Opinion: Africa’s accomplishments are part of the flow of history

The ebbs and flows between African and other cultures are intertwined. These are conduits for the world defying their geographic designations. Culture does not end where nations, continents, peninsulas, seas and mountains end. Humanity in its quest to survive slipped past these topographic edges, chasms and heights. The norms of culture transform and connect through migration and mutation adding to our collective knowledge.

I confess to going on obsessive research quests based on dogged skepticism. I repeatedly Google the first established university in the world because I want to see how Google delivers it. Google has repeatedly designated the University of Bologna in Italy as the first and continuously operating university founded in 1088.

However, when I added keywords like “African” or “Arab,” I got different answers. Apparently, the oldest and longest continuously operating university in the world predates the University of Bologna by about 230 years. The University of al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco, was founded in 859 A.D. by an African Muslim woman!

Within her lifetime, Fatima al-Fihri expanded the center for higher learning and research to the sciences, math and philosophy from its base of Quranic study. She also designed the graduation caps and gowns that we use today. The mortar board symbolizes the Quran or a book and the tassel is the bookmarker. Even the way we move the tassel from right to left upon graduation mimics the semitic Arabic language, also read from right to left. The thobes or gowns, draping and striped, are the dress scholars wore hundreds of years ago.

Last month, when I looked it up again, the answer changed — somewhat. The University of Bologna popped up again, but an artificial intelligence box also appeared in contradiction to the default answer confirming the University of al-Qarawiyyin as the oldest and continuously operating university.

Like an essential oil, culture and language permeate most human experiences. Humanity is not containable and everything in its paths aggregates and flows into lacy archipelagos; a network of water, land and channels much like fishing nets used from Gaza and Alexandria to Tunis and Rabat and like river people who catch the tiny Dagaa, a silvery and speckled fish, in Mali, often used as a dried staple.

Much of our human lineage is received from Africa. In fact, the African continent created the next two universities after al-Qarawiyyin: Al Azhar in Cairo in 970 A.D. and the University of Timbuktu in Africa’s modern country of Mali around 1000-1100 A.D., where it became the largest draw for scholars for several centuries. These three universities predated European ones. Are facts deliberately suppressed to concretize a Western-centered world?

Critical race theory or ethnic studies are politicized buzzwords that have been stripped of their meanings. They are imperfect terms but fit my curious research. They are meant to motivate us to learn, find histories buried and divorced from their origins. It should not be hard to find out what the oldest universities are. If I add African or Arab to my search and get a different answer, something is wrong. Why should anyone have to use math to find out what came first? Do we privilege fear and suppression over learning?

Try these search experiments with other topics and search engines. Compare your findings. Other topics I habitually look up are optics, surgery, philosophy and navigation. The European male inventor has usually popped up in a Google search over the true originators who often came from North Africa or Southwest Asia, Iran, India, China or Southern Spain. Sometimes they were women. A few months ago the fathers of optics were European. Last week they were part of the Arab/Islamic network predating the European “founders” by hundreds of years. Artificial intelligence is doing the DEI work that the Trump administration is trying to extinguish.

The best rulers of the world, many from Africa, ruled ethnically and religiously diverse lands. Their recipe for innovation was diversity and inclusion. They pulled from Byzantium, Africa, Indo-China and all tribal cultures to create what adds up to our modern world.

African American History month should encourage us to celebrate the vast threads of lineage. Let’s be expansive about human accomplishments. Be skeptical and search for what ties the flow of humankind and its expansive accomplishments.

Bittar is an artist and community activist who lives in North Park.