100 years of enlightenment

By Azza Heikal

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Being a Cairo University graduate endows one with pride and definitely knowledge. In its 100-year anniversary, Cairo University honoured a number of its graduates who contributed to the development and enlightenment of Egypt and the Arab world. It paid tribute to those who crossed the frontiers of locality to hover at the borders of universality, such as Naguib Mahfouz and Mohamed El-Baradei.

The foundation of that first great university began with a dream that has been realised and fulfilled over the years. Mustafa Kamel El-Ghamrawi, Imam Mohamed Abdu and political leader Mustafa Kamel all advocated the idea of building a new college in Egypt that would encompass the high schools previously constructed during the era of Khedive Ismail. In 1908, the new university began lectures under the name of the Egyptian College. Later on, one of the princesses of the Alawi family, Fatma Ismail, donated all her jewellery and hundreds of hectors for the financing and housing of the great educational project.

Years passed and thousands of young men and women graduated from the new university, exerting all their efforts and paving the way for changing the face of life in Egypt for the better. Women were allowed for the first time to receive higher education and join faculties and colleges previously dedicated to men. Soheir El-Qalamawi and Nabawia Moussa were among hundreds of eminent Egyptian women who laid the cornerstone for the emancipation of Arab women.

However, Cairo University is not a place or an institution, it is a concept and a role model that informs the spirit and the soul of Egyptians as well as Arabs. Many Arab leaders and scholars received their essential education under its auspices; eventually they spread that knowledge to cover the whole area from east to west, from north to south. Indeed, the ticking of the famous Cairo University clock announces every minute that Egypt, the cradle of civilisation, is perpetually ready to carry on its role of enlightenment through knowledge and education.

Cairo University in its centennial celebration is really the bride of culture that beholds the sun of the future shinning firmly day upon day.

This week's Soapbox speaker is a professor of comparative literature, a critic and a writer.