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Al-Azhar University: Programs, Campus & Admissions Info
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By Confinity Heritage Editorial · 2026-07-20 · 8-minute readQuiet tools, not a toolbar.
Al-Azhar in Cairo is two things joined together: a mosque that has stood at the centre of the city for more than a thousand years, and the school of learning that grew up inside it. The Fatimid dynasty built the mosque between 970 and 972, soon after founding Cairo as its new capital, and within a generation the building had become a place of organised study as well as prayer. Teaching has continued there in more or less unbroken succession ever since. That long continuity places Al-Azhar, alongside the Qarawiyyin in Fez, among the oldest continuously operating institutions of higher learning in the world.
For most of its history the place has been understood first as a centre of religious scholarship rather than as a university in the modern sense. It is widely regarded as the foremost seat of Sunni Islamic learning, and its senior office, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, is treated by many Sunni Muslims as one of the highest authorities in matters of doctrine and law. Set beside that religious role is a large modern university. A reorganisation in 1961 added faculties of medicine, engineering, science, and agriculture to the traditional disciplines of theology, jurisprudence, and the Arabic language, and the wider Al-Azhar establishment now oversees a national network of schools taught to close to two million students. Al-Azhar is therefore at once an ancient mosque, a living religious authority, and a state university, and its story is best told as the braiding of those three strands.
The mosque was a founding act of a new dynasty in a new city. In 969 the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shia dynasty that had ruled from what is now Tunisia, seized Egypt and laid out a fresh royal capital they named al-Qahira, the origin of the English name Cairo. Construction of a congregational mosque at the heart of that capital began on the orders of the caliph al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah and was directed by his general Jawhar al-Siqilli. Work started in 970, and the mosque held its first Friday prayers in 972. The name Al-Azhar is usually linked to al-Zahra, "the resplendent," an epithet of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad from whom the Fatimids claimed descent.
The building was conceived from the start as more than a place of worship. The Fatimids intended it as an instrument for teaching and spreading Ismaili Shia doctrine across their new domain, and formal instruction followed quickly. Regular lessons are recorded in the 970s, and around 988 the vizier Ya'qub ibn Killis is credited with putting study on a permanent footing by endowing a body of salaried scholars, on the order of thirty-five to forty-five, to give lessons in law and the religious sciences. That endowment, tying paid teachers to a fixed place of study, is a large part of why Al-Azhar can trace continuous instruction back so far.
The institution's religious character was overturned in the twelfth century. In 1171 Saladin brought the Fatimid caliphate to an end and founded the Sunni Ayyubid dynasty. Under the new rulers Al-Azhar was reoriented from Ismaili Shia teaching toward Sunni Islam, following the Shafi'i school of law and Ash'ari theology, and for a period the Friday sermon was suspended in the mosque as its Fatimid associations were set aside. The change of ownership left a permanent mark: the Sunni identity established under the Ayyubids has defined Al-Azhar ever since.
Its recovery and rise to pre-eminence came under the Mamluks, the military dynasty that ruled Egypt from 1250 to 1517. Mamluk sultans and officials restored the mosque, enlarged it, and endowed it generously, funding teachers, paying stipends to students, and attaching residential colleges, or madrasas, to the complex. In these centuries Al-Azhar became a magnet for scholars and students from across the Muslim world, and its reputation as a leading Sunni centre of learning was firmly settled. Later rulers continued to add to it. Under the Ottomans the administrator Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda carried out extensive works in the mid-eighteenth century that nearly doubled the mosque's size, and successive periods left their own minarets and gateways on the building.
The modern reshaping of Al-Azhar belongs to the twentieth century. Reforms in the 1930s began to formalise its structure into faculties, but the decisive step came in 1961, when the government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser passed a law reorganising Al-Azhar into a modern national university. The reform added secular faculties, including medicine, engineering, science, commerce, and agriculture, opened a college for women, and brought the institution more firmly under state administration. The move modernised Al-Azhar and widened what it taught, while also drawing it closer to the Egyptian state, a tension that has shaped its public role since.
For a thousand years Al-Azhar's core work has been the study and transmission of the religious sciences. Its traditional curriculum covers the Qur'an and its recitation, hadith (the reports of the Prophet's words and actions), tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis), fiqh (jurisprudence), theology, and the Arabic language and its grammar and rhetoric, which are the tools needed to read the sources. Al-Azhar has long taught all four Sunni schools of law, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali, rather than a single one, and it has been closely associated with Ash'ari and Maturidi theology and with a strong current of Sufi practice.
