Al-Azhar Mosque

Al-Azhar stands in the heart of Islamic Cairo, on the south side of al-Azhar Street opposite Khan el-Khalili. It was founded in 970, within a couple of years of the founding of Cairo itself.

It is a working mosque and a working university at the same time, and it has been both, more or less continuously, for over a thousand years.

The courtyard is one of the calmest spaces in central Cairo. White marble, arcades on all four sides, and after the noise of al-Azhar Street the change is abrupt. Most visitors stay ten minutes; it rewards sitting down for half an hour.

It is also a lesson in reading a building. Nothing here is of one period. The Fatimids built the core, the Mamluks added madrasas and minarets, the Ottomans added more, and each ruler who paid for a piece signed it in the style of his own century. The minarets in particular are all different, and the double-finialed one built for Sultan al-Ghuri is the one everybody photographs.

And it still functions as what it was built as. Al-Azhar is the foremost institution of Sunni Islamic learning, its scholars are quoted worldwide, and students come here from across the Muslim world. You are visiting an institution, not a monument.

The mosque was founded by the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli in 970 for the new capital, al-Qahira, and was completed in 972. Teaching began within a few years, which is why it is regularly described as one of the oldest continuously operating centres of learning anywhere.

The name itself is a claim: al-Azhar, 'the most luminous', is usually connected to al-Zahra — 'the radiant' — the epithet of Fatima, the Prophet's daughter, from whom the Fatimid dynasty took its name and its legitimacy.

The Fatimids were Shia and Al-Azhar began as a Shia foundation. After Saladin ended Fatimid rule in the twelfth century the mosque was reoriented to Sunni teaching, which is what it has been ever since.

Successive Mamluk emirs and sultans endowed madrasas and minarets around the original prayer hall, and Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda made major additions in the eighteenth century, including the gate most visitors now enter by.

Its scholars have mattered politically as well as religiously — al-Azhar was a centre of resistance to the French occupation in 1798 — and the modern university added faculties of medicine, engineering and languages in the twentieth century alongside the traditional curriculum, with a women's campus since the 1960s.

• The white marble courtyard and its surrounding arcades
• Minarets from several different centuries, none matching
• The original Fatimid prayer hall behind the courtyard
• Stucco decoration surviving from the earliest phase
• The Barber's Gate — Bab al-Muzayyinin — where students once had their heads shaved
• Its position directly opposite Khan el-Khalili and the Hussein quarter