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"Brother of vultures didst thou go forth; brother of eagles dost thou return," she said. "Eat, drink, in the house of thy child and its mother." "Shall the unforgiven eat or drink?" he asked, and he rocked his body to and fro, like one who chants the Koran in a corner of El Azhar, forgetting and forgotten.

Before we could even think of moving eastwards towards Palestine we had to set our own house in order. Egypt was seething with sedition, and the flame of discontent was sedulously fanned by the young excitables from Al Azhar, who probably were themselves stimulated by Turko-German propaganda and "baksheesh." These had to be suppressed; and the task was not easy.

In the last half-century, however, the ancient repute of the Egyptian metropolis has suffered a good deal from the enormous increase of European influence in the land of the Pharaohs; the effects of which have made themselves felt even in the Azhar.

The Nayb el Haram has a small collection of books which belonged originally to the mosque; but it is now considered as his private property, and the books cannot be hired without difficulty. The Azhar at Cairo is on a very different footing.

The ever more numerous adherents of modern thought in Egypt do not generally proceed from the ranks of the Azhar students, nor do they generally care very much in their later life for reforming the methods prevailing there, although they may be inclined to applaud the efforts of the modernists.

That all these changes might be logically effected by a process of reasoning from the traditions, and expanding or minimising the interpretation of the Koran, no one need doubt who remembers what fetwas have already been given on these very points by some of the Azhar Ulema.

The author evidently possesses a good deal of the scholastic learning to be gathered in the Azhar and no European erudition in the stricter sense of the word.

There are marks put above and below the line to show the sounds of the vowels; just as we wrote the word potato in our first chapter. Arabic grammar is much more difficult than English grammar, and even the boys who attend the big Arabic college of El Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, must find its study a bugbear.

It went underground or into exile, and in 1908 put through the revolution which deposed the tyrant and brought the "Young Turks" to power. In Egypt liberalism took firm root, represented by men like Sheikh Mohammed Abdou, Rector of El Azhar University and respected friend of Lord Cromer.

The people, who had too long been the sport of Turkish mercenaries, received the invaders as deliverers, just as the Copts had welcomed the Arabs three centuries before. He also founded the great historic university mosque of the Azhar, which, begun by the heretical Shia, became the bulwark of rigid scholasticism and the theological centre of orthodox Islam. The theological change was abrupt.