Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Housekeeping: A worker by Cairo University's famed dome cleans a lamp in preparation for the U.S. president's visit.

Egypt's largest public university is busy sprucing up for what might be the world's worst-kept secret: On Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama will give his first speech in the Arab world from the campus of Cairo University in Giza, Egypt.

As of last week, the venue had not been formally announced, and U.S. officials coyly responded "no comment" when asked about it. But preparations are clearly in full swing, and Egypt's capital simmers with excitement and anticipation. On a recent day, teenage workers in plastic sandals measured the front of the university's main building with giant measuring tapes coiled around their shoulders like snakes. High above them, half a dozen others grappled down the sides of the building's dome and polished it with rags and buckets of water.

Security guards and soldiers dot the campus -- though apparently no one told them to keep quiet. One plainclothes officer in acid-washed jeans interrogated a foreigner: "You with the embassy or with the White House?"

"With the press," the visitor answered. An officer quickly escorted him off the premises.

Indeed, from ensuring the campus looks its best to keeping a close eye on pesky journalists, Cairo University is honing its image for Thursday's broadcast -- just as Obama is doing the same. The Giza institution endeavors to show the world its best face: accommodating, urbane, secular, and intelligent. But what lies beneath the campus prepared for telecast?

To understand Cairo University and why Obama picked it for his banner first address, it is vital to understand the alternatives, and why he discarded them.

The usual venue for U.S. diplomats is the American University in Cairo (AUC), where such dignitaries as former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have appeared in recent years. But the school straddles the American and Egyptian worlds -- it was founded by Evangelical missionaries and teaches classes in English to a decidedly upscale student body. It's not an ideal place to reach out to a broad spectrum of Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims (and in any case, AUC has just moved from its old downtown Cairo location to a somewhat remote new campus in the desert).

In early May, the Associated Press reported that Egyptian officials hoped Obama would speak at al-Azhar Mosque, a cherished 1,000-year-old monument in this chaotic city of 18 million. It is connected to al-Azhar University, a state-affiliated seat of Sunni learning that claims to be the oldest university in the world (the university is now cohosting Obama's address).

Objections raised by Egyptian human rights activists might have given the White House pause. Gamal Eid, director of the Cairo-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, explains that Azhar originated a recent series of fatwas, or religious edicts, that accused striking workers of being un-Islamic. The mosque has also confiscated and banned 24 books in the last year, including titles such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, and Eva Luna, by Isabel Allende.

"We cautioned [Obama's] advisors against speaking at al-Azhar" as well, says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a democracy activist. An outspoken critic of the Hosni Mubarak regime who lives in exile (at the age of 71, he was sentenced to two years of hard labor), Ibrahim has long lobbied for bringing Obama to Egypt -- but only to secular and independent institutions such as the new Library of Alexandria. "We [want] the issue of secular civil society highlighted," he explains.

Cairo University, though, is an entirely Egyptian and entirely secular institution. With a student body of about 200,000 countrywide, it serves as a microcosm of the reigning influences and tensions that characterize contemporary Egypt: Islamism and secularism, anticolonialism and the countervailing aspiration to Westernize, democracy and authoritarianism.

Established in 1908 as the Egyptian University, the was founded as nothing less than an act of resistance against British colonial occupation, says Leila Soueif, a mathematics professor who has been on campus since her freshman year in 1973.

"It was a rejection of Lord Cromer's whole idea of educating the Egyptian," she says, referring to the British consul general to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. "[We] basically said, 'We can have our own universities, and not just … schools that educate people to be clerks and secretaries in colonial administrators' offices.'"

Since then, it has educated many of Egypt's best and brightest, from scientists and writers to parliamentarians and anti-Mubarak activists.

It became a public institution in 1928, when King Fuad I took it under his care and gave it his name. The 1952 revolution swept away the monarchy, and the school finally became Cairo University. Enrollment climbed steeply after President Gamal Abdel Nasser promised a university education to every Egyptian who wanted one.