The Founding of al-Azhar

An open desert plain north of an older, smaller city which has been the administrative seat of Egypt for three centuries (Fustat, the Rashidun garrison-city of 21 AH). The new royal city is being marked out on virgin ground to the north-east, ringed by a fresh enclosure of mud-brick walls; the Nile flows broad and green to the west; the Muqattam escarpment rises bare and limestone-grey to the east.

Inside the southern half of the new royal enclosure, the foundations of a congregational mosque are being laid out, Jami' al-Azhar, a hypostyle plan: a sahn ringed by arcades on stone columns reused from older Egyptian buildings (the Egyptian convention of spolia from the late antique past); a deeper prayer hall to the south with the qibla wall; a small minaret on the north side of the sahn.

The new city is al-Qahira al-Mu'izziyya, the Victorious City of al-Mu'izz, founded by the general Jawhar al-Siqilli on the orders of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah in Sha'ban 358 AH (July 969 CE), to be the seat of the new dynasty whose religious and political programme is Isma'ili Shi'ism, distinct from the Sunni Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and from the Sunni population of Egypt. The Fatimid foundation of al-Azhar was, on its origin, an Isma'ili foundation.

In the long arc of Sunni history of Egypt, al-Azhar is remembered for what it became after the conquest of Egypt by Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (rahimahu Allah) in 567 AH (1171 CE), who deposed the last Fatimid caliph, restored Egypt to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, and rededicated al-Azhar as a Sunni Shafi'i institution. Friday prayer at al-Azhar was suspended for the duration of Salah al-Din's (rahimahu Allah) restoration and resumed in 665 AH under the Mamluk Sultan Baybars al-Bunduqdari (rahimahu Allah) as the Sunni jami' of Cairo. From that moment al-Azhar has been continuously a Sunni teaching mosque, becoming over the subsequent centuries the foremost institution of Sunni religious learning in the Islamic world.

On the ground of the foundation, surveyors mark out the qibla orientation with cords and gnomons; labourers in plain Egyptian dress haul granite columns from the dismantled buildings of Coptic-era Babylon for the riwaqs; masons cut limestone for the qibla wall. Above, the Egyptian sky is the high blue of late spring.

The light is the high silver light of late spring in Lower Egypt. The day in the Arabic calendar is the 24th of Jumada al-Ula in the 359th year after the Hijrah, corresponding to April 970 CE, the date of the foundation laid; the first Friday prayer in the new mosque would be held two years later in Ramadan 361 AH (June 972 CE).

The foundation of al-Azhar is preserved in the Sunni Egyptian topographical and historical tradition: al-Maqrizi's al-Mawa'iz wa-al-I'tibar (the Khitat), Ibn Khallikan's Wafayat al-A'yan, Ibn Taghribirdi's al-Nujum al-Zahira, and Ibn al-Athir. All record the date, the patron, and the architectural form. The Sunni framing of the institution dates from the restoration by Sultan Salah al-Din (rahimahu Allah) in 567 AH and the resumption of jumu'a under Sultan Baybars (rahimahu Allah) in 665 AH.

Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh (early 13th c.): Sunni historical synthesis. Cross-reference for the broader political context of the Fatimid foundation and the Ayyubid restoration.