By Mahmoud Hosni Radwan –
This is not a passing warning but a genuine obituary for Egypt’s civil intellect. It is the alarm sounded by Pr. Hamed Abdallah Hamed (*). What he wrote is not merely an opinion but a documented testimony to a stage in which education is being transformed from a project of national advancement into a project of religious guardianship. The opening of Al-Azhar “Riwaqs” within public universities amounts to a declaration of the clinical death of the modern university project in Egypt.
Lutfi al-Sayyid and Taha Hussein Look on in Horror from Their Graves
Let us remember Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid, the Teacher of the Generation and the first president of Cairo University, who founded the Egyptian University in 1925 as a thoroughly civil institution. His slogan, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” was a declaration of war against sectarianism and narrow religious universalism.
Then came Taha Hussein to continue the battle. His famous declaration that “education is like water and air” meant that knowledge is a right for everyone, free from guardianship and tutelage. His statement that “science is to the university what religion is to (people)” meant that the university’s only creed should be the critical scientific method—not religious texts and not sermonizing discourse.
These two men did not build Cairo University to be a mosque or a church. They built it to be Egypt’s weapon in the battle for modernity. Today, as Al-Azhar Riwaqs are being opened at Benha University as a pilot project before possible expansion to other universities, those two men must be looking on in horror, for the project they created is now being dismantled by those who claim to be the guardians of identity.
What Is a Riwaq, and Why Is It Dangerous?
Historically, the riwaq was Al-Azhar’s traditional educational system: rote learning, memorization of texts, commentary upon commentaries, and complete submission to religious authority. No criticism. No fundamental questioning. No methodological doubt.
Introducing such a system into a civil university means one thing only: killing the university’s critical spirit. The modern university rests on four pillars:
• Independence of thought
• Freedom of research
• Criticism and debate
• Procedural secularism—the separation of knowledge from doctrine
The riwaq embodies none of these pillars. It belongs to another age. Bringing it into the university is therefore an act of academic suicide and a declaration that Egypt wants memorizers of texts rather than thinkers.
Calling today’s educational system “Taliban-style education” and describing the Ministry of Education as a “Ministry of Kuttabs” is not a subjective attack. It is an accurate diagnosis of what is happening. When institutions become factories of intellectual obedience rather than questions, and when ideological conformity becomes more important than scholarly competence, what remains is no longer a university. It is a mosque—or a monastery—bearing the name of a university.
Who today would dare criticize a religious text inside a public university? Who would dare discuss sensitive philosophical questions such as secularism or the critical study of religious heritage?
The answer is obvious: no one. The university is no longer neutral; it has become an official extension of a single religious discourse.
Al-Azhar already possesses its own institutions, colleges, specialized institutes, schools, and educational structures. Let it do as it wishes within them and apply its Taliban-style ideas there if it chooses. But it should stay away from the university and leave it to fulfill its own mission.
Egypt’s public universities belong to all Egyptians: Muslim and Christian, religious and non-religious, Azharite and non-Azharite alike. Opening an official Al-Azhar Riwaq inside these universities therefore excludes all other Egyptians. It is an explicit declaration that the university’s identity is no longer neutral but traditionally Islamic, and that any Christian, secular Muslim, or even an ordinary Muslim who does not belong to the Azharite tradition will find himself a stranger in his own country, within a campus that is supposed to be neutral.
The Tragedy of Balancing Acts
Are Egypt’s universities suffering from a shortage of religious discourse? Of course not.
What Egypt is suffering from is:
• The decline of scientific research and poor global rankings;
• A record pace of brain drain;
• Empty laboratories and obsolete libraries;
• Graduate unemployment worthy of a failed developing state;
• International rankings that should embarrass any Egyptian who knows the country’s historical stature.
Why, then, should the priority be Al-Azhar Riwaqs rather than laboratories, research centers, scholarships, and scientific missions?
The answer is obvious. The priority is no longer science or development. The priority is the “sectarianization” of educational institutions and their transformation from factories of free thought into factories of ideological obedience.
Lessons from History
Europe did not rise through preaching but through challenging inherited authority. Europe’s renaissance began with a scientific revolution that removed the Church from the university.
Japan did not become a major power through religious arcades but through rigorous technical universities. South Korea, which was poorer than Egypt in the 1960s, became a technological giant because it turned its universities into temples of science rather than religion.
By contrast, societies that fused religion and the university—from Taliban Afghanistan to post-revolutionary Iran—produced outcomes that are well known: economic decline, scientific stagnation, backwardness, debt, unemployment, and the flight of creative minds.
Is this the future we want for Egypt? Do we want to become a country whose universities are transformed into jurisprudential arcades rather than research laboratories?
Fight the Riwaqs Before They Kill the University
The cry raised by Pr. Hamed Abdallah is a final warning from someone who still cares about Egypt’s enlightenment project. This is not a passing outburst of anger or an academic caution. It is a battle for Egypt’s very identity.
There are two competing visions.
The vision of Lutfi al-Sayyid and Taha Hussein: Egypt as a modern civil state, whose universities are beacons of free thought and whose only academic creed is science.
And the opposing vision: Egypt as a backward state in which every institution—including the university—is subjected to religious guardianship, where education becomes indoctrination and preaching rather than inquiry and criticism.
There is no middle ground. Opening a single Riwaq is the beginning of the end.
The outcome is inevitable: a clinically dead Egyptian university graduating generations that memorize jurisprudence and prohibit reason.
God have mercy on the days when university presidents were philosophers and deans were critics.
Who will save Egypt?
(*) Pay attention, please! Egypt is moving backwards.
by Pr. Hamed Abdallah Hamed –
God have mercy on the days of Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid, the Teacher of the Generation, the first president of the oldest and most important university in Egypt and the entire East—Cairo University—and the man who proclaimed: “Egypt for the Egyptians.”
And God have mercy on Taha Hussein, dean of its Faculty of Arts and the “Leader of the Enlightened,” who declared that “education is like water and air for all Egyptians,” and that “science is to the university what religion is to life.”
May God help us endure these cursed times, in which Egypt has become “for the Azharites,” the Ministry of Education has become a “Ministry of Kuttabs,” and the Ministry of Higher Education has become a “Ministry of Taliban-Style Education.”
Like Umm Kulthum, one can only lament:
“We want to return to the way things once were.
Tell Time to come back, O Time!”
And, recalling al-Baroudi:
“Knowledge has departed and the days have passed away.
Peace be upon knowledge, and peace be upon time.”
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