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ndonesia’s Religious Affairs Ministry is blaming students seeking entry into Cairo’s Al-Azhar University through shortcuts for their own troubles, denying claims that more than 100 of them were scammed by a third-party agent, an official has said.

The Foreign Ministry recently had the police look into a possible fraud case after 122 Indonesian students held a protest in front of the Indonesian Embassy in Cairo in mid-February demanding that they be given language certificates.

The students claimed they were assured of enrolment by a broker after individually shelling out up to Rp 25 million (US$1,820) to bypass exams. The agent was also said to have threatened prospective students not to alert the embassy of their presence in Egypt for several years.

Agus Sholeh, the Religious Affairs Ministry’s head of cooperation under the Islamic higher education directorate, said on Wednesday that there had not been any case of fraud in the enrolment of students at the prestigious institution.

“Al-Azhar University has so far been very open to international students until recently, when they started to tighten immigration regulations,” he told The Jakarta Post.

He said that Indonesians wishing to study at Al-Azhar previously were able to go to Egypt to take the entrance exams, after which they were required to take a year-long language course.

However, several years ago the ministry and Al-Azhar decided to establish a single-channel enrolment process, in which prospective students would apply through the ministry and take the entrance and language exams in Indonesia.

“The students either don’t know about the regulation, or they intentionally went to Cairo first, thinking that as long as they take language courses there, they can take the entrance test,” Agus said.

Al-Azhar University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the Muslim world, has long attracted Indonesian scholars seeking to learn about moderate Islam.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry had asked the National Police’s criminal investigations department (Bareskrim) to look into the case and coordinate with authorities in Egypt to track the whereabouts of the broker who allegedly illegally arranged for the 122 students to go to Cairo.

“We’ve got some data about the agency, consisting of Indonesians living in Indonesia or in Egypt, who had sent the students abroad,” the ministry’s director for citizen protection abroad, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said recently.

Iqbal said the embassy in Cairo would facilitate a language test this month. If the students pass, they would be able to apply to Al-Azhar. “If they passed they can continue their registration to Al-Azhar, but if not, they would have to go home,” said Iqbal.

He said the students came from different regions in Indonesia, such as Central Java, West Java, and West Nusa Tenggara, and had gone to Egypt over several years on visitor visas.

Last month, more than 1,500 students who applied legally through the Religious Affairs Ministry last year were told to take language courses before starting their studies at Al Azhar.

Agus said such practices were normal, adding that the only difference from previous years was that the university announced it publicly, instead of just telling students individually.