By being my usual pedantic self and insisting on the correct use of terms in a historical context, I appear to have kicked a wasp’s nest.
Paul Williams, who has a Youtube channel titled Blogging Theology, twitted this map with the following text.
Oxford University has published a map showing the oldest universities in the world:
1. Ez-Zitouna University in Tunisia (737) [the emphasis is his]
2. Al-Qarawiyyin University in Morocco (859) [the emphasis is his]
3. Al-Azhar University in Egypt (972) [the emphasis is his]
4. University of Bologna in Italy (1088)
5. University of Oxford in England (1096)
The first and oldest three universities in history were in the Arab/Muslim world.
(There is, by the way, no indication that this map was published by Oxford University)
Upon reading this I responded in my usual tactful and considerate style:
The first three institutions on your list are not universities. A university is a medieval European creation. Your first three are institutes of higher education of a totally different type. If you don’t understand the difference, then you shouldn’t tweet about it.
This of course, it being Twitter, brought the wasps swarming around my head, eager to take up the cudgels on behalf of “their universities.” All of them, however, incapable of comprehending what I had actually written. I was not denying the status of an institute of higher education to the three but merely pointing out that is historically and linguistically incorrect to use the term university for them.
In the medieval period a university was a specific type of European institute of higher education that was part of the general infrastructure of the Catholic Church. The name university comes from medieval Latin universitatem (nominative universitas), “the whole, aggregate,” in Late Latin “corporation, society,” from universus “whole, entire.” In the academic sense, a shortening of universitas magistrorum et scholarium “community of masters and scholars;”
Of course, other cultures had institutes of higher education, many of them much earlier than the European universities, but they had other structures, other relations to political or religious institutions, and above all were referred to by other names.
I tried to make my point clear to one of my most persistent critics, before I ended up muting him, by asking if he would call a mosque a church as they are, after all, institutions of religious worship. He accused me of straw-manning, and I fail to see how an argument by analogy, a good one in my opinion, is straw-manning. He then threw in that the London School of Economics is not a university because of its name. When I pointed out to him that the LSE was a constituent college of the University of London, as indeed is SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies (my father taught at both colleges). He then threw up MIT, which was the point when I muted him.
Looking at the three institutions mentioned at the beginning we have interesting results. According to Wikipedia Ez-Zitouna:
The university originates in the Al-Zaytuna Mosque, founded at the end of the 7th century or in the early 8th century, which developed into a major Islamic centre of learning in North Africa […] There is little information about teaching at the Zaytuna Mosque prior to the 14th century. During this time there were most likely courses being offered voluntarily by ulama (Islamic legal scholars), but not in an organized manner.
Turning to Al-Qarawiyyin:
It was founded as a mosque by Fatima al-Fihri 857–859 and subsequently became one of the leading spiritual and educational centres of the Islamic Golden Age.
[…]
Scholars consider al-Qarawiyyin to have been effectively run as a madrasa until after World War II. Many scholars distinguish this status from the status of “university”, which they view as a distinctly European invention.
This has the following interesting footnote, which says everything that needs to be said:
No one today would dispute the fact that universities, in the sense in which the term is now generally understood, were a creation of the Middle Ages, appearing for the first time between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is no doubt true that other civilizations, prior to, or wholly alien to, the medieval West, such as the Roman Empire, Byzantium, Islam, or China, were familiar with forms of higher education which a number of historians, for the sake of convenience, have sometimes described as universities. Yet a closer look makes it plain that the institutional reality was altogether different and, no matter what has been said on the subject, there is no real link such as would justify us in associating them with medieval universities in the West. Until there is definite proof to the contrary, these latter must be regarded as the sole source of the model which gradually spread through the whole of Europe and then to the whole world. We are therefore concerned with what is indisputably an original institution, which can only be defined in terms of a historical analysis of its emergence and its mode of operation in concrete circumstances.
Jacques Verger “Patterns”, in: Ridder-Symoens, Hilde de (ed.): A History of the University in Europe. Vol. I: Universities in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 35-76, p 35
Our third institution is Al-Azhar:
Al-Azhar was founded as a mosque by the Fatimid commander Jawhar al-Siqilli at the orders of the Caliph and Imam al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh, as he founded the city for Cairo. It was begun (probably on Saturday) in Jumada al-Awwal in the year AH 359 (March/April 970 CE). Its building was completed on the 9th of Ramadan in AH 361 (24 June 972 CE).
[…]
Studies began at Al-Azhar in the month of Ramadan, 975. According to Syed Farid Alatas, the Jāmiʻah had faculties in Islamic law and jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, Islamic astronomy, Islamic philosophy, and logic.
The correct term for all three institutions is madrasa.
Interestingly, not in response to me, but in response to William’s original tweet somebody tweeted:
I guess, Oldest [sic] university is in India, Nalanda
I’d never heard of Nalanda, so down another rabbit hole. Once again Wikipedia:
Nalanda was a renowned mahavihara (Buddhist monastic university) in ancient Magaha (modern-day Bihar), eastern India. Considered by historians to be the world’s first residential university [my emphasis]and among the greatest centres of learning in the ancient world, it was located near the city of Rajagriha (now Rajgir) and about 90 kilometres (56 mi) southeast of Pataliputra (now Patna). Operating from 427 until 1197 CE, Nalanda played a vital role in promoting the patronage of arts and academics during the 5th and 6th century CE, a period that has since been described as the “Golden Age of India” by scholars.
The phrase I have emphasised is justified with a link to UNESCO Nominations (PDF). However, if you go there it says, Residential-cum-Educational facility, no mention of the word university
I have to wonder why so many vehemently want to call their tradition institutes of higher education universities?