Cairo University

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CAIRO UNIVERSITY

flagship modern university in egypt.

Cairo University's early founding and location made it a model for later universities throughout the Arab world. Opened as the small, private Egyptian University in 1908 and taken over as a state university in 1925, it became Fuʾad I University in 1940 and Cairo University in 1954.

The retirement in 1907 of Britain's consul general, Lord Cromer (formerly Sir Evelyn Baring), who had opposed a university for fear of Egyptian nationalism, allowed the plan for the private university to proceed. Egypt's minister of education Saʿd Zaghlul, feminist judge Qasim Amin, and others insisted that Egypt needed a Western-style university to complement its state professional schools and the Islamic religious university of al-Azhar. Europe provided the models and a number of the professors when the university opened with Prince Ahmad Fuʾad as rector in 1908.

In 1925 Fuʿad, by then king, transformed the Egyptian University into a major state institution, with colleges of arts, science, law, and engineering—the latter two formed from existing higher schools. Other schools were introduced later: engineering, agriculture, commerce, veterinary science, and the teachers college of Dar al-Ulum. The university now has seventeen colleges and six institutes in Cairo and a number of branch colleges in Fayyum, Bani Suayf, and Khartoum. Alexandria (then Farouk I) University split off in 1942; today Egypt has a dozen state and several new private universities.

During the quarter-century after 1925, the British overtook the French in influence at the university, but slowly lost out themselves to pressures to Egyptianize the faculty. The battle for coeducation was won, with the first women graduating in 1933. In the 1930s Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, rector, and Taha Husayn, dean of arts, fought for university autonomy from palace and cabinet interference, as the students were inevitably caught up in turbulent national politics.

At serious cost in quality, Gamal Abdel Nasser opened Cairo and other universities more widely to provincials and the poor. His purge of 1954 crushed student and professorial opposition until after the 1967 war. President Anwar al-Sadat initially encouraged Islamist groups on campus to counter the left, and campus Islamists remain a major challenge to the regime of Husni Mubarak. With about 155,000 students in 2003, Cairo University still has its pockets of excellence, but it is desperately underfunded and overcrowded and continues churning out thousands of poorly educated graduates onto a glutted job market.

see also alexandria university; amin, qasim; dar al-ulum; husayn, taha; zaghlul, saʿd.