It was dissapointing. I went there on a scholarship in 2009, and stayed for a year before leaving. The facilities are all dilapidated and old, and if you stay in the student accomodation, you will definitely feel like you are living in africa. So I would recommend anyone to find an apartment on their own. As for the teaching, it is a joke, seriously. In order to get into the bachelor's program you need to complete their mahad, high school equivalency diploma. Let me just say that the quality of teaching there is laughable. The teachers are not interested in it at all, they are government employees it is just a job to them. They are not like the kind old man who teaches Qur'an for free at your local mosque. Perhaps it's because the pay is not really enough for them to survive on, and they have no other options since studying religion gets you no job. And in Egypt, people really struggle to survive. But anyway, the quality is quite poor, the classrooms are full of dust and the guy will just give a lecture in his colloquial Ammiya Arabic, and if you don't understand, too bad, they don't care. Then of course there is the beaurocracy. It took me six weeks to complete the necessary paperwork in order to just live in the student accomodation, it would not be hyperbole to describe that experience as a nightmare; having to travel all around cairo to get bits of paper signed by random people for God know what reason (I had an interpreter). Though I am thankful that I had some pakistanis to help me do it, out of the goodness of their own hearts they gave up their time to help me. Anyway, you will have to complete 3 years in their high school to get into the university. I can't really emphasise how bad the high school/mahad really is. It really was just a waste of time. You don't learn anything in it, but you MUST attend in order to keep getting your visa renewed. Some times, the teacher would just sit at his desk and order us to write a hadith off the board. He wouldn't say anything for three hours, and we wouldn't understand what the hadith said, nor could we read his writing that well. But three hours of just sitting there, doing nothing. As I said, a waste of time. As for the university lectures, it is not like in the west, where you have tutorials, labs etc. At azhar, a very large group of students sit in the hall and the guy lectures. Then you have exams at the end. Some indians who can't speak arabic just memorise all the information and regurgitate it at the exam, so they haven't really learnt anything. And a lot of students aren't interested in being there either; it just presents them with an opportunity to live abroad, and it beats living in a mudhud in Nigeria. But of course, that does not cover everyone. So my final thoughts are, that Azhar does not deserve its reputation. The Azhar of today is not the one of the past. Today it is a large scale government university, designed to churn out government functionaries, religious or otherwise. Traditional scholarship is not something that will be facilitated for you there. The text books are all written by the Shk al Azhar, rarely are primary sources (bukhari etc) studied. However, there are many other opportunities to learn in Egypt, and those who 'go to azhar' really wanting to learn, don't learn from ahzar, they go outside and sit with scholars on their own time. This is because it is well known you will not get a full, proper islamic education from just 'going to azhar.'