• About
    LeConte-Menu-sm-300.jpg

    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
    student-book-writing-small.jpg

    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.

    .

  • Admissions & Aid
    teacher-students-sisters-small.jpg

    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
    sisters-looking-out-window-small.jpg

    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.

Mohamed Lamallam

Mohamed Lamallam

Biography

Email: mlamallam@zaytuna.edu

Office Hours: By appointment

Dr. Mohamed Lamallam is a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies whose work bridges classical Islamic learning with contemporary academic scholarship. His field specialties and research include Islamic Ethics, Arabic Literature and Linguistics, Methods and Theories in the Study of Religion, the categories of religion and secularity in Islamic thought, the semantics of the Qur’an and Islamic philosophical theology (kalām), and the intellectual world and writings of al-Māwardī.

At Zaytuna College, Dr. Lamallam teaches Introduction to Hadith, Arabic Grammar and Texts I & II, and Advanced Arabic Studies I & II (al-Raghib’s Muḥādarāt and classical adab anthologies). He is also developing preceptorials on Islamic ethics and topics within the Islamic liberal arts.

Dr. Lamallam received his M.A. and Ph.D. (2024) in Theology and Religious Studies from Georgetown University. Prior to that, he obtained an Ijazah (B.A.) and Taʾhil (Master’s-level qualification) in the Islamic sciences from the University of al-Qarawiyyin, Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania for Higher Islamic Studies in Rabat, Morocco, as well as a B.A. and M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Mohammed V University.

Dr. Lamallam’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Religion and Secularity in Classical Islam: The Dīn/Dunyā Differentiation in the Practical Philosophy and Cultural Context of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Māwardī (d. 450 AH/1058 CE),” investigates how classical Muslim scholars conceptualized the domains of religion (dīn) and worldly life (dunyā) in dialogue with prevailing academic narratives about the nature of Islam and its place in the modern world. By tracing the gradual emergence of conceptual demarcation of domains of knowledge and human activity in the formative centuries of Islam, the thesis examines the functions of religious/worldly differentiation in the classifications of the sciences, political theory, debates over the scope of revealed law, cultural sensibilities reflected in adab literature, and ethical thought.

Dr. Lamallam is a native speaker of Tamazight (Berber) and Arabic, fluent in French, and has a reading proficiency in additional languages such as Persian and German.