European observers read al-Azhar’s open pedagogy as pure chaos

Evidence

‘What is astonishing at al-Azhar is the crowd that throngs in its halls’, we are told by the Inspector-General. ‘A thousand students of every age, of every colour … scattered into groups, the diversity of costumes.’ One writer complains of the ‘chaos’ and the absence of nizam (order, discipline), noting that the teachers do nothing but sit at the pillars of the mosque giving lessons, without bothering to record the presence or absence of students or their progress through different lessons. Another writer describes ‘the brouhaha’ as ‘the students, lacking all direction, move haphazardly from professor to professor, passing from one text to another, understanding nothing of passages on which the masters comment in a language about which they have no clue, and ending with everything confounded and confused’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 281

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of a bustling medieval-university-style mosque school with vendors selling fruit among sleeping, arguing students is a vivid, shareable vignette.
• FICTION: A story detail: the chaos-coded classroom where learning actually happened through rotation — useful for worldbuilding a non-Western learning institution.