Al-Azhar Becomes the World's First University

# Al-Azhar as University: The Birth of Organized Higher Islamic Learning

The Question of the World's First University

Few historical questions generate more debate among scholars of education than which institution can claim to be the world's first university. The Moroccan city of Fez's al-Qarawiyyin mosque-university (founded 245 AH / 859 CE by Fatimah al-Fihri) is claimed by UNESCO as the world's oldest continuously operating university. Bologna in Italy (founded approximately 1088 CE) is often cited in European historiography as the first. India's ancient Nalanda Buddhist monastery-university (flourishing 5th-12th centuries CE) predates all of these.

Al-Azhar's claim to university status rests on a specific historical moment: the formalization of its educational mission under the Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz bi-Allah, approximately 378 AH / 988 CE, when the caliph established formal stipends for both teachers and students and organized al-Azhar as a structured center of higher learning. Whether this qualifies as a "university" in the full sense depends on how one defines that term — and that definitional question reveals much about what a university actually is and does.

The Fatimid Formalization of Learning at Al-Azhar

The founding moment of al-Azhar as a teaching institution came in 361 AH / 972 CE, when the first formal lesson — on Ismaili jurisprudence — was delivered in the mosque. But the transformation from a mosque that hosted some teaching to an institution with systematic organization, full-time residential students, and paid faculty came under al-Aziz bi-Allah (r. 365-386 AH / 975-996 CE).

Al-Aziz allocated revenues from state properties to fund scholars' salaries, provided stipends that allowed students to pursue learning without needing to work, established regular reading circles (halaqat) on various subjects, and brought distinguished scholars to Cairo to teach. The library associated with the Fatimid palace — reportedly containing hundreds of thousands of volumes — made al-Azhar the center of an intellectual ecosystem that rivaled anything in the Islamic world.

The curriculum under the Fatimids was shaped by Ismaili doctrine. The core subjects were Ismaili jurisprudence (based on the traditions of the Fatimid Imam), Quranic recitation and interpretation through an Ismaili lens, Arabic language and rhetoric, and the sciences that supported these. The distinctively Ismaili element was the teaching of the batin — the esoteric, inner meaning of religious texts that only those initiated into the Ismaili teaching tradition could fully access.

The Riwaq System and Residential Learning

One of al-Azhar's most enduring institutional innovations was the riwaq system. As students began arriving from across the Islamic world to study in Cairo, the mosque complex developed residential halls — riwaq (sing. riwaq, lit. "arcade" or "hall") — organized by geographic origin. A student from the Maghreb would live in the Maghrebi riwaq; a student from Upper Egypt in the Sa'idi riwaq; a student from Syria in the Shami riwaq.

Each riwaq had its own financial endowment, providing food, lodging, and a stipend for students from that region. This system made al-Azhar not merely a place to attend lectures but a residential community — a place where a young man could come with nothing but his intelligence and commitment to learning and be provided for while he studied. The social and intellectual life of al-Azhar was shaped by this residential community structure, where scholars and students from dozens of countries lived together, debated ideas, formed friendships, and built the networks that would connect the Islamic scholarly world across political and geographic boundaries.

This residential, stipend-funded model of organized higher education is precisely what distinguishes a university from a school: the institution assumes responsibility not just for teaching but for sustaining the student during the years of his formation. By this measure, al-Azhar's claim to be among the earliest universities in history is well-founded.

The Curriculum After the Sunni Transformation

When the Ayyubids (and then decisively the Mamluks) transformed al-Azhar into a Sunni institution, the curriculum underwent a comprehensive reorganization. The Ismaili jurisprudence and esoteric theology were replaced by the mainstream Sunni curriculum that would remain essentially stable for centuries.

The core of the Sunni al-Azhar curriculum comprised:

The Islamic Sciences: Tafsir (Quranic exegesis), hadith and its sciences (mustalah al-hadith), fiqh (jurisprudence, primarily Shafi'i and Maliki), usul al-fiqh (legal theory), and 'aqeedah (theological doctrine, in the Ash'ari tradition).

