The world's Oldest University

Attending a university is an important part of a person's life. Today, many people go to the university to study and train for a future job in subjects like law, medicine, or education. But, the university is not a modern invention.

An important one startedin Egypt over one thousand years ago.

The world's oldest surviving university, Al-Azhar, is in Cairo, Egypt. It was first built as a mosque in A.D 972 in honor of the daughter of the prophet Muhammad. A few years later, learners and teachers began meeting in the mosque I  "tutoring circles". They read and talked about the subjects of religion and law. Around the year 988, leaders in the city of Cario decided to creater a school for higher learning and soon after that, Al-Azhar University was started.

Because a university was a new idea, the teachers at Al-Azhar needed to think about what courses to teach and how to teach them. The earliest course were in law and religion. In a course, students read and studied with the teacher, but there was also free discussion. Often, students and teachers had interesting discussions, and there was no "correct" answer. In the years that followed, the new university attracted scholars from around the world who came to teach and to research. At Al-Azhar, people studied the past, but it was also a place for sharing new ideas.

Over a thousand years later, Al-Azhar is still an important university in the world. Its library contains many of the world's oldest and most valuable books. Today, many of the world's important universities such as Oxford and Harvard still follow the same traditions as they do at Al-Azhar.

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