| @JRL: That's not so different from the western universities, which at the time of their founding hardly resembled what we refer to now with that term. While their curricula encompassed more than just theology, they were under the administration of the church and often founded in conjunction with the building of cathedrals, like Notre Dame de Paris. If you exclude the Islamic institutions because of their religious focus, you would need to exclude a great deal of the answers above as well, and only include them when they began to resemble modern universities. |