Some say now that Islam is dying and that nobody cares; others that, if she withers in Europe and Asia, she will renew herself in Africa and will return—­terrible—­after certain years, at the head of all the nine sons of Ham; others dream that the English understand Islam as no one else does, and, in years to be, Islam will admit this and the world will be changed.  If you go to the mosque Al Azhar—­the thousand-year-old University of Cairo—­you will be able to decide for yourself.  There is nothing to see except many courts, cool in hot weather, surrounded by cliff-like brick walls.  Men come and go through dark doorways, giving on to yet darker cloisters, as freely as though the place was a bazaar.  There are no aggressive educational appliances.  The students sit on the ground, and their teachers instruct them, mostly by word of mouth, in grammar, syntax, logic; al-hisab, which is arithmetic; al-jab’r w’al muqabalah, which is algebra; at-tafsir, commentaries on the Koran, and last and most troublesome, al-ahadis, traditions, and yet more commentaries on the law of Islam, which leads back, like everything, to the Koran once again. (For it is written, ’Truly the Quran is none other than a revelation.’) It is a very comprehensive curriculum.  No man can master it entirely, but any can stay there as long as he pleases.  The university provides commons—­twenty-five thousand loaves a day, I believe,—­and there is always a place to lie down in for such as do not desire a shut room and a bed.  Nothing could be more simple or, given certain conditions, more effective.  Close upon six hundred professors, who represent officially or unofficially every school or thought, teach ten or twelve thousand students, who draw from every Mohammedan community, west and east between Manila and Morocco, north and south between Kamchatka and the Malay mosque at Cape Town.  These drift off to become teachers of little schools, preachers at mosques, students of the Law known to millions (but rarely to Europeans), dreamers, devotees, or miracle-workers in all the ends of the earth.  The man who interested me most was a red-bearded, sunk-eyed mullah from the Indian frontier, not likely to be last at any distribution of food, who stood up like a lean wolfhound among collies in a little assembly at a doorway.

And there was another mosque, sumptuously carpeted and lighted (which the Prophet does not approve of), where men prayed in the dull mutter that, at times, mounts and increases under the domes like the boom of drums or the surge of a hot hive before the swarm flings out.  And round the corner of it, one almost ran into Our inconspicuous and wholly detached Private of Infantry, his tunic open, his cigarette alight, leaning against some railings and considering the city below.  Men in forts and citadels and garrisons all the world over go up at twilight as automatically as sheep at sundown, to have a last look round.  They say little and return as silently across the crunching gravel, detested by bare feet, to their whitewashed rooms and regulated lives.  One of the men told me he thought well of Cairo.  It was interesting.  ’Take it from me,’ he said, ’there’s a lot in seeing places, because you can remember ‘em afterward.’