Abbas Hilmi’s wife is the Princess Ikbal Hanem, whom he married when he was about twenty. She is said to be both accomplished and beautiful, but like all Mohammedan ladies, she leads a secluded life, and does not appear at the great functions at the palace. She is not seen at the Khedive’s grand ball, given to his officials and the foreigners about once a year, to which something like fifteen hundred guests are invited. She is present, all the same, however, for she has a screened chamber looking down upon the ballroom, with the curtains so arranged that she can watch the dancing and flirting while she herself is unseen. Her Majesty has gorgeous apartments in each of the palaces and a little court of her own of which the noble ladies of Egypt are a part. CHAPTER IX EL-AZHAR AND ITS TEN THOUSAND MOSLEM STUDENTS The biggest university of the Mohammedan world is situated in Cairo. It has, all told, over ten thousand students, and its professors number more than four hundred. Its students come from every country where Mohammedanism flourishes. There are hundreds here from India, and some from Malaya and Java. There are large numbers from Morocco, as well as from Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripoli. There are black Nubians, yellow-skinned Syrians and Turks, and boys from southeastern Europe with faces as fair as our own. There are long-gowned, turbaned Persians, fierce-eyed Afghans, and brown-skinned men from the Sudan and from about Kuka, Bornu, and Timbuktu. The students are of all ages from fifteen to seventy-five, and some have spent their lives in the college. This university has been in existence for almost a thousand years. It was founded A.D. 972, and from that time to this it has been educating the followers of the Prophet. It is to-day perhaps the strongest force among these people in Egypt. Ninety-two per cent. of the inhabitants of the Nile valley are Mohammedans and most of the native officials have been educated here. There are at least thirty thousand men in the public service among its graduates, while the judges of the villages, the teachers in the mosque schools, and the _imams_, or priests, who serve throughout Egypt are connected with it. They hold the university in such high regard that an order from its professors would be as much respected as one from the government, if not more. [Illustration: A fifteen-minutes drive from the hotel quarter through the bazaars of the Mouski and the narrow “Street of the Booksellers” brings one to the university of El-Azhar, for 900 years the educational centre of the Moslem world.] [Illustration: The various nationalities are segregated in the courtyard porticos of El-Azhar. Instruction is free and almost entirely in the Koran. If a student doesn’t like one professor, he moves on to another.]