The Arabic Language Sciences: Nahw (grammar), sarf (morphology), balaghah (rhetoric and literary theory), and 'arud (prosody). Mastery of Arabic was understood as the prerequisite for all other learning, since the primary texts of the Islamic sciences were in classical Arabic and the nuances of their meaning could only be grasped by someone who commanded the language at its highest level.

The Rational Sciences: Logic (mantiq), mathematics, and — in different periods to varying degrees — natural philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. The rational sciences were understood as instrumental: they equipped the student to think clearly, to analyze arguments, and to engage with the full range of human knowledge.

The Transmitted Sciences: The great texts of each discipline were transmitted by the ijaza system — when a teacher was satisfied that a student had mastered a text, he issued an ijaza (license) certifying that the student was authorized to teach that text to others. This chain of transmission connected every scholar back through his teachers to the earliest generations of the scholarly community.

The Ijaza System and the Certificate of Learning

The ijaza is al-Azhar's equivalent of the university degree, and it predates the European degree system by centuries. An ijaza is not a certificate of attendance but a personal authorization from a specific scholar certifying that the student has mastered specific knowledge under that scholar's supervision. The social weight of an ijaza depended heavily on the reputation of the issuing scholar: an ijaza from one of the great shaykhs of al-Azhar carried enormous prestige throughout the Sunni world.

The ijaza system preserved the personal, relational character of Islamic learning — the idea that knowledge is transmitted from person to person, not merely absorbed from texts. The Prophet ﷺ taught his companions, who taught the tabi'in, who taught the tabi' al-tabi'in, and so on in an unbroken chain (silsilah). The ijaza gives concrete form to this ideal of transmission: every scholar can, in principle, trace the line of his teachers back through the generations.

This personal transmission model also provided quality control. A scholar who issued ijazas carelessly damaged his own reputation. The system created strong incentives for rigorous evaluation of students' actual competence rather than mere completion of a prescribed curriculum.

The Great Scholars Who Shaped Al-Azhar

Among the scholars who shaped al-Azhar's Sunni intellectual character in the Mamluk and early Ottoman period were figures of enormous learning. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (773-852 AH), the greatest hadith scholar of his era and the author of Fath al-Bari (the most comprehensive commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari), was associated with Egyptian scholarly life. Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (849-911 AH), who claimed to have mastered every Islamic science of his day and wrote over five hundred works, studied and taught in Cairo. Al-Qalqashandi wrote his encyclopedic administrative manual "Subh al-A'sha" as an Azhari-trained scholar.

These men — working across multiple sciences simultaneously, producing encyclopedic works of extraordinary scope — represent the Azhari ideal of the comprehensive scholar: the 'alim who does not specialize narrowly but commands the full range of Islamic learning.

Al-Azhar in the Modern World

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought enormous pressure for change to al-Azhar. Napoleon's arrival in Egypt (1213 AH / 1798 CE) confronted al-Azhar scholars with European modernity in a jarring and immediate way. Muhammad Ali's reforms in the early nineteenth century reorganized Egyptian society in ways that challenged al-Azhar's traditional functions. The demands of the modern nation-state — for engineers, physicians, lawyers, and administrators trained in modern disciplines — could not be met by an institution whose curriculum had remained essentially unchanged for centuries.

Al-Azhar's response to these pressures culminated in the massive reforms of 1961 CE, when Egypt's government reorganized al-Azhar University to include faculties of medicine, engineering, commerce, and agriculture alongside the traditional Islamic sciences faculties. Today al-Azhar University has over half a million students enrolled across dozens of faculties in Egypt and in satellite institutions around the world.

The question of whether this modernized institution represents a departure from or a development of the original al-Azhar mission continues to animate Islamic educational debates. What is not in question is the significance of the institution that began when the Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz bi-Allah organized formal teaching and stipended scholars in a Cairo mosque more than a thousand years ago.

Sources:

• Al-Maqrizi, al-Mawa'iz wa al-I'tibar
• Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning (Washington DC: Middle East Institute, 1961)
• Heinz Halm, The Fatimids and Their Traditions of Learning (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997)
• Hasan Ibrahim Hasan, Tarikh al-Dawla al-Fatimiyya (Cairo, 1958)
• Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
• Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
• Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (eds.), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)