Education and Culture in Cairo

( Al-Azhar University )
The most famous educational institution in Cairo is the Al-Azhar University, the oldest in the Islamic world. The institution has grown up around the Al-Azhar Mosque, which was founded in 970 by the Fatimids, eighteen years before the university.

Al-Azhar University is an authoritative voice throughout the Islamic world, and its positions on important issues are influential in Egypt and the Arab world.

Other institutions of higher education include Cairo University (founded in 1908) and Ain Shams University (1950), which together enroll more than 100,000 students; and the American University in Cairo, founded in 1919, where the children of Egypt's elite mingle with students and faculty from abroad.

Egyptian history is displayed and preserved in the city's numerous museum collections.

( The Egyptian Museum )
Founded in 1902, the Egyptian Museum contains hundreds of thousands of works, including more than 1700 pieces from the collection of Tutankhamun; the Museum of Islamic Arts (1881) contains a vast collection relating to early Islamic civilization; and the Coptic Museum (1910) traces the history of the Coptic community in Egypt.

Other Cairo museums maintain collections relating to more modern themes; these range from the Al Gawhara Palace Museum, built in 1811 in the Ottoman style, to the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, founded in 1963, which contains works by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Peter Paul Rubens, and other European and Egyptian painters of renown.

Cairo's rich cultural life is further enhanced by local theater, cinema, dance, and music, in addition to the city's vibrant community of journalists and fiction writers; Cairo residents take great pride in the work of Nobel Prize-winning author and Cairo native Naguib Mahfouz, whose fiction has provided a chronicle of the city.