CHAPTER IX
EL-AZHAR AND ITS TEN THOUSAND MOSLEM STUDENTS
The biggest university of the Mohammedan world is situated in Cairo. It has, all told, over ten thousand students, and its professors number more than four hundred. Its students come from every country where Mohammedanism flourishes. There are hundreds here from India, and some from Malaya and Java. There are large numbers from Morocco, as well as from Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli. There are black Nubians, yellow-skinned Syrians and Turks, and boys from southeastern Europe with faces as fair as our own. There are long-gowned, turbaned Persians, fierce-eyed Afghans, and brown-skinned men from the Sudan and from about Kuka, Bornu, and Timbuktu. The students are of all ages from fifteen to seventy-five, and some have spent their lives in the college.
This university has been in existence for almost a thousand years. It was founded A.D. 972, and from that time to this it has been educating the followers of the Prophet. It is to-day perhaps the strongest force among these people in Egypt. Ninety-two per cent. of the inhabitants of the Nile valley are Mohammedans and most of the native officials have been educated here. There are at least thirty thousand men in the public service among its graduates, while the judges of the villages, the teachers in the mosque schools, and the imams, or priests, who serve throughout Egypt are connected with it. They hold the university in such high regard that an order from its professors would be as much respected as one from the government, if not more.
A fifteen-minutes drive from the hotel quarter through the bazaars of the Mouski and the narrow “Street of the Booksellers” brings one to the university of El-Azhar, for 900 years the educational centre of the Moslem world.
The various nationalities are segregated in the courtyard porticos of El-Azhar. Instruction is free and almost entirely in the Koran. If a student doesn’t like one professor, he moves on to another.
The university education is almost altogether Mohammedan. Its curriculum is about the same as it was a thousand years ago, the chief studies being the Koran and the Koranic law, together with the sacred traditions of the religion and perhaps a little grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. A number of the professors also teach in the schools connected with the mosques of the Egyptian villages, which are inspected, but not managed, by the government. Even there the Koran takes up half the time, and religion is considered far more important than science.
Indeed, it is wonderful how much time these Egyptians spend on their bible. The Koran is their primer, their first and second reader, and their college text book. As soon as a baby is born, the call to prayer is shouted in its ear, and when it begins to speak, its father first teaches it to say the creed of Islam, which runs somewhat as follows: