Zaytuna College

In 2009, Zaytuna College was officially launched in Berkeley, California.

Its first academic program was a two-month Summer Arabic Intensive, welcoming students into an immersive study of the language of revelation. The program emphasized the essential skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing, while giving special attention to grammar, morphology, syntax, and the habits of serious study.

It was a fitting beginning for a college whose mission would be to form students grounded in the Islamic scholarly tradition and conversant with the ideas shaping the modern world. What had begun as classes, seminars, publications, and community gatherings had now taken a historic new form.

The dream was now a college.

The early seeds of Zaytuna were planted by people who believed sacred knowledge could take root in America. Today, you can help that work continue. Join 12000 Strong and stand with Zaytuna for the next 30 years.

Give monthly at zaytuna.edu/30

In 2004, Zaytuna Institute launched a pilot seminary program in response to a pressing need: the paucity of religious leaders with both deep grounding in the Islamic tradition and the cultural literacy to tend to the spiritual and pastoral needs of American Muslims.

Zaytuna set out to help form scholars and shepherds who could serve their communities with knowledge, wisdom, and mercy—leaders fluent in the sacred tradition and attentive to the world their communities actually lived in.

Alongside this new program, Zaytuna’s community classes continued to flourish, with offerings such as “Exemplars of Courage,” “The Rightly Guided Caliphs,” and “Links to the Past, Bridges to the Future: African Muslims in American History.”

The pilot seminary program marked an important step toward what Zaytuna would eventually become: a college dedicated to restoring a holistic model of Islamic education in the West.

The early seeds of Zaytuna were planted by people who believed sacred knowledge could take root in America. Today, you can help that work continue. Join 12000 Strong and stand with Zaytuna for the next 30 years.

Give monthly at zaytuna.edu/30