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.
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