Greetings from Cairo!
In 970 work started on the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, which had been founded on the orders of al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah, the fourth Fatimid Caliph. Work on the buildings was completed two years later. In 988 Ya’qub ibn Killis, the first vizier of the Fatimids, designated the mosque as a centre of learning, and the following year 35 scholars were hired. This marked the beginnings of the mosque as a place of learning. The curriculum included law and jurisprudence, grammar, astronomy, philosophy and logic; ibn Killis himself taught; and both men and women could study there.
It was also, it seems, a place of learning with an agenda. The Fatimids, argue Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara in their 2016 work “The Origins of Higher Learning”, funded Al-Azhar in order to create a framework to underpin Shia Islam.
In 1171, the Ayyubid caliph Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, who you might know better as Saladin, overthrew the last of the Fatimids, after many years of strife. One of the actions he took was to assert Sunni Islam, rather than Shia; and with this the fortunes of Al-Azhar took a downward turn. There was, it seems, the destruction of books on a vast scale. Some say 120,000 books from the library, some say 2,000,000. Now, by the 1050s the library was said to hold 200,000 books, which is a lot, but it does feel like the upper estimate for destruction one hundred years later has some poetic license about it. In any event, a lot of books were destroyed. Al-Azhar lost its breadth, becoming a centre for the study of Sunni Islam.
And so it remained, for several centuries. It gained in prestige, becoming one of the four main centres for Sunni jurisprudence in the Islamic world. It regrew its library, which now holds over seven million items; it expended its premises. It continued to accept students for study; and continued too award qualifications. On which rests its claim to be the longest continually operating degree awarding body in Egypt.
In 1961 – nearly 1000 years after its foundation – Al-Azhar was re-founded as a modern university. Its curriculum was secularised, to cover business, science, engineering, and medicine. And it has a broader remit, as a body responsible for schools across Egypt, with over 4,000 affiliated institutions, with 2,000,000 learners at those schools and institutes.
Since 2011 the University’s Council of Senior Scholars – senior Islamic scholars, that is – has been re-established and plays a role in national affairs. This includes electing Egypt’s Grand Mufti, which role had previously been appointed by the country’s president. Roughly speaking, a mufti is an Islamic scholar who can issue a fatwa; the Grand Mufti in a country is head of that country’s muftis.
One of the reasons I like finding out about universities in other countries is the exposure to different ideas of what a university is or does. Al-Azhar has antiquity, it teaches to a high level, it’s a university. And it has a broader remit too.
And here, as is now becoming customary, is a jigsaw of the postcard. Hope you enjoy it!