The university education is almost altogether Mohammedan. Its curriculum is about the same as it was a thousand years ago, the chief studies being the Koran and the Koranic law, together with the sacred traditions of the religion and perhaps a little grammar, prosody, and rhetoric. A number of the professors also teach in the schools connected with the mosques of the Egyptian villages, which are inspected, but not managed, by the government. Even there the Koran takes up half the time, and religion is considered far more important than science. Indeed, it is wonderful how much time these Egyptians spend on their bible. The Koran is their primer, their first and second reader, and their college text book. As soon as a baby is born, the call to prayer is shouted in its ear, and when it begins to speak, its father first teaches it to say the creed of Islam, which runs somewhat as follows: “There is no God but God; Mohammed is the Apostle of God,” and also “Wherefore exalted be God, the King, the Truth! There is no God but Him! The Lord of the glorious Throne.” When the boy reaches five or six he goes to the mosque school, where he squats down, cross-legged, and sways to and fro as he yells aloud passages from the Koran. He studies the alphabet by writing texts with a black brush on a slate of wood or tin. Year after year he pounds away, committing the Koran to memory. There are more than two hundred and fifty thousand pupils in the Egyptian schools, of whom a majority are under thirteen years of age. It was brought out by a school census some years ago that over fifty thousand of these boys could recite a good part of the Mohammedan bible, and that forty-five hundred had memorized the whole from beginning to end. Another forty-five hundred were able to recite one half of it from memory, while thirty-eight hundred could correctly give three fourths of it. When it is remembered that the Koran contains one hundred and fourteen divisions and in the neighbourhood of eighty thousand words, it will be seen what this means. I’m willing to bet that there are not four thousand children in the United States who can reel off the New Testament without looking at the book, and that with our vast population we have not fifty thousand boys who can recite even one book of our Bible from memory and not mispronounce a word.