The Moslem University in the Mosque al Azhar has a fine old front designed with a grace and finished in a mellowness of colour that any Oxonian College might respect. You show a proper respect--whether you will or no--by donning the capacious slippers over your boots, as in visiting any other mosque, and enter the outer court, filled with the junior students. The hum and clatter rises to a mild roar. All are seated in circular groups, usually about a loud and gesticulating teacher; and where there is no teacher the students are swaying gently in a rhythmic accompaniment to the drone with which _Al Koran_ is being got by heart. There is no concerted recitation or repetition: every man for himself. That, perhaps, helps to visualise the swaying mass of students and to conceive the babel of sound. There is no roof above that tarbushed throng. This is the preparatory school. The University proper, beyond the partition, containing the adult students, alone is roofed. Here they are all conning in the winter sunshine. Little attention is given to visitors; most students are droning with closed eyes, presumably to avert distraction. Few are aware of your presence. That consciousness is betrayed chiefly by a furtively whispered "Baksheesh!"--the national watchword of Egypt--uttered with a strange incongruity in a temple of learning--a temple literally. Beyond, in the adult schools, you will hear no mention of baksheesh, except from the high-priest of the Temple, the sheikh of the University, who demands it with dignity, as due in the nature of a temple-offering, but appropriated (you know) by himself and for his own purposes. Any knowledge of a British University renders this place interesting indeed by sheer virtue of comparison. The Koran is the only textbook--of literature, of history, of ethics, and philosophy in general: a wonderful book, indeed, and a reverend. What English book will submit successfully to such a test?... Here is the same droning by heart and the same rhythmic, absorbed accompaniment, but in a less degree. The lecturer is more frequent and more animated in gesture and more loud and dogmatic in utterance. Declamation of the most vigorous kind is the method with him, and rapt attention with the undergraduates. The lecturers are invariably past middle age, and with flowing beards, and as venerable in feature as the Jerusalem doctors. The groups of students are small--as a rule, four or five. Yet the teachers speak as loud as to an audience of two hundred. The method here is that of the University _semina_: that is to say, small, and seemingly select, groups of students; frequent, almost incessant, interrogation by the student; and discussion that is very free and well sustained. The class-rooms, defined by low partitions, go by race, each with its national lecturers.