The Woman Who Fasted While She Built: The Untold Story of Fatima al-Fihri and the World's First University, (Paperback)

<p><b>In 859 CE, a widow in Fez, Morocco decided that her grief would not be the end of the story.</b></p><p>Her name was Fatima al-Fihri. She had inherited her father's fortune and his love of learning. She had lost her husband. She had a city around her that needed a place to be serious. So she did what people who have genuinely loved something will do when they can no longer bear its absence: she built a home for it.</p><p>She fasted for the entire duration of construction-months of abstaining from food and comfort as an act of devotion, marking the building as a gift to God rather than a monument to herself. What she built was al-Qarawiyyin: a mosque, a library, and a school that became the world's oldest continuously operating university, still teaching in Fez, Morocco, nearly twelve hundred years later.</p><p><i>The Woman Who Fasted While She Built</i> is the story of Fatima al-Fihri and the institution she gave to the world. It is a work of narrative nonfiction that brings her into focus as a human being-a specific woman in a specific city in a specific moment of grief and faith, who made a decision that has reverberated across twelve centuries.</p><p>This is also a book about what buildings can hold. About what endowments can protect. About what a city becomes when two sisters build on opposite banks of a river. About the ijaza-the certificate of scholarly transmission that Fatima's institution systematized and that is the ancestor of every university degree conferred on earth today.</p><p>Most of all, it is a book about grief and what grief makes possible when the person who carries it has been given, by someone they have lost, the knowledge of what they are for.</p><p><b>The grieving build. The grief becomes the foundation. The foundation holds.</b></p><p>Al-Qarawiyyin is still there. The fountain Fatima al-Fihri set running in the ninth century is still running. She is in it, waiting-as she has been waiting for twelve hundred years-for someone to come and learn.</p>

• The Woman Who Fasted While She Built: The Untold Story of Fatima al-Fihri and the World's First University, (Paperback)
• Author: Narin Hikma
• ISBN: 9798182233514
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-06-18
• Page Count: 246