The Resplendent

Under the watchful eyes of steel-helmeted police, the world's oldest university began its 1,006th academic year in Cairo last week. The cops were just a precaution in a land hot over the Palestine question: the 11,000 students at Al Azhar ("The Resplendent") University take their politics as seriously as their Moslem faith. It is not just boyish prankishness either; some of the "undergrads" have been going to school for 15 or 20 years.

Al Azhar pays all its students a regular salary (from $2 to $12 a month) instead of charging them tuition. It gets -L-350,000 a year from the Egyptian government, is also heavily endowed by wealthy Moslem alumni. There are no entrance exams, though every Egyptian student is expected to know the Koran (the Moslem Bible and Al Azhar's main textbook) by heart--a feat they master by the age of ten.

Minarets & Masters. Founded in the same decade as Cairo, Al Azhar has known trouble: earthquakes have crumbled the university's minarets, Napoleon's artillery have chipped its walls, and a succession of foreign masters have ruled Egypt. Al Azhar has survived them all-even Saladin, who destroyed its library and exiled its faculty. The university's 32-man Senatus is the highest religious and educational authority in Islam; its rector is the nearest thing to a Moslem pope.

But since the death last February of His Eminence Al Sheikh Mustafa Abdel Razek, the rectorship has been vacant and the university split by feuds. At the same time Al Azhar's position of Islamic leadership is threatened by a swirling current of social change, and by the emergent authority of two modern, secular universities (Fuad el Awal and Farouk el Awal).

For centuries Moslem students of all colors and tongues have trekked to Al Azhar from as far as China and the Netherlands East Indies. One youth with a burning for learning journeyed overland (more than 2,000 miles) from Morocco to Cairo 50 years ago, is still studying--bent and bearded--at Al Azhar today. Students live by national groups in riwaks, the Moslem version of fraternity houses.

A new student at Al Azhar buys himself a high, tight academic turban, sharpens his reed quills, tucks his inkhorn into his belt, takes off his slippers, and enters Al Azhar mosque. There he joins one of the attentive circles of cross-legged students gathered at the feet of a sheikh (elder, i.e., teacher), who leans against a pillar and expounds Islamic faith and Arabic letters.

Down with Shaw. Since 1930, a modern system of classrooms and laboratories has been introduced side by side with the old carpet seminars. In new buildings next to the mosque, three faculties of Theology, Law and Letters teach students of the "new" Azhar. Many of these professors are laymen, educated in European universities. After eight years, a new-Azhar student gets his Alimieh (doctorate); in the old Azhar, many students spend their whole lives in learning.

The challenge of the athletic, tweedy, young Oxford-trained dons of Fuad el Awal and Farouk el Awal universities has only intensified the religious fanaticism of Al Azhar's bearded sheikhs. Each year the Senatus combs the secular universities in search of heresy. When blind Philosopher Taha Hussein Bey, dean of Fuad el Awal and leading man in Arab letters, dared to teach Shaw's Saint Joan, he was assailed by Al Azhar's Senatus. (In the play, a character denounces Mohamed and his "dupes.") Rioting Al Azharites forced Taha Hussein to resign, the fuss broke up an Egyptian cabinet, and Shaw now goes unread.

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