Cairo's Al-Azhar was founded as a Shia mosque and became a Sunni powerhouse
In 970 a Fatimid general began a mosque in the new city of Cairo, named in honour of Fatimah 'the luminous', daughter of the Prophet. It promoted Ismaili Shia teaching for two centuries. Then Saladin overthrew the dynasty, turned it Sunni, and it rose to become the leading seat of Sunni learning.
Jawhar al-Siqilli laid out the mosque for Caliph al-Mu'izz in the spring of 970, and the building was finished in June 972. In 988 the vizier Ya'qub ibn Killis made it an official centre of higher learning, with a regular curriculum and 35 salaried scholars. Students studied the Qur'an and law alongside logic, grammar, rhetoric and the calculation of lunar phases, and the institution claims to be the oldest madrasa still operating.
Saladin's conversion in the 12th century came at a cost to the Fatimid palace library. Its treasures were sold off over ten years, and many books were reportedly burned, dumped in the Nile or piled into a sand-covered mound; estimates of the losses range from 120,000 to 2,000,000 volumes. Saladin also introduced the college system, with separate classrooms, dormitories and libraries inside the compound.
The Mamluks paid teachers, funded students and endowed the school; Ibn Khaldun taught there from 1383. Learning relied heavily on memorising lectures, and blind boys enrolled hoping to earn a living as teachers. There were no formal degrees: a professor judged when a student, typically after about six years, was ready and granted an ijazah. Students lived in riwaqs, groups organised by homeland and legal school. Under the Ottomans the office of Shaykh al-Azhar was created, and by the mid-19th century Al-Azhar had overtaken Istanbul as the capital of Sunni legal expertise. All four Sunni schools of law were taught, and Sufi membership has long been standard.
Its modern form arrived in 1961, when Gamal Abdel Nasser's government reorganised it as a university and added business, medicine, engineering, agriculture and a women's faculty. Scholars had previously classed it as a madrasa rather than a full university. Today it oversees a national school network of about two million pupils, and its library ranks second in Egypt only to the national archives, with a project launched in 2005 to put some seven million pages of manuscripts online.
Source: Al-Azhar University
