A good teacher is hard to find. A good religious teacher is harder still. A few years ago, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Suspect No. 1 in the Boston Marathon bombing, wanted to learn more about Islam. He’d been arrested on a domestic-abuse charge and his boxing career was faltering; maybe he thought religion would help. Who was his teacher? His uncle and former brother-in-law say it was a family friend named Mikhail Allakhverdov. “Somehow, he just took his brain,” the uncle says. But Allakhverdov denies it: “If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this,” he told Christian Caryl last month.
A good teacher is hard to find, but it’s easier when there are good institutions where you can look for one. Back in 2000, a Catholic nun named Marianne Farina noticed a gap in the world of religious higher education. She issued a challenge to her friend, a forty-two-year-old Muslim teacher named Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. “You’re one-fourth of the world’s population. Where are the Muslim colleges?” she asked. “You need to do it.” Yusuf, an Irish-American convert who wears horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard, is perhaps the most influential Islamic scholar in the Western world, and he took Sister Farina’s question seriously. Three years ago, in Berkeley, California, he joined with Imam Zaid Shakir, an tall, slender Oakland-born black convert whose influence rivals Yusuf’s, and a Muslim academic named Dr. Hatem Bazian to found Zaytuna College, the first Muslim liberal-arts college in the United States. (Zaytuna is Arabic for olive tree.) In his new book, “Light Without Fire,” the religion writer Scott Korb followed Zaytuna’s inaugural class of fifteen students through their first year, and his reporting reveals one of the most intriguing recent American experiments in providing a religious education.
An early motto of Zaytuna’s was “Where Islam Meets America,” and in many respects Yusuf and Shakir are perfect emissaries for that meeting—in their own ways, they’re all-American guys, and they speak in an American vernacular. Their struggle is always primarily for Islamic ideals, but they think American ideals are also worth struggling for, and that in some important ways it’s the same struggle. Both America and Islam, they’d argue, strive to be cosmopolitan and egalitarian societies that place a high value on equal access to justice and religious freedom. Yusuf offers particular praise for Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose civil disobedience he calls “the essence of Islam.” Yusuf has called America “the best model we have to have a multi-faith, multicultural society,” and that he sees the roots for such a society in the historical example of “conviviality in the Muslim world.”
Zaytuna’s curriculum is modelled on the Great Books Program, a style Yusuf grew up with—born Mark Hanson, and raised in Northern California by academic parents, he was named after Mark Van Doren, a champion of the Great Books approach. He converted to Islam in 1977, after nearly dying in a car crash, and subsequently spent ten years training with leading Muslim scholars in the Middle East and North and West Africa. When he returned to California, he earned degrees in English, religious studies, and nursing, and he’s currently pursing a Ph.D. in Islamic studies at U.C. Berkeley. His writings and lectures are peppered with references to Goethe and Auden and Frost, James Madison and Patrick Henry, Dante and Plato, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. He recites not just the Koran but also Shelley and Yeats from memory. Shakir, Zaytuna’s other star founder, likewise converted to Islam in 1977, while serving in the Air Force; he was the first American to graduate from Abu Nour University, a famed seminary in Syria, and he also holds American degrees in international relations and political science. Zaytuna’s course offerings increasingly reflect the founders’ wide-ranging interests—American history, logic, rhetoric, ethics, anthropology, composition, poetry—but all of it, Korb told me, “inflected by Islam.” For Yusuf, Korb writes, Zaytuna’s liberal-arts curriculum “is part of a larger ambition to bring the sacred knowledge he gained throughout the Muslim world into conversation with classical texts of the Western tradition.”
Yusuf and Shakir can be highly critical of America—its permissiveness, its foreign policy in the Middle East, its attitude toward Muslims—but they’re also quick to say that in some ways, Muslims have it a lot better here than they would in certain Muslim-majority countries. (One exception is American public education, which Yusuf bitterly opposes, insisting that it ignores “basic human decency” and produces “no more than functional literates.” “If you want a fatwa from me,” he said at an event in 2011, “I really consider it prohibited by Islamic law to send a child to public school in this country.”) And they often draw on their own American experiences in the classroom: Shakir as a black American and a child of the civil-rights movement, and Yusuf as a descendent of Irish Catholic immigrants who were abused by Nativists in Philadelphia in the eighteen-forties—but who responded, as Korb puts it, “by building churches and schools as a way to create safe institutions that would eventually serve the entire community.” And they have; as the Times reported last year, American Catholic colleges have seen a marked increase in Muslim students over the past decade.
So far, Zaytuna’s focus is on the Muslim community; the student body, now thirty-one students, is a hundred per cent Muslim, as is the faculty, and Korb says he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. But it’s not a seminary or madrasah; the goal isn’t to train imams, but, as at any liberal-arts school, to give the students an education that will serve them in whatever career they choose. All the students are American citizens or longtime permanent residents—California and Michigan are most heavily represented—and as racially diverse as American Islam itself, with a large proportion of African-Americans. They dress pretty much like students at any explicitly religious American school, in a style you could call modern modest, topped off with hijabs for most of the women and kufis for some of the men. There’s no requirement to be religiously observant, but, in Korb’s experience, all the students are. Zaytuna is a convivial place, and the male and female students socialize freely and gather often, but it’s no party school. The tuition, at eleven thousand dollars a year, is well below average for a private four-year college, and the students are well aware that their education is largely made possible by donations from Muslims around the country who believe in Zaytuna’s experiment—and they feel keenly the pressure of the donors’ expectations.
