May 11, 2001
A 1,000-Year-Old University Takes On a New and Troubling Role
Scholars fear that al-Azhar U.'s influence promotes censorship
In this city of 15 million, amid the dusty warrens of medieval stone houses and fortified travel lodges that once sheltered merchants returning from the Silk Road, sits a mosque-and-university complex that for more than a millennium has functioned as the unrivaled center of higher learning in the Islamic world: al-Azhar University.
Established in A.D. 970, the university and its affiliated religious institutions have
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