been the goal of pilgrimage and the cherished abode of many learned men.  Many capitals of Islam offered the students an easier life and better accommodations for their studies; while in Mecca four months of the year are devoted to the foreign guests of Allah, by attending to whose various needs all Meccans gain their livelihood.  For centuries Cairo has stood unrivalled as a seat of Mohammedan learning of every kind; and even now the Uaram of Mecca is not to be compared to the Azhar-mosque as regards the number and the fame of its professors and the variety of branches cultivated.

In the last half-century, however, the ancient repute of the Egyptian metropolis has suffered a good deal from the enormous increase of European influence in the land of the Pharaohs; the effects of which have made themselves felt even in the Azhar.  Modern programs and methods of instruction have been adopted; and, what is still worse, modernism itself, favoured by the late Mufti Muhammed Abduh, has made its entrance into the sacred lecture-halls, which until a few years ago seemed inaccessible to the slightest deviation from the decrees of the Infallible Agreement of the Community.  Strenuous efforts have been made by eminent scholars to liberate Islam from the chains of the authority of the past ages on the basis of independent interpretation of the Qoran; not in the way of the Wahhabi reformers, who tried a century before to restore the institutions of Mohammed’s time in their original purity, but on the contrary with the object of adapting Islam by all means in their power to the requirements of modern life.

Official protection of the bold innovators prevented their conservative opponents from casting them out of the Azhar, but the assent to their doctrines was more enthusiastic outside its walls than inside.  The ever more numerous adherents of modern thought in Egypt do not generally proceed from the ranks of the Azhar students, nor do they generally care very much in their later life for reforming the methods prevailing there, although they may be inclined to applaud the efforts of the modernists.  To the intellectuals of the higher classes the Azhar has ceased to offer great attraction; if it were not for the important funds (wagf) for the benefit of professors and students, the numbers of both classes would have diminished much more than is already the case, and the faithful cultivators of mediaeval Mohammedan science would prefer to live in Mecca, free from Western influence and control.  Even as it is, the predilection of foreign students of law and theology is turning more and more towards Mecca.