The first accredited Islamic college in the US is being planned by an influential Muslim body hoping to produce “a generation of indigenized scholars.”
The management committee from the Zaytuna Institute, which is dedicated to classical Muslim scholarship, last week recommended launching Zaytuna College in autumn next year. The board of trustees is expected to vote on it later this month.
The college would be open to men, women, Muslims and non-Muslims, and would be on a level comparable to the best religious seminaries and higher education institutions in the US, the brochure says.
The initiative, described as a “Muslim Georgetown,” is backed by widely respected Islamic scholars and clerics across the world, who argue there is a need for institutions that can wed religious texts to a contemporary context.
There are thought to be about 7 million Muslims in the US, and in Cairo last Thursday, US President Barack Obama said that Islam had “always been a part of America’s story.”
“They have fought in our wars, served in government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they have excelled in our sports arenas, they have won Nobel prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic torch,” he said.
Every state had a mosque and there were more than 1,200 mosques within the country’s borders, Obama said, before adding: “Let there be no doubt, Islam is a part of America.”
Imam Zaid Shakir, scholar in residence at the Zaytuna Institute, said: “We’re an expanding Muslim community in North America and we don’t have any seminary or college that is endeavoring to produce a generation of indigenized scholars.”
“Non-Muslims are free to study here. We are not a closed society or a secretive one. Our goal is to have a 50/50 gender split in the student body. We’re talking about a generation of American Muslim scholars, period,” he said.
His key concerns are that there are few scholars who can meet the religious and pastoral needs of the West’s Muslim community and that much of the younger generation has become alienated from the mosque and the religious culture.
Students on the bachelor program will study the Koran, jurisprudence, legal theory, theology, hadith science, Islamic spirituality and Arabic. There will also be an emphasis on studying history, literature, philosophy, political science, economics and sociology.
The brochure states: “We see no dichotomy between what is called ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in the modern world. We believe our students will be able to contextualize Islamic knowledge in a dynamic and productive way.”
Shakir, an African-American air force veteran who converted to Islam in the 1970s, studied in Syria and Morocco.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.