The Oldest Islamic Public University in the World
The Oldest Islamic Public University (Al-Azhar University)
The Al-Azhar University “the University of (the honorable) Al-Azhar”) is a public University in Cairo, Egypt. Associated with Al-Azhar Al-Sharif in Islamic Cairo, it is Egypt’s oldest degree-granting University and is famend as the most prestigious University for Islamic learning. In addition to increased education, Al-Azhar oversees wide neighborhood of schools with approximately two million students. As of 1996, over 4,000 instructing institutes in Egypt have been affiliated with the university.
History
Founded in 970 or 972 via the usage of the Fatimid Caliphate as a centre of Islamic learning, its University students studied the Qur’an and Islamic legislation in detail, alongside with logic, grammar, rhetoric, and how to calculate the phases of the moon. Today it is the chief centre of Arabic literature and Islamic studying in the world. In 1961 extra non-religious subjects had been delivered to its curriculum.
Its library is considered 2d in importance in Egypt solely to the Egyptian National Library and Archives. In May 2005, Al-Azhar in partnership with a Dubai statistics technological know-how enterprise, IT Education Project (ITEP) launched the H.H. Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum project to maintain Al Azhar scripts and publish them on-line (the “Al-Azhar Online Project”) to subsequently put up online get entry to to the library’s whole uncommon manuscripts collection, comprising about seven million pages of material.
political chief of all Muslims across the world. The Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar repudiated the abolition and used to be once phase of a name from Al-Azhar for an Islamic Conference. The unsuccessful “caliphate conference” used to be held beneath the presidency of the Grand Chancellor of Azhar in 1926 alternatively no one was as soon as in a position to obtain a consensus for the candidacy at some stage in the Islamic world. Candidates proposed for the caliphate included King Fuad.
Map of Al-Azhar University
In 1961, Al-Azhar used to be as soon as re-established as a college underneath the authorities of Egypt’s 2nd President Gamal Abdel Nasser when a huge vary of secular schools were added for the first time, such as business, economics, science, pharmacy, medicine, engineering and agriculture.
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Before that date, the Encyclopaedia of Islam classifies the Al-Azhar variously as madrasa, center of increased getting to know and, because the nineteenth century, non secular university, but not as a university in the full sense, referring to the state-of-the-art transition system as “from madrasa to university”.
Other educational sources additionally refer to al-Azhar as a madrasa in pre-modern cases earlier than its transformation into a university. An Islamic women’s college used to be also introduced in the identical year, six years after Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah had been the first lady to communicate at the university