MOSLEM STUDENTS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17352, 17 May 1924, Page 2

MOSLEM STUDENTS.

UNDERGRADS. IN CAIRO. From a labyrinth of unpaved lanes, trodden into mud by the feet of unending trains of laden donkeys and camels, the curious traveller emerges in a wider space to find himself beside a massive white wall, surmounted by two towering minarets and adorned with flamboyant medallions or blue and gold mosaic. In space he has put a few .hundred yards only between himself and the broad thoroughfares and gay shops of modern Cairo. In time he has travelled backwards nearly a thousand vears. savs a writer in “The Daily Mail.” All around him hums the ancient city of the Caliphs and the Arabian Nights. He stands at the gate of the wolrd- famous Mosque of Al Azhar“the most Resplendent”—the most renowned seat of learning of all the Moslem world. Slipshod with a large pair of loose, formless slippers—for no dirt from the outside world must be brought over the sacred threshold—the traveller enters a wide stone courtyard, as closely thronged and quite as noisy as the crowded streets without. The close press of humanity and the incessant tumult recall a crowded day on the Stock Exchange rather than a quiet haunt of learning. Sitting croes-legged on skin mate on the stone floor, each with his shoes f laid sole to 6ole beside him, are some hundreds of students in flowing robes and grouped round a sccwe of bearded sheiks—sitting literally “at the feet” of their Gamaliels.

They bail from all quarters of the Moslem world. They are black Sudanese, fair-haired Moors, swarthy Arabs; even Malays and yellow men from Java. Each face possesses its own “com-mon-room” in the shape of a small arcade opening off the great courtyard. Above are the dormitories where the students sleep. In the courtyard itself and a great colonnade of 389 columns beyond it—with intervals marked by the shadow of a great sundial and sonorously hailed with resonant calls to prayer from Muezzins on the balconies of t-be twin minarets—the wheel of classes and lectures turns incessantly, with a din that reproduces Babel. Some groups follow the explanations of a lecturer who is working out long-division sums in Arabic figures on a blackboard. Others listen to an instructor who is reading history aloud in a monotonous sing-song Here and there groups of students sway their bodies backwards and for-

wards. as if in pain or frenzy, while they chant, and so commit to memory —passages from the Koran. Such exercise is the time-honoured accompaniment of Moslem studies. Its object is the simple one of concentrating the scholar's enact thoughts by keeping him awake. Al Azhar offers no scholarship and gives no prizes. It plays no games and indulges in no sports. Its professors are unpaid and its pupils are charged no fees. Poor scholars, indeed, receive not only free tuition but also free quarters and rations from its ample funds, which at present amount to about £30.000 a year, together with a daily revenue in kind of 25.000 loaves of bread.