orientalcairocit00sladuoft

1 86 Oriental Cairo
But there is one prime difference between them, that
whereas the colleges of Oxford have lost all trace of having
been founded for the poor, all Moslem mosques, universities,
colleges, and schools are more or less charities.
Mr. Margoliouth, the greatest scholar that Oxford ever produced,
in his learned book on Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus,
derived from Arab sources, and published by Chatto & Windus
a year or two ago, gives the following account of the foundation
of El-Azhar, the principal University of the Mohammedan
world, which is established in a vast and ancient mosque at
Cairo :
" One of the earliest cares of Jauhar, the conqueror of Egypt,
for the Fatimides, was to build a mosque for public worship,
and this project was the commencement of the famous Al-
Azhar. It took about two years to erect, and was finished
June 14, 972. It was not at first a literary institution any
more than any other mosque; all such places had from the be-
ginning of Islam served as rendezvous for savants, and places
where those who undertook to interpret the Koran or recite
traditions could establish themselves. The line between
religious and secular studies was not drawn during the early
centuries of Islam ; men made circles in the mosques for the
purpose of reciting verses, or telling literary anecdotes, as
well as for instruction of a more decidedly edifying character.
The first mosque ever built in Islam, that of the prophet at
Medinah, had served a number of purposes, for which separate
buildings were deemed necessary in more specialising days :
it had not only been church and school, but town hall,
hospice, and hospital as well. Since politics and religion
could not be kept distinct, the mosque was the place where
announcements of importance respecting the commonwealth
might be made. The ideas connected with it in some ways
resembled those which attach to a church, in others were
more like those which are connected with a synagogue, but
the peculiar evolution of Islam furnished it with some which
those other buildings do not share.
" The person who conceived the idea of turning the first
mosque of the new city into a university was the astute