Finding Solace in Knowledge
Sundays, April 5, 12, and 19 | 1 pm PST
A new Sunday series with Zaid Shakir, Talal Ahdab, and Faraz Khan
Sundays, April 5, 12, and 19 | 1 pm PST
According to our tradition, tribulation—notwithstanding its difficulty—always presents an opportunity for us to reorient our hearts to God. In his text On Benefitting from Misfortunes, al-’Izz ‘Abd al-Salam al-Sulami (d. 1262) laid out seventeen ways through which a person might raise his or her standing with God in times of distress.
Zaytuna College will host a live three-part
series, The Seventeen Benefits of Tribulation, based on Shaykh al-Sulami's
text, featuring cofounder Zaid Shakir and faculty members Talal Ahdab and Faraz
Khan. After his talk, each scholar will take questions from the online audience.
Scholar |
Date and Time |
---|---|
Faraz Khan |
Sunday, April 5 | 1 pm PST |
Talal Ahdab |
Sunday, April 12 | 1 pm PST |
Zaid Shakir |
Sunday, April 19 | 1 pm PST |
We hope this guidance from our scholars, rooted deep in the soil of our tradition, will enrich us all as we navigate this unprecedented global challenge together. The lessons will be livestreamed on this page and the Zaytuna College Facebook page every Sunday until Ramadan, God willing.
Zaid Shakir, a cofounder of Zaytuna College, is a prominent American Muslim scholar. He has taught courses in Arabic, Islamic spirituality, contemporary Muslim thought, Islamic history and politics, and Shafi’i fiqh at the College. He speaks and writes on a wide range of topics, and he travels frequently across the United States to support institution-building projects in the Muslim community. In 2007, he was a signatory of the 2007 letter “A Common Word Between Us and You,” an appeal for peace and cooperation between Christians and Muslims, and in 2016, he presided over the public memorial for Muhammad Ali.
Talal Ahdab serves on the MA faculty at Zaytuna College. He pursued a rigorous and structured classical curriculum with Islamic authorities, with a focus on Islamic theology, epistemology, ontology, language, jurisprudence, and legal theory. Over the last twenty years, he has been teaching the Islamic disciplines to senior students as well as professors of Islamic studies. His research interests include exploring how modern challenges can be addressed through Islam's rich tradition of knowledge and scholarship.
Faraz A. Khan is on the faculty at Zaytuna College. He resided in Amman, Jordan, from 2004 to 2011, where he read classical texts with distinguished scholars in Ashʿari and Maturidi scholastic theology, Hanafi jurisprudence, prophetic narration, logic, and other religious sciences; he received scholarly authorization after seven years of full-time private study. His current research interests center on the engagement of philosophical theology and ethics with the contemporary age. His book A Prolegomenon to Islamic Theology, a translation and annotation of an intermediate Maturidi teaching text, will be published by Zaytuna College this summer.