Around 1088, students in Bologna organized themselves into mutual-aid guilds called "universitates," and by the 1180s they had won the power to hire their own professors and set their own curriculum — a university built from the bottom up by the learners themselves. In Cairo, the Fatimid caliphate built the Al-Azhar Mosque in 970–972, and by 988 it had grown a permanent teaching faculty around its prayer hall, so that worship and scholarship occupied the same walls from the very start. In China, the Guozijian traced its roots to 265–289 CE under Emperor Wu of Jin, who founded it to educate his own sons — and it remained, through the Tang dynasty's elaborate tiered schools, an institution defined by rank: open to aristocratic sons, while commoners studied at a separate school, the Taixue. Three civilizations, three different answers to the same question: once a society decides learning deserves a permanent space of its own, who gets to decide what happens inside its walls?