• 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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    As a Muslim liberal arts college in the West, Zaytuna offers a curriculum that provides its students with a foundation in the intellectual heritage of two major world civilizations: the Islamic and the Western.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Academics

Liberal Arts & The Trivium

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.

The trivium is the foundation of the College’s pedagogical mission. Its constituent disciplines—grammar, logic, and rhetoric, each of which is taught in both the Islamic and Euro-American traditions—are studied and repeatedly practiced by students throughout their four years of study, to achieve excellence in reading, writing, speaking, and reasoning.

A Campus Tour of Zaytuna College

Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts and Islamic Studies

Zaytuna’s bachelor of arts program is founded on an integral liberal arts curriculum, consisting of courses from both the Islamic and Euro-American traditions of higher learning.

Master’s Degree in Islamic Texts

Zaytuna’s master of arts degree in Islamic texts is intended to provide students with higher-level access to the Islamic tradition through a guided course of study in Islam’s primary sources.

Faculty

Experiential Learning

Preceptorials

What Our Students Say

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