron curtain” between the Muslim world and Christian Europe. Accordingly, although some have argued to the contrary, I have no doubt that educated Europeans were aware of how Al-Qarawiyin operated, and chose to replicate the same organisational structure in Europe.
The key point is that as citizens of the modern world, we are the inheritors of a civilisation built by the shared contribution of Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as followers of other religions. None of us can claim exclusive ownership of civilisation; nor should anyone try to reject modern civilisation as un-Islamic since Muslims were a key contributor to its construction.
Mohammed Amin
Each of us changes the world every day. We can choose to make it a better place.