Some of the students have already earned bachelor’s or even master’s degrees from other schools. Whatever its other merits, the school’s main draw is the chance to study with Yusuf and Shakir. To their Muslim students, many of whom grew up seeing Yusuf and Shakir speak to rapturous crowds at Muslim gatherings across the U.S. and Canada, they’re celebrities, even saints, and around Zaytuna, Korb writes, there’s a certain “longing for the scholars, a strange covetousness that you don’t find at other liberal arts schools.” Yusuf in particular is often referred to as a “rock star” by his admirers; he’s the headliner of any bill he’s on. His appeal among his followers, Korb writes, “is rooted in the way he argues against Islamic violence and in favor of Islamic mercy.” Shakir’s teachings tend to emphasize social justice, particularly as it relates to poverty and racism. Both derive their authority among Muslims by basing their arguments in their deep knowledge of Sharia law. But despite their renown among Western believers, “if you’re not Muslim you probably don’t know who they are,” Korb says. “And even if you do, the knowledge they possess that professors at other liberal arts schools don’t is sacred knowledge.”
When it comes to such sacred knowledge, Zaytuna aspires to offer a broad education, from Islamic jurisprudence to Arabic grammar. The founders reject sectarianism, teaching equally from multiple Muslim legal traditions, and emphasize the fact that there has been genuine disagreement on every point of Islamic law by the most learned of scholars. (One example is a paper Yusuf wrote on the spectrum of Islamic legal opinions on the playing of chess throughout history, ranging from prohibition to recommendation, which he concludes with a reflection on the thin line between recreation and killing time.) The founders are a lot more interested in the Islamic intellectual traditions of centuries past—and the way those traditions interacted with and expanded on the intellectual traditions of other faiths—than they are in current Muslim factional disputes and political movements. “Personally, I think we need a Muslim stillness rather than a Muslim movement,” Yusuf told Al Jazeera. “I think people need more quietude in their lives.” The emphasis at Zaytuna is on reading, discussion, and reflection.
But this shouldn’t be taken to mean that Zaytuna is a liberal institution. In some ways, Yusuf’s practice suggests that he’s a Sufi, but he’s wary of the term, fearing, it seems, that it will rob him of his claims to orthodoxy. At the same time, he’s called the mindset of literalists and extremists “bizarre” and “idiotic,” and refers to religious militants as “nut jobs.” Because he holds this particular position on the Islamic spectrum, and because he’s thoughtful, intelligent, and abhors violence, Yusuf is often described by non-Muslims as a “moderate.” What they mean is that he’s a Muslim whom they’re not particularly scared of. But it’s not a word that accurately describes his religious stance, which is overwhelmingly traditional and conservative. As Korb notes, genuinely moderate Muslim academics—the kind who appear on “The Daily Show,” like Reza Aslan—"aren’t typically starting Islamic colleges from the ground up; they tend to enroll in centers for Islamic studies at solidly secular institutions.” Yusuf and Shakir have more in common with American Christian conservatives—despite the fact that many such Christians are wary of them at best—than they do with American Muslim liberals. “I’m not really a spiritual progressive,” Yusuf told Korb. “I believe in treating people well, but I don’t believe in all this acceptance.”
That leads us to the tension at the heart of Korb’s book: Is a conservative religious liberal-arts college an oxymoron? American Catholic and Jewish universities offer plentiful examples of reconciling their religious identities with a secularizing country—but many of them, from Georgetown to Brandeis, have done so primarily by deëmphasizing religion. Even as Zaytuna continues to expand its liberal-arts curriculum, downplaying Islam is decidedly not part of its plan. Nor is reform: at Zaytuna, the objective is to study “Islam as it is.”
Again, while Zaytuna’s experiment is novel, there’s some precedent here: there are predictable areas in which the tension between religious conservatism and liberal arts has manifested itself at Christian colleges, and they seem likely to play out at Zaytuna as well. One is evolutionary theory, an area of inquiry that Yusuf has little use for. “I don’t care how many degrees you have,” he said in a speech at the end of the first school year. “If you deny design in this world, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a lunatic.” In practice, Zaytuna’s approach has been to frame natural selection as an important side of a scientific debate, and one teacher told Korb that the students take the scientific consensus on the matter seriously—just as they would religious consensus on a point of Islamic jurisprudence. Another is homosexuality, and it’s on this subject that Korb’s book is especially fascinating—and Yusuf is especially disappointing. “I don’t want to see gay people bashed,” he told Korb. “But I also don’t want it normalized as a healthy thing for a society. I think it confuses young people who are already having enough things to deal with.” He went on to say that a person can become a homosexual “very easily,” and that one way people turn gay is by watching too much pornography. “I don’t want things normalized,” he said. “I don’t want someone to say this is a normal, healthy lifestyle. It’s not. It’s pathogenic.” For a religious leader, these aren’t particularly unusual views. But for the president of a liberal-arts college and a scholar, they are embarrassing.
Yusuf has said that there are lines he won’t cross in order to be “politically correct.” As Korb puts it, “If Zaytuna is to become a liberal arts college, in the model of religious institutions like Georgetown, Marquette, or Brandeis—or Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, for that matter—it will have to at least address some of these lines, and probably cross them eventually"—especially, I’d add, a school like Zaytuna, which explicitly seeks to engage with American culture and what’s happening here now. Yusuf simply can’t ignore the overwhelming move toward acceptance of gays in a country whose tradition of tolerance he purports to admire.
If it seems farfetched that establishment Muslims would make peace with homosexuality, it’s not. In 1858, the Ottoman Empire, seat of the global Islamic Caliphate, decriminalized homosexuality, nearly a hundred and fifty years before it happened everywhere in the United States. Much more recently, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, made the case for Muslim acceptance of gay marriage. And there’s no shortage of American Muslim academics who could offