Bobbe's trip to Morocco, part 2: Al-Karaouine University in Fez

Here is Bobbe's second post about Morocco.

Hello again from Morocco! I want to tell you about a fantastic trip I took to the city of Fez. Fez is one of three great imperial capitals of Morocco, along with Meknes and Marrakesh. The heart of Fez is a wonderful thousand-year-old walled old city (called a "medina" in Arabic). The city has lots of narrow walkways that twist and turn and wind about. If you don't know your way around, you can get lost really fast. I'll tell you more about the medina in my next post, but in this one I want to focus on the building at the heart of the city of Fez: Al-Karaouine University.

Al-Karaouine University is the oldest functioning university in the entire world. It was founded in AD 859 to provide an Islamic education to the people of Fez. 1,154 years later, it is still going strong. Let me put that date in perspective: this university is three centuries older than Oxford and eight centuries older than Harvard. Wow!

The university is part of a mosque, also called Al-Karaouine. The mosque is so big that it can fit 22,000 worshippers. For many centuries, it was the largest mosque on the continent of Africa. Unfortunately, I couldn't go inside. In Morocco, only Muslims are allowed to go inside mosques (this is not true of most other countries, where anybody can go inside a mosque when it is not time to pray). The best I can offer you is photos through the main gate of the central courtyard.

I pose in front of the gate to Al-Karaouine Mosque.

Here is the courtyard of Al-Karaouine Mosque as seen through the gate.

The highlight of my trip to Fez was that I got to go inside the library attached to the mosque and the university, which is where the most important manuscripts in Morocco are stored. I got a private tour of the library from the librarian. Here is a photo of the reading room where people go to pore over their manuscripts.

Would you like to do your homework in here?

This is a particularly wonderful book that I would like you to see. It's an "illuminated manuscript." An illuminated manuscript is a work in which the text has been supplemented with ornate decoration. This manuscript has been decorated with real gold. This is an illuminated design known as the "sandal" of the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad's sandals are important because they are a symbol of humility. Islam does not allow representative art, so Muslims decorate holy texts and holy sites with abstract art. You can see that this is not really a picture of a sandal; it just represents a sandal.

The sandal of the Prophet.

This is my favorite manuscript from the library of Al-Karaouine. It is a handwritten, original copy of a book called The Muqaddimah. The Muqaddimah is the introduction to a massive multi-volume history of the world. It was written by a man named Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun, who is most often known as Ibn Khaldun. He lived for a while in Fez during the 14th century.

Ibn Khaldun's ideas were very influential. One of the things he talked about was how dynasties rise and fall. He believed that nomads are very strong because they lead harsh lives in the desert and are thus bound together by "group feeling." At some point, these nomads succeed in conquering a city and setting up a dynasty. Once they live in a city, however, they begin to grow spoiled and corrupt and they lose their group feeling. Eventually, they are conquered by a new group of nomads. This cyclical theory of dynastic succession made Ibn Khaldun one of the first people to think about what we now call social science.

In this picture, I am standing in front of the first page of the handwritten version of The Muqaddimah. I got to see Ibn Khaldun's signature in his own hand! It was amazing!

I pose with Ibn Khaldun's signature!

In my next post, I will tell you about other things I saw on my trip to Fez.

--Bobbe