The Same Thing Is True Indeed Of The Greater
Number Of These Orientals, Who, If We Meet Them In Our Own Country,
Seem To Be Quite Parisianised; Their Modernity Is Only On The Surface:
In Their Inmost Souls Islam Remains Intact.
And it is not difficult to
understand, perhaps, how the spectacle of our troubles, our despairs,
our miseries, in these new ways in which our lot is cast, should make
them reflect and turn again to the tranquil dream of their
ancestors.
. . .
While waiting for the conclusion of the morning studies, we are
conducted through some of the dependencies of El-Azhar. Halls of every
epoch, added one to another, go to form a little labyrinth; many
contain /Mihrabs/, which, as we know already, are a kind of portico,
festooned and denticulated till they look as if covered with rime. And
library after library, with ceilings of cedarwood, carved in times
when men had more leisure and more patience. Thousands of precious
manuscripts, dating back some hundreds of years, but which here in El-
Azhar are no whit out of date. Open, in glass cases, are numerous
inestimable Korans, which in olden times had been written fair and
illuminated on parchment by pious khedives. And, in a place of honour,
a large astronomical glass, through which men watch the rising of the
moon of Ramadan. . . . All this savours of the past. And what is being
taught to-day to the ten thousand students of El-Azhar scarcely
differs from what was taught to their predecessors in the glorious
reign of the Fatimites - and which was then transcendent and even new:
the Koran and all its commentaries; the subtleties of syntax and of
pronunciation; jurisprudence; calligraphy, which still is dear to the
heart of Orientals; versification; and, last of all, mathematics, of
which the Arabs were the inventors.
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