Al-Azhar in Cairo is a mosque and centre of learning that has been, for most of a millennium, among the most authoritative institutions of Sunni Islam.
Shia foundation, Sunni institution
Al-Azhar was founded by the Shia Fatimid dynasty: construction began in 970 and the first Friday prayer was held in 972, and it served at first as a centre of Ismaili Shia teaching. After the Sunni Ayyubids under Saladin ended Fatimid rule in the twelfth century, the institution was reoriented to Sunni Islam, and it grew into the pre-eminent centre of Sunni religious scholarship, teaching law, theology, Quranic sciences and Arabic to students drawn from across the Muslim world.
The nature of its authority
Al-Azhar's opinions on doctrine, law and public conduct carry weight far beyond Egypt, and its Grand Imam, the Shaykh al-Azhar, is as close as Sunni Islam comes to a single recognised religious voice, which is not very close: Sunni Islam has no clergy, no ordination and no central magisterium, and al-Azhar's standing rests on prestige and scholarship rather than on any power to bind believers. Its relationship with the Egyptian state has long shaped, and constrained, that authority.
A living institution
Al-Azhar remains a working mosque and, since a modern reorganisation, a large university teaching secular as well as religious subjects, alongside the traditional teaching circles that continue in the mosque itself. It trains scholars and preachers who carry its interpretation of Islam across the Sunni world, and it continues to issue opinions on contemporary religious questions; it is an active centre of worship and learning rather than a monument.