A teaching at the Al-Azhar

Share

A teaching session at al-Azhar, the mosque-university in Cairo that has been a center of Islamic learning for more than a thousand years, is the particular subject of this 1977 color photograph. The record places it among the dye destruction prints from the 1970s held by the Library of Congress, and its subjects point to students and people gathered at the university itself. Al-Azhar was founded in the late tenth century and remained one of the most important places for religious and legal study in the Muslim world, so a scene of instruction there in the late 1970s shows an institution with deep roots still at work. Color prints from this decade often recorded everyday life with a warm, saturated palette, which makes them useful for seeing how such places looked at the time.

More from the Historic Print Archive collection

Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation.