AL AZHAR.

Putaruru Press, Volume VII, Issue 273, 31 January 1929, Page 1

AL AZHAR.

It is officially announced that innovations are to be made in the University at A 1 Azhar, in Cairo, the oldest university in the world, in order that this seat of learning may be brought into line with the modem requirments of the Islamic world. There is something that catches the imagination in this announcement, so unchanging, so permanent had the teaching and the very structure of this ancient instituting seemed at least to the Occidental visitor to itts precincts (writes Kenneth Williams, in the London Sunday Times). For nearly 1000 years A 1 Azhar has stood as a guide, and as a proof of, the culture of the Islamic world, and the fact that it, of all institutions in the Moslem world, should have had to bow to the “spirit* of progress” and should have decided to recognise its purpose and methods, almost puts into the shade the more ostentatious achievement's of Mustafa Kemal Pasha in National Turkey.

A 1 Azhar was the first real university in the world—unless one refers to the schools of philosophy and of letters which flourished in Grecos Roman times; or to the University of Baghdad, founded in 763 A.D. by the Caliph Mansur, or to that of Cordova, founded by t*he Caliph Abdur Rahman (912-961) neither of which has had, like A 1 Azhar, a continuous history down to the present day. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a “University” began to be regarded as a corporate body devoted to study, beaching, andexamination.This was the common accepted connotation of the world during the Middle Ages. Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, for instance, had been founded during the thirteenth century, and Vienna, Bologna, and Heidelberg in the fourteenth. But A 1 Azhar (which means “the blossom” or “the flcrwer”) had been founded before the c-nd of t'he tenth century. It was established—the great mosque, and public library, and the medresselis, or the colleges—by the Fatimid Caliph Muizz, who was such an enlightened man that he had been called Mamun cf the West, or the Meacenas of Moslen Africa. These buildings were actually converted into a university in the year 988, from which date A 1 Azhar has been a beacon of learning in Islam. The teaching has been mainly theological, and it ie largely because the tendancy of the present age to neglect lit'eral interpretations of inspired efr sacred books that in the opinion of some observers A 1 Azhar was held to be losing its grip on realities. No one will dispute, however, that many of the sheikhs produced from Ai Azhar were men of amazing learning.

But in many cases it is quite obvious that young Islam will have what it intended to learn, that is, the Science' of the West, whether it can get at Al Azhar or net. Al Azhar has, therefore, decided to move with the times.