Dear smart students!

The leaders of Al-Azhar and I extend heartfelt congratulations to you on this remarkable achievement to which Allah guided you through your patience and assiduousness in acquiring beneficial secular and religious knowledge. Congratulations to your respectable families too for the support and encouragement they offered you, for the toil and labor they endured, and for instilling in you trust in Allah and self-reliance. These true Egyptian families deserve thanks and appreciation. We really take pride in them.

Dear students!

Do proceed in full trust in Allah and keep up the hard work, excel in the colleges you will choose, whether religious, applied or technical.

Do not think that knowledge is limited to religious and linguistic sciences only. It extends to encompass all that benefits humanity, bringing their weal in a rationally, legally and religiously acceptable manner.

You will meet many distractions on your path, so be cautious and pay no heed to them. Keep going on the path of knowledge acquisition as you are entrusted to sustain the faith and show its ease and humaneness to people. Accentuate the merciful aspects in the faith towards humans, animals, and inanimate objects. Illustrate to people the beauty of the Glorious Qur’an and the Noble Sunnah and guide them to its upright Sharia.

Do not incline to the exclusivists who turn their back on proper understanding of the religion as introduced by Allah and His Messenger (pbuh). Those people succumb to aberrant preachers who have lost their way in this life and mistakenly thought that they have done well. You are the hope of the nation and the advocates of right and justice. Through your call, peace shall spread among all people, regardless of their races, religions, or creeds. Know that, among all world universities, you affiliate with an ancient institution that dates back to more than a thousand years during which it has been disseminating knowledge, literature and morals and guiding people to good and beneficial conduct. Also know that your reverend Sheikhs, despite their adherence to their weighty heritage, were the first to open their arms in Egypt to the Western culture, and to acquiring its knowledge, but that was the case only after sifting the beneficial from the non-beneficial in it.

Through your promising presence, I wish that you bring together traditional erudition and openness to the wisdom and contemporary literatures in world cultures, and that you follow the example of your predecessors in sifting the beneficial and bringing it home and abandoning the harmful in these traditions.

Indeed, Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif brought to us Sheikh Ḥasan Al-ˁAṭṭār, Rifāˁah Aṭ-Ṭahṭāwī, Muhammad ˁAyyad Aṭ-Ṭanṭāwī, Muhammad ˁAbdou, Muṣṭafa ˁAbd ur-Rāziq, Muhammad ˁAbdullah Drāz, Ghallab, and other Sheikhs who majored in the Principles of Religion, Sharia and the Arabic language, and yet studied in the universities of the West. In the same sense, Al-Azhar will not fail to bring to us the likes of them from among you who can carry the torches of pristine Islamic culture which builds on tradition, with all its sanctities, and reason in its widest venues and breakthroughs.

If I were to give you advice as a father and a teacher, it would be that you keenly learn a foreign language that would serve as your windowpane to other cultures. Among Allah’s Blessings is that it has become easy for you now to learn English, French and German at the hands of its people, and in Al-Azhar University language centers.

On another note, I should assure you that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi appreciates your role and the role of Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif, and that he largely counts on you in disseminating true knowledge and sound thought, in rooting out extremism and terrorism, and in confronting deviant thought. We are grateful to him for his noble gesture that encourages all free and devout Azharites who are loyal to their institution to double their efforts, and to patiently endure those who do not work and do not want people to work.