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A book investigating the social practices and material culture at al-Azhar, an Islamic center of learning in Cairo, from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

Founded in 972 in Cairo, al-Azhar is the leading religious authority for Sunni Islam. My book is a cultural biography of al-Azhar from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a formative 250-year period, which straddles Egypt’s Mamluk and Ottoman eras. It investigates the complex interplay between the social structures and material culture that scaffolded Islamic learning at al-Azhar (from the rise of fraternities to lockers) and the social practices performed by people in day-to-day life that gave structure and meaning to its rich landscape. Scholarly consensus asserts that al-Azhar rose in prominence as an Islamic center of learning in the sixteenth century. The project reformulates the problématique of al-Azhar’s rise into an investigation of the transition of the Arab provinces to Ottoman rule, specifically the effect of the new administration on educational institutions. It combines sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, including untapped Ottoman court records.