• About
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    In 2009, Zaytuna College was founded in Berkeley, California, with a mission that called for grounding students in the Islamic scholarly tradition as well as in the cultural currents and critical ideas shaping modern society.

  • Academics
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    Zaytuna College aims to educate and prepare morally committed professional, intellectual, and spiritual leaders who are grounded in the Islamic scholarly tradition and conversant with the cultural currents and critical ideas shaping modern society.

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  • Admissions & Aid
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    Our mission is to educate students to become morally, intellectually, and spiritually accomplished individuals ready to contribute to our contemporary world in ways that are proportionate to their gifts and to the needs of human society.

     

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  • Campus Life
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    Zaytuna’s campus is on Holy Hill and students enter the College as part of a cohort, a community of learners that travel together through the curriculum.

Freeing the Mind

Abdullah Qureshi on His Zaytuna Education  

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Abdullah Qureshi (BA Class of 2020) arrived at Zaytuna College in the midst of a faith crisis. It began when he studied existentialist philosophers like Sartre and Camus whose overarching message was that life is meaningless and full of suffering. He also listened to the recorded teachings of Zaytuna scholars who taught that life was full of meaning. He could not resolve the tension between these messages. His presentation on Islam in his world history class was basic. “Besides God, our Prophet ﷺ, and the pillars, I really didn’t know much about Islam,” he said.  At Zaytuna’s Summer Arabic Intensive he discovered a religious community like he’d never known. That's when he knew he wanted to attend Zaytuna College. And during his undergraduate education, he says, he had a faith awakening and acquired the tools he needed to answer his most vexing questions.   

Abdullah decided to become a lawyer. They say the first year of law school is the most difficult.  Like children thrown into deep water who flounder as they learn to swim, law students are thrown into the law without preparation or orientation. Abdullah vividly recalls his first assignment at Georgetown University Law School: read fifty pages of Supreme Court cases and be prepared to discuss them in the following week’s class.  

For Abdullah, it was a smooth transition. The practice of law is parsing words for their various meanings — and at Zaytuna he had been trained to do close readings of Arabic texts to understand the implications of textual organization and word choices. “To be honest, law school was no more challenging than my undergraduate education,” he said.  “The amount of required reading was comparable — and the material was not as complicated.” In fact, during his first year of law school he also audited master’s classes at Zaytuna. Usul was his most challenging course that year.  

As his law school graduation approached, Abdullah chose to apply to international firms where he might apply his Arabic and Islamic studies as well as his legal training. He now works in Islamic finance at Hourani & Partners, one of the largest commercial law firms in the Middle East, designing loan agreements that are sharia-compliant. It’s very easy, he says, to create workarounds that are technically valid but not at all aligned with the intention of the law.  His favorite projects are for companies and clients who genuinely seek Islamic solutions and give him the creative freedom to design debt arrangements that are aligned with the spirit — not just the letter — of the law.  His supervisor and mentor, who has worked in this realm for twenty years, studies with a mufti in Pakistan who is one of the most prominent scholars on Islamic finance.  

Abdullah also continues to study with renowned Islamic scholars — and not just in the realm of Islamic finance. He does this to improve his relationship with God — and also because there is so much work to be done. Great Islamic scholars, Abdullah says, can create a four-volume commentary from a text of just one hundred pages — and somehow every word in the commentary is extracted from the original text. His teachers are sometimes surprised by his ability to extract textual meanings that are not explicitly stated. It is clear to him that most Islamic education does not equip students with the tools he acquired at Zaytuna. This affirms the need for a revival of the Islamic intellectual tradition.  

“Over the past 200 years, out of necessity and in reaction to colonialism, our tradition shifted to a preservation mindset,” he said. “Scholars who no longer had the power to advance the tradition, who couldn’t offer creative solutions because they were not allowed to offer any solutions at all, had to shift the goal of Islamic education.”  

“Ours is a living tradition of revival and renewal,” he says.  “Reviving our religion won’t happen in the four or six years it may take to earn a degree at Zaytuna. It takes decades of study to produce someone who can revive the tradition. What Zaytuna can and does do for students is free their minds and teach them to think like Muslims.”  

The British historian Arnold Toynbee describes a “creative minority” that can renew a civilization — and Abdullah thinks a Zaytuna education produces such a creative minority.  For a true religious revival, he says, we need not just scholars but leaders in every realm of life. “Whatever else they do in their lives, graduates who think freely can find solutions to real problems in any domain,” he said. 

“Zaytuna opened every door for me,” Abdullah says. “It opened my understanding of where I could go with my Islamic studies, and it did an incredible job of laying the intellectual and ethical foundation for me to succeed in all I do.”