Aligarh Muslim University

Since its inception as Mohammedan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College in 1875, the Aligarh Muslim University has grown into a premier university offering quality education in a wide spectrum of academic disciplines. It has 88 departments, 5 institutions and 13 centers country wide. Located in a sprawling 467.6 hectares of land, the university has about 28,000 students on its rolls, 1,400 academic staff and 6,000 non-teaching staff. Around 500 foreign students come to study at AMU every year. The university offers courses in Agriculture, Arts, Commerce, Engineering, Technology, Law, Life Science, Management, Medicine, Social Science, Theology and Unani Medicine. There is a well equipped central library which has a rich collection of academic texts along with other rare collections. Most noteworthy of them are the 1400-year-old fragment of the Holy Quran transcribed by Hazrat Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam written on parchment in Kufi script, and the Halnama of Beyazid Ansari, whose no other copy is available anywhere else in the world. The University also has excellent facilities for sports and recreation. There are separate fields for cricket, hockey, and football, apart from those for indoor games such as billiards and chess.