Word: azhar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wearing scarlet caps and traditional flowing robes, some 400 imams one day last week left al-Azhar, Islam's oldest university, and fanned out through the streets of Cairo to spread a new-style gospel. The preachers had just completed a two-week course designed to align their ancient faith with the facts of modern life...
...that suppression of women in the Arab world is a distortion of the Koran's teaching. They heard Mohamed Madani, dean of the Islamic Law Faculty, declare that "not a single phrase in the Koran is against science." To this tradition-bound university, such lectures are unprecedented. Al-Azhar, in many ways the spiritual center of the Mohammedan world, is in the midst of the most drastic renaissance in its long history...
...three tall, sand-colored towers of the Mosque of al-Azhar dominate the university, which was built in 972, only three years after Cairo was founded. A few years later the mosque became the classroom for Koranic law courses, and thus Islam's most famous center of learning was born. Al-Azhar weathered the crusades, but fell into academic stagnation after the Ottoman Turks occupied Egypt in 1517. For three centuries it knew no other role than to be the official interpreter of the Koran. There was no curriculum; a sheik simply sat by his favorite pillar and waited...
...Past. The 19th and early 20th centuries brought many modernizing attempts; schools of medicine and engineering were added, admission and teaching requirements were set up, class attendance became obligatory. But al-Azhar remained engulfed in the past. As World War II, the Palestine war, and revolution forced Egypt toward the modern era, al-Azhar began to lose its universal respect...
Late last year, Nasser appointed a new rector: Sheik Mahmoud Chaltout, 66, himself a product of al-Azhar and a top Koranic scholar, who has long preached the need for Islam's religious awakening. In weekly radio talks, he demanded reform, urged that Arab countries give women an education. "It is written that women used to argue with the Prophet," he explains. "God heard those arguments and approved them." Long an antiCommunist, Chaltout last month appealed to his vast radio audience "in the name of the religion of Allah, to give serious thought to the danger which threatens...