The Ultimate Aim of Education
The ultimate aim of education at Zaytuna College is the inculcation of the love of beauty, truth, and goodness in a human being. Muslims call the highest truth īmān, or a firm conviction of God’s existence and providence; we call goodness islām, or submission and resignation to God’s will and action in accordance with it, on earth as it is in heaven; and we term beauty iĥsān, which literally can mean “to make beautiful,” “to reflect beauty,” and “to perceive beauty.”
Each of these is reflected in the liberal arts of freedom taught at Zaytuna: grammar is man’s greatest good; logic makes him capable of recognizing truth and seeing falsehood in its absence; and rhetoric enables him to transmit beauty in all he does. With mastery of these arts, we can embark on the discovery of the absolute by light of reason only, free of the constraints of our senses, resulting in the perception (ma¢rifah) of reality, where at last we find peace and understanding.
