EL-AZHAR AND ITS MOSLEM STUDENTS of technical education has been started and the govern¬ ment has model workshops at Bulak and Asyut. At Cairo it has a school of agriculture, a school of engineering, and schools of law and medicine.

An important movement has been the introduction of modern studies into the village schools belonging to the Mohammedans. These were formerly, and are to some extent now, under the university of El-Azhar. They were connected with the mosques and taught by Mohammedan priests. They were supported by the people themselves and also by a Mohammedan religious organization known as the Wakf, which has an enormous endowment. There were something like ten thousand of these schools scattered over the lower part of the Nile valley, with an attendance of nearly two hundred thousand. They taught little more than the Arabic language, the Koran, and reading, writ¬ ing, and arithmetic. Lord Cromer wanted to bring these schools under the ministry of public instruction and in¬ troduce our modern studies. When the teachers refused to accept supervision, he offered to give every mosque school that would come in an appropriation of fifty cents for every boy and seventy-five cents for every girl. This brought good results. At present only half of each school day is set apart for the study of the Koran and the precepts of Islam, and I am told that such of the Mohammedan pupils as do well are more likely to get appointments under the government than if they were Christians or Copts.

The girls of Egypt are beginning to get an education. For a long time it was hard to persuade their parents to send them either to the government or the private schools, but of late some of the native educated women have taken 77