The way this knowledge was passed on shaped the institution as much as its content. Teaching was organised not around lecture halls and timetables but around the halqa, the study circle. A scholar would sit against one of the mosque's pillars, and students would gather in a ring to hear a text read and explained line by line. A student advanced by mastering particular books with particular teachers, and the qualification that resulted was the ijaza, a licence certifying that its holder had studied a given work and was authorised to transmit and teach it in turn. The ijaza recorded a chain of teachers reaching back through the generations, so that authority rested on a documented line of transmission rather than on a diploma from an institution. Only in the twentieth century did Al-Azhar adopt the modern apparatus of set degrees, fixed programmes, and formal examinations.
Al-Azhar also serves as a source of religious rulings and guidance well beyond its own students. Its scholars issue fatwas, that is, considered opinions on questions of Islamic law and practice, and its positions carry weight across much of the Sunni world. Since 1961 much of this work has been channelled through the Islamic Research Academy, the Majma' al-Buhuth al-Islamiyya, a senior body of scholars that examines contemporary religious and ethical questions and reviews the printing and circulation of the Qur'an in Egypt. Through this authority Al-Azhar shapes debate on subjects ranging from finance and medical ethics to the boundaries of orthodoxy, and its rulings are cited far outside Egypt.
The roll of teachers and students connected with Al-Azhar runs across the whole span of Islamic intellectual history. The historian Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddima is a founding work in the study of history and society, taught Maliki law in Cairo in the late fourteenth century and lectured at Al-Azhar after his appointment as a judge in 1384. His presence is a reminder that the mosque drew leading minds from across the Muslim world at the height of the Mamluk period.
Al-Azhar was also a centre of the reform movements that reshaped Muslim thought in the modern era. In the 1870s the activist and thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani gathered an influential circle of students in Cairo, many of them from Al-Azhar, who debated how Muslim societies should respond to European power and modern science. Among them was Muhammad Abduh, who studied and later taught at Al-Azhar, pressed for reform of its curriculum and administration, and rose to become Grand Mufti of Egypt in 1899. Abduh is regarded as a central figure in Islamic modernism, and his effort to reconcile Islamic tradition with the conditions of the modern world was argued out largely within Al-Azhar's orbit.
In the twentieth century the reforming impulse reached the institution's highest office. Mahmud Shaltut, a follower of Abduh who served as Grand Imam from 1958 until his death in 1963, overhauled Al-Azhar's structure and is best known for a 1959 ruling declaring the Shia Ja'fari school a legitimate school of law to be followed alongside the four Sunni ones, an unusual gesture of accommodation between the Sunni and Shia traditions. Al-Azhar's classrooms also trained figures who went on to shape Egyptian culture more broadly, among them the writer Taha Hussein, a leading voice of modern Arabic literature, who began his education at Al-Azhar before helping to build the country's secular university system.
It is easy to speak of Al-Azhar as a university and forget that it began, and remains, a working mosque. The two are not separate buildings but one continuous fabric in the medieval heart of Cairo, in the district that grew up around the original Fatimid foundation. The Al-Azhar Mosque still holds daily prayers and Friday congregations, and for most of its history the teaching happened in the same courtyards and prayer halls, with students clustered around their teachers between the columns.
The building itself is a record of the dynasties that have added to it. The original Fatimid mosque was a hypostyle structure, a broad prayer hall of many aisles set behind an open courtyard, and elements of the tenth-century work survive amid later decoration, including keel-shaped arches and carved stucco from a twelfth-century refurbishment. The Mamluks added the ornate minarets that define the skyline of the complex, among them the minaret of Qaytbay from the 1480s and the twin-finialled minaret of al-Ghuri from about 1509, along with attached madrasas. Ottoman-era additions enlarged the mosque again and gave it several of its gates. The result is not a single unified monument but a layered one, in which six centuries of Egyptian rulers left their architecture around a common core. The mosque and its surroundings form part of the Historic Cairo area that UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1979.
As Al-Azhar grew into a modern university in the twentieth century, the teaching largely moved out of the mosque and into a network of campuses and faculties spread across Cairo and other Egyptian cities. Yet the mosque remains the symbolic and spiritual centre of the whole institution. The Grand Imam presides over the mosque and, by extension, the university and the wider Al-Azhar establishment, and it is the ancient building, rather than any modern lecture hall, that gives the institution its name and much of its standing.
Al-Azhar's influence has always reached well beyond Egypt. For centuries it drew students from West and sub-Saharan Africa, the Levant, Central and South Asia, and the Malay world, who studied there for years and carried its scholarship home. Because it taught in Arabic and covered the full range of the religious sciences, it served as a common reference point for Sunni learning across a vast geography, and the graduates it sent back to their own communities as judges, teachers, and prayer leaders spread its approach far and wide. That role as the hub of a scholarly network is a large part of why its rulings still command attention across the Sunni world.
Its position has also made it a barometer of the arguments running through modern Muslim societies. In the colonial period Al-Azhar was a focus for debates about how to respond to European dominance, and reformers and traditionalists contended over its curriculum. Since 1961 its close ties to the Egyptian state have made it, in part, an official religious voice, expected to speak for a moderate mainstream, though its scholars have not always spoken with one mind. Its interventions on questions of doctrine, law, and public morality are widely reported, and disputes within the institution, such as later challenges to Shaltut's ruling on the Shia schools, are followed as signs of broader shifts in Sunni thought.
In recent years Al-Azhar has taken a prominent part in interfaith engagement. In February 2019 the Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb, and Pope Francis jointly signed the Document on Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi, a statement calling for peaceful coexistence between religions that was widely noted as a significant meeting between the leaderships of Sunni Islam and the Catholic Church. Steps of this kind reflect the institution's continuing effort to present itself as a voice for a moderate reading of Islam on the world stage.
Behind the teaching and the rulings, Al-Azhar preserves something harder to see: an unbroken chain of learning. What has been handed down at Al-Azhar is not only a body of texts but a method of studying them and a documented line of transmission from teacher to student reaching back centuries. The traditional ijaza system was, in effect, a way of preserving not just knowledge but the authority to teach it, so that each generation received both the books and the credentials of those who had explained them before. That continuity of instruction, sustained through changes of dynasty and language of rule, is itself part of what the institution keeps alive.
Al-Azhar also holds one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts anywhere. Its library, built up over a millennium, contains on the order of fifty thousand manuscripts on law, theology, language, history, and the sciences, and is generally reckoned second in importance among Egypt's libraries only to the national collection. Preserving this material is demanding work: fragile paper and parchment must be conserved, catalogued, and increasingly digitised so that scholars can consult texts too delicate to handle often. In keeping copies of rare works safe and making them legible to researchers, the library guards a written record of Islamic thought that reaches back to the early centuries of the tradition.
Al-Azhar now sits at the top of a large educational system. The wider Al-Azhar establishment runs a national network of primary and secondary religious schools and institutes across Egypt, teaching close to two million pupils, and feeds students into the university itself, whose enrolment is generally put in the hundreds of thousands. The university teaches across dozens of faculties on campuses in Cairo and other cities, combining its historic disciplines of theology, jurisprudence, and Arabic with the modern faculties of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, science, agriculture, and commerce that were added from 1961 onward. Men and women study in separate faculties, and the institution continues to attract international students from across the Muslim world, many of them supported to study the religious sciences in Arabic.
At the head of the whole structure stands the Grand Imam, an office held since 2010 by Ahmed el-Tayeb, a scholar and former president of the university who is widely regarded as one of the most senior figures in Sunni Islam. Working alongside the Islamic Research Academy and Egypt's other religious institutions, he and the scholars of Al-Azhar continue to issue guidance on questions of faith, law, and public life. More than a thousand years after Fatimid builders raised its first walls, Al-Azhar remains what it has long been: a mosque, a school, and a religious authority, still teaching, still ruling, and still speaking for a large part of the Sunni Muslim world.
History and founding
A centre of Islamic learning
Notable scholars
The mosque and the institution
Cultural significance
What it preserves
Today
References and resources
- Al-Azhar University, official site: the university's own presentation of its faculties, admissions, and organisation.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: al-Azhar University: concise overview of the mosque's founding, history, and modern role.
- Wikipedia: Al-Azhar University: detailed history, the 1961 reforms, structure, and notable figures, with sources.
- Wikipedia: Al-Azhar Mosque: the building's construction, architecture, and later additions across the dynasties.
- Wikipedia: Grand Imam of al-Azhar: the senior office, its authority, and its holders.
- Wikipedia: Al-Azhar Shia Fatwa: Mahmud Shaltut's 1959 ruling on the Ja'fari school and its context.
- Document on Human Fraternity: the 2019 declaration signed by Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb and Pope Francis.
- UNESCO: Historic Cairo: the World Heritage listing that includes Al-Azhar and the medieval city around it.