Founding of Al-Azhar University

# Al-Azhar Mosque: From Fatimid Shia Institution to Sunni World University

The Founding of the Mosque

In the year 359 AH / 970 CE, within months of the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, the general Jawhar al-Siqilli began construction of a congregational mosque in the new royal city of al-Qahira. The mosque was completed and inaugurated in 361 AH / 972 CE, when it received its first Friday prayer. The institution that would become the most influential mosque and university in the Sunni Islamic world had its beginnings as an instrument of Ismaili Shia theological propaganda.

The mosque's name — al-Jami' al-Azhar, "The Most Luminous Mosque" — has inspired multiple explanations. The most widely accepted scholarly view links it to the name Fatimah al-Zahra (Fatimah the Radiant), the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ and the ancestress from whom the Fatimids derived their dynastic name and their claim to the imamate. This etymology fit perfectly with Fatimid political theology: the mosque was named in honor of the holy lineage through which the Fatimids claimed divine right to rule. Other explanations have been proposed over the centuries, but this remains the most historically coherent.

Al-Azhar Under the Fatimids: An Ismaili Institution

For nearly two centuries under Fatimid rule, al-Azhar served the purposes of an Ismaili Shia caliphate. The Friday khutbah (sermon) was delivered in the name of the Fatimid Imam-Caliph rather than the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. The theological teaching conducted there promoted Ismaili doctrine — a form of Shia Islam that emphasized esoteric (batin) interpretations of the Quran and recognized a line of imams descending through Ismail ibn Jafar al-Sadiq.

The first formal teaching session recorded at al-Azhar took place in 361 AH / 972 CE — a lesson on Ismaili jurisprudence delivered by a Fatimid qadi. The historian al-Maqrizi records the details of these early sessions and the doctrinal content taught at al-Azhar during the Fatimid period. The mosque's role in propagating Ismaili doctrine was explicit and central to its function. The Fatimid state supported it generously precisely because it served as the primary institution for training missionaries (du'at) who would spread Ismaili doctrine throughout the Islamic world.

The Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz bi-Allah (r. 365-386 AH) formalized the educational mission of al-Azhar, establishing stipends for scholars and students and transforming it into a residential center of learning. This formalization — approximately 378 AH / 988 CE — is sometimes cited as the date when al-Azhar became a university in the more formal sense.

The Remarkable Transformation: Saladin and the Sunni Restoration

The transformation of al-Azhar from a Fatimid Ismaili institution to a Sunni one is one of the most remarkable institutional transformations in Islamic history. When Salahuddin al-Ayyubi (Saladin) effectively took control of Egypt — first as vizier to the last Fatimid Caliph al-Adid (beginning 564 AH) and then as the de facto ruler after al-Adid's death in 567 AH / 1171 CE — he undertook a systematic restoration of Sunni governance and religious practice.

One of his first acts was to ensure that the Friday khutbah in Cairo's mosques was delivered in the name of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustadi in Baghdad, not in the name of the Fatimid Imam. For al-Azhar, this was specifically consequential: Saladin ordered that the Friday prayer no longer be held at al-Azhar at all. The mosque continued to function for daily prayers, but the Friday prayer — with its politically charged khutbah — was transferred to other mosques in Cairo.

This decision was not arbitrary. The Friday khutbah at al-Azhar had for nearly two centuries been a vehicle of Fatimid religious-political authority. By ending it there, Saladin effectively severed the association between al-Azhar and Shia caliphal legitimacy. The mosque was left as a place of daily worship but stripped of its status as the primary Fatimid congregational center.

Saladin built instead new Sunni madrasas in Cairo promoting Shafi'i and Maliki jurisprudence. He brought in Sunni scholars, endowed institutions of Sunni learning, and systematically replaced Ismaili with Sunni educational infrastructure. Al-Azhar during Saladin's rule and that of his Ayyubid successors existed in a kind of institutional limbo — preserved but not rebuilt as a Sunni center.

The Mamluk Restoration of Al-Azhar

The decisive restoration of al-Azhar as a Sunni institution came under the Mamluk Sultan al-Zahir Baybars in 665 AH / 1267 CE, nearly a century after Saladin's conquest. Baybars restored the Friday prayer at al-Azhar — an enormously symbolic act. From that moment, al-Azhar began its transformation into the preeminent Sunni institution.

The Mamluk sultans who followed Baybars lavished endowments (waqf) on al-Azhar. The waqf system — in which property is permanently dedicated to religious or charitable purposes and its income used to fund an institution — was the financial mechanism that made al-Azhar self-sustaining and independent of day-to-day royal patronage. Successive sultans, amirs, and wealthy individuals endowed properties across Egypt whose rental income flowed permanently to al-Azhar, funding its scholars' salaries, students' stipends, and physical maintenance.

This waqf system gave al-Azhar a durability that purely state-funded institutions lacked. Dynasties rose and fell, but al-Azhar's endowments continued to generate income regardless of who ruled Egypt.

The Architecture of Al-Azhar

The original Fatimid mosque of 361 AH has been expanded so many times over the subsequent millennium that the original structure is now almost entirely embedded within later additions. The complex today includes several minarets from different periods, multiple courtyards, libraries, and educational facilities added by Mamluk, Ottoman, and modern builders.

The Fatimid elements that survive — portions of the original prayer hall, elements of the original minaret (though substantially reconstructed) — speak to the architectural sophistication of the Fatimid builders. The mosque was conceived on a grand scale from the beginning, appropriate for a caliphal capital.

The riwaq (residential halls organized by geographic origin of students) that developed over the centuries around the mosque's courtyard became one of al-Azhar's distinctive features. A student from Morocco could live in the Moroccan riwaq, eat from its kitchen, sleep in its cells, and be connected to a network of fellow countrymen going back generations. This system made al-Azhar genuinely international — a mosque-university where the Islamic world sent its sons to learn.

Al-Azhar's Global Significance

What makes al-Azhar's history so extraordinary is precisely the contrast between its origins and its destiny. Founded as an instrument of Ismaili Shia Fatimid political authority, repurposed by Saladin, restored by the Mamluks, and endowed by Ottoman sultans, it became the foremost institution of Sunni Islamic learning in the world.

The fatwas issued by al-Azhar's scholars have carried weight across the Sunni world for centuries. When al-Azhar speaks on a religious question — the permissibility of a new technology, the proper response to a political crisis, the authenticity of a reported hadith — its voice carries the accumulated authority of centuries of institutional scholarship.

The institution trains scholars from over one hundred countries. A Malaysian scholar, an Indonesian qadi, a Nigerian imam, a Bosnian teacher — all may have received their education at al-Azhar and carry its intellectual formation back to their communities. In this way, al-Azhar has shaped the texture of Sunni Islam in the modern world to a degree that no other institution can match.

The transformation from Fatimid Shia institution to Sunni world university is not merely an institutional curiosity. It reflects the deeper story of Egyptian Islam — a country whose population remained overwhelmingly Sunni even under two centuries of Shia Fatimid rule, and which reclaimed its Sunni religious institutions with remarkable resilience when the political circumstances allowed.

Sources:

• Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawa'iz wa al-I'tibar (Admonitions and Reflections)
• Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-A'yan
• Heinz Halm, The Fatimids and Their Traditions of Learning (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997)
• Jonathan Bloom, Arts of the City Victorious (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
• Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning (Washington DC: Middle East Institute, 1961)
• Daniel Newman (ed.), An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit to France (London: Saqi Books, 2004)
• Malak Badrawi, Political Violence in Egypt 1910-1924 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000)