Word: azhar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...Azhar pays all its students a regular salary (from $2 to $12 a month) instead of charging them tuition. It gets ?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...
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...
...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...
Loosely organized, Islam is the religion of a people separated by deserts and living in hard climates. Without a head prelate, a religious hierarchy or even an ordained priesthood, it has its center of activity at El Azhar University in Cairo (enrollment: 15,000). El Azhar, the largest Moslem university in the world, .draws students who walk there from as far as Addis Ababa; its graduates have vast prestige among Moslems in their own countries...