ABSTRACT
Azharite students who had been selected to study at abu Za'bal, and then gone on to Europe for advanced specialized training after graduation, returned to join the small but growing community of educated elite coming out of Muhammad Ali's institutes. During the first half of the 19th century, Muhammad Ali's educational innovations introduced modern medicine and science to several thousands of students, many of whom had been students in Islam's most venerable institution of advanced religious study. Some shaykhs became students in the Language and Translation School in preparation for employment as language teachers or as translators and proofreaders of the scientific and technical texts being translated into Arabic. Modern science, the offspring of those Greek rational sciences that had been warned against by the great theologians of the past, was a product of the West, millennial enemy and perverter of the good name of Islam and its Prophet.
