Dar al-Ulum

Dar al-Ulum, the "House of Sciences", was a college of higher instruction in Cairo founded in 1872 by Ali Pasha Mubarak. ¹ Its aim was to give a certain number of students of al-Azhar a five-year course in modern branches of learning so that they could teach in the new schools. ^{1 2} The same Encyclopaedia also has articles on other institutions of the same name, at Deoband, Farangi Mahall and Lucknow; this record concerns only the Cairo college. ²

A survey of Egyptian education says it was the first teacher-training school, that it had started in 1871 as a programme of public lectures for students recruited from al-Azhar, and that in the following year it was organised as a regular college where religious and secular subjects were studied. ³ The same survey places it in the reign of Khedive Ismail, when school budgets rose tenfold. ³ Another article gives the opening year as 1871 for the training of teachers of Arabic. ⁴ The sources therefore differ by a year, and the Dar al-Ulum article itself gives 1872. ¹

According to the article, the curriculum was remodelled several times, the exact sciences were pushed into the background as other centres for science teaching arose in Cairo, and the course was cut to four years. ² Since 1946 it has been a faculty attached to the University of Cairo, then called Fuad I, and it aims to be both Arabic and Islamic and to be the great Muslim teachers' training college of Egypt, with sections for Arabic language and for Islamic studies. ² Its diploma equals a bachelor's degree and may be followed by a master's or doctorate. ² From 1951-2 graduates of government secondary schools were admitted alongside al-Azhar students, and from 1953-4 a number of women. ² Formerly teaching was free and students received a small monthly sum; fees were later charged with concessions for those who undertook to teach. ²

In 1872 the minister Ali Mubarak appointed the blind scholar al-Husayn al-Marsafi professor of Arabic linguistic disciplines there; he taught until 1888, and the article regards him as the first to formulate what became the literary renaissance, the nahda. ⁵ Muhammad Abduh was appointed a teacher there in 1879. ⁶ Hasan al-Banna, in another article, is said to have entered it when it was still an independent teachers' training college. ⁷ Students of the college founded the Nadi Dar al-Ulum in 1907 with the declared purpose of Arabising foreign words. ⁸

The article's bibliography names Muhammad Abd al-Jawwad, Takwim Dar al-Ulum (Cairo 1952), with a supplement for 1946-59. ²