Al-Azhar seems incapable of renewing Islamic theological and juristic thought in order to offer a religious discourse commensurate with the modern age, with its vast and rapid progress in the sciences, technology, media and communications. The institution is shackled by so many restrictions that it has lost much of its influence. There are many reasons why the Islamic world's oldest and largest religious institution has reached its current state of impotence and stagnation. It has been assaulted from all sides, swept by the political storms of the past half-century, and wrenched by decrees that may have been issued with the best of intentions to promote reform and development but have had disastrous consequences. In 1961, then-President Gamal Abdel-Nasser issued Law 103, which was intended to reorganise Al-Azhar. Under Article 34 of this law, Al-Azhar University was obliged to establish faculties of medicine, engineering, science, commerce and agriculture. Up until this point the faculties of the centuries-old university had been limited to theology, Islamic law and jurisprudence and Arabic. Under the new law the university had to follow the Ministry of Education's curriculum. Article 85 of Law 103 states: “The purpose of the Al-Azhar academies is to furnish students with a sufficient degree of Islamic culture and alongside this with the knowledge and skills their peers receive in other schools, thereby opening up equal opportunities to them in the work force as well as in the admission to other universities.” The law also doubled the workload of Al-Azhar students, who were now compelled to study the Ministry of Education curriculum as well as Al-Azhar's traditional religious and linguistic curriculum which included study of the Qur'an, exegesis, hadith, Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic grammar and so on. The results were disastrous. Overall student performance was poor, and students neither excelled in the theological sciences nor were they adequately equipped in the modern sciences. Moreover, the third article of the law called for the appointment of a minister for Al-Azhar affairs. The minister would effectively become the top man in the ancient institution after the grand imam of Al-Azhar. Later, this ministerial post was abolished in the course of successive amendments to the law. The second wave in the history of the attrition of Al-Azhar occurred under President Anwar Al-Sadat, who issued a decree appointing Abdel-Halim Mahmoud as grand imam in 1973. During his years in office and until his death in October 1978, Mahmoud expanded the university's faculties. To improve the institution's financial situation, he started a fund-raising campaign to solicit donations in the form of land or money to build new schools, arguing that the existing faculties, which would increase to 20 under his tutelage, were not sufficient. He also opened branches of Al-Azhar in rural Egypt. His successors continued the rural expansion of Al-Azhar's primary, preparatory and secondary schools, relying primarily on community donations to finance them. However, the problem was that Al-Azhar did not have the qualified instructors necessary to teach in these institutions. While its graduates may have been armed with certificates, they were not armed with the necessary pedagogical skills. The declining standards of pedagogy in Al-Azhar paved the way for the infiltration of extremist trends, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Salafists. Many members of extremist Islamist groups have obtained Al-Azhar degrees, including masters and doctorates. Some of them have even gone on to ascend the university ladder at Al-Azhar, acquiring influence over members of the student body who no longer recognise the authority of the grand imam. Today, Al-Azhar University has 76 faculties and a total enrolment of around half a million students, including foreign students from 110 countries. It has thousands of branch institutes with a total enrolment of around 400,000. Undoubtedly, this vast expansion has facilitated the control of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists over some Al-Azhar schools, the evidence being that in some of them the students no longer salute the Egyptian flag or sing the national anthem at morning assemblies. These patriotic rituals have been replaced by religious chants. Al-Azhar's curriculum also poses one of the greatest obstacles to the institution's development. The instruction of Islamic jurisprudence relies on ancient books written in difficult, archaic language and expressing views that promote fanaticism and extremism, and, indeed, recourse to violence in the dissemination of the faith. It also continues to foster bygone values such as those sanctioning bondage, killing captives in war, mistreating captive women and treating non-Muslims in ways that fly in the face of modern principles of equal citizenship. As a result, it offers a fertile environment for extremists to disseminate their ideas among students, whether Egyptians or from abroad. The fact that most Al-Azhar students come from the countryside and require financial assistance has given the extremists another opening. The Muslim Brotherhood has been quick to exploit these circumstances, providing accommodation near the university and funding facilities for the poor in order to gain control over the minds of thousands. It has also been active among the foreign student community. Although the current grand imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayyib, is clearly an erudite man, being fluent in French and a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, he is incapable of confronting the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists in Al-Azhar, both in the university itself and in its branch institutes, due to the problems that have accumulated over the years. He has not been able to make essential progress in curriculum development, as this would require handing the task over to committees consisting of members who are either unaware of the importance and aims of curriculum development or who are opposed to the idea from the outset. The poor standards of Al-Azhar graduates are reflected in the imams of many mosques who form the institution's first channel of interaction with the general public. Not only have Friday sermons in some mosques become superficial and repetitive but they have also sometimes turned into political rallies, with the preacher forcing his views and political choices on worshippers. Another manifestation of the shortcomings of Al-Azhar and its graduates can be found in the state of confusion and inconsistency in the institution's fatwas (religious rulings). These have had a tendency to focus public attention on trivial matters and present personal attitudes and experiences as religious doctrine. But Al-Azhar's greatest failing has been its inability to meet the demands for religious renovation and reform, in spite of the support of the president and his repeated appeals to Al-Azhar and Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments) officials to counter fanaticism and extremist ideas that contradict Islamic culture. Naturally, those who are not fully versed in the traditional theological and jurisprudential sciences, and who therefore do not possess the tools necessary for understanding the Qur'an and Sunnah, are not properly equipped to engage in a proper critique of juristic heritage and the authorised textbooks on the Al-Azhar curriculum. Sadly, this is the case with the majority of Al-Azhar graduates, including those who serve as faculty deans and department heads. One can also not help but observe how warily Al-Azhar officials, from the grand imam to the ulema, have responded to calls for renovation and reform. Their initial response was to erect barriers between themselves and advocates of serious reform, as though the latter were bent on destroying the principles of the faith and encroaching on the preserve of a religious establishment that alone is charged with handling everything pertaining to Islamic thought and law. Al-Azhar has been greatly embarrassed by the impression created in the media by its representatives who in the course of intellectual debates on questions of religious heritage have shown themselves unable to present cogent answers and often evade the questions by shifting to doctrinal discourses. The state allocates about LE8 billion a year to Al-Azhar. Wages and salaries consume the bulk of this sum, with LE6.35 billion going to the payrolls of Al-Azhar schools and institutes and LE1.21 billion earmarked for the university. Practically speaking, Al-Azhar cannot afford to fund an effective administrative or educational reform. This lack of funding has forced the institution to solicit contributions from some Arab and Islamic states, enabling certain states to gain leverage in the institution. In other words, Al-Azhar's loss of independence is connected to more than just its relationship with the government in Egypt. True, the country's new constitution underscores the autonomy of the grand imam of Al-Azhar. Article 7 of the constitution states that Al-Azhar is an “independent scientific Islamic institution”; that “the grand imam is independent and may not be dismissed”; and that “the law shall regulate the method of his selection by the members of the Council of Senior Ulema” at Al-Azhar. In practice, however, the independence of the institution remains open to question in light of the relatively low level of allocations from the state and its acceptance of donations from abroad. Rescuing Al-Azhar from its shortcomings, so that it can perform its true educational and intellectual role, is not the responsibility of the current grand imam or his successor alone. It is also the responsibility of the Egyptian government. As well, confronting the religious extremists' control of Al-Azhar's faculties, schools and institutions will take more than simply firing them from their posts. The ideological and theological camouflage provided to them by the ancient institution's academic curriculum must be removed. The writer is a political analyst.
