orientalcairocit00sladuoft

i88 Oriental Cairo
There seems to be a consensus of opinion that El-A/.har
cannot be taken very seriously as a means of general educa-
tion. Lord Cromer upon this point quotes Hughes's " Dic-
tionary of Islam." The chief aim and object of education
in Islam, Hughes says, " is to obtain a knowledge of the
religion of Mohammed, and anything beyond this is considered
superfluous and even dangerous." And commenting upon
this Lord Cromer makes this caustic confession as to his own
action : " Under these circumstances, it was clear to the
British reformer that the education imparted at the famous
University of El-Azhar could not be utilised to raise the
general standard of education in Egypt."
He therefore left that institution alone, and the editor of one
of the leading Arabic newspapers in Cairo declared to me in
1908 that the only use he could .see in El-Azhar was that its
students were exempted from the conscription. It is a fact
that the so-called Liberal party in Egypt has for one of its
planks the reform of El-Azhar into an active means of education.
There are at the present moment over three hundred
professors and ten thousand students—the latter come from
all parts of the Mohammedan world. The students are much
better treated than the professors from our point of view, for
they get their board and lodging free, and some of them
get doles of money ; whereas the professors of El-Azhar are
many of them not as well paid as the ordinary working-man.
But some of them, judging from their appearance— their
prosperous look and grand purple robes—whom I saw at the
Khedivial reception when the Mahmal came back from
Mecca, and at the Sheikh El-Bckri's pavilion at the Moh'd of
the Prophet, must be quite well off, judged by these standards.
The head of El-Azhar is called the Sheikh of Islam. The
students spend three, four, or six years at the University ;
professors are called sheikhs. I have several times watched
the students at El-Azhar, and each time was more convinced
that the El-Azhar of to-day is like Oxford or Paris in the
Middle Ages. There is of course great similarity in the sub-
jects taught, for at Oxford six or seven hundred years ago the
theological philosophy of the nominalists and realists was the
the