WEB SPECIALS

What are Web Specials?

As a bonus for visiting our web site, we offer various special deals on our tours to the web audience. This is usually the first, and sometimes the only place where we will offer these deals on the website. They range from being tours to new destinations or special prices on our existing ones.

Please check back often to see what new specials we are offering. Also, if you would like to be informed automatically of any specials or new destinations, please join the Bestway Club where you will receive advance notification of every new destination and tour special that we run. To join the club simply click here. It will compose and address an e-mail message to bestway@bestway.com indicating your desire to join the club. All you have to do is send the message. It's that easy.

Here is brief run down of what is happening at Bestway Tours & Safaris

Your team at Bestway Tours & Safaris is always on the move checking out different services and destinations. In the first six months of this year, we have been on educational visits to Morocco, India and the Philippines.. Education both by personal visits as well as in house research is a very important part of our operations.

If you are interested in doing a particular tour and that may not have enough participants to confirm its operation, we can, through this column advise other Club members who may be interested. This can also help for those members who are interested in getting a room share mate for any tour. So just let us know and we will try our best. You may contact us at 1.800.663.0844 / bestway@bestway.com

Any tour of the historical city of Cairo is incomplete without a visit to the Al Azhar Mosque - seat of the most esteemed Islamic school in the world. Located in the old part of Cairo, Al Azhar was founded in 970 AD by Jawar, the military commander Caliph Moez. With Caliph Moez's ascension in 969, the founding of the Fatimid Empire began in Egypt. The Fatimid rule was the high period of learning and tolerance in Egypt and in 975AD the mosque became a teaching institution later converted to a University. When the famous Central Asia traveler Nasir Khusraw visited Al-Azhar in 1047, he found 317 professors and as many as 9758 students engaged in the study of logic, mathematics, law, physics, astronomy and theology. Napoleon Bonaparte, who conquered Egypt wrote in his diary that Al Azhar was the counterpart to the Sorbonne in Paris.Today, after some 1035 years, the Al Alzhar University still functions as the leading school in the Islamic world and teaches Islamic thought along with modern sciences including medicine.

The architecture of the mosque reflects its many centuries of existence, as successive sultans and emirs added minarets and other details through the ages. Today there are five artistically designed minarets with small balconies and intricately carved columns. It has six entrances, with the main entrance being the 18th Century Bab el-Muzayini (barber's gate), where students were once shaved. This gate leads into a small courtyard and then into the Aqbaughawiya Madresa built in 1340 which now serves as a library. Not to be missed is the Taybarsiya Medersa built in 1310 which has a very fine mihrab (niche facing Mecca). The Qaitbay Entrance was built in 1469 and has a minaret built on top. Inside is a large courtyard surrounded with porticos supported by over three hundred marble columns of ancient origin. The Kufic inscription on the interior of the mihrab is still original.

The Grand Mufti - Imam of Al Azhar is recognised as a leading religious scholar in the Islamic world with authority to pass opinions which many Muslims may take it as binding. An interesting aspect is that Al Azhar founded by the Shia Fatimid Caliph is now a renowned Sunni University. On June 4, 2009, when President Obama made his speech in Cairo, he was guest of Al Azhar University.