Word: azhar
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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...
...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...