• 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.

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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.

Rabia Bajwa

Assistant Professor

Rabia Bajwa

Biography

Email: rbajwa@zaytuna.edu

Office Hours: By Appointment

Dr. Rabia Bajwa specializes in teaching Arabic as a foreign language. She has taught Arabic to non-native speakers at various universities and institutions over the past twenty years. She has taught Modern Standard Arabic, Classical Arabic and Qur’anic Arabic. Her research interests include Second Language Acquisition, Arabic Linguistics, and Qur’anic Studies.

Dr. Bajwa received her BA in Asian Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2001 and her MA/PhD in Arabic Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2012. She has studied Arabic in Damascus, Cairo, and Doha.

Her dissertation, Divine Story-Telling as Self-Presentation: An Analysis of Surat-Al-Kahf, explores the application of Discourse Analysis to five Qur’anic narratives. It presents an analytical framework on how God tells a story while advancing a cohesive reading of the five narratives.

Dr. Bajwa is proficient in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Spanish

Dr. Bajwa joined the Zaytuna faculty in the Fall of 2022.

Education

Education



  • BA in Asian Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2001

  • MA/PhD in Arabic Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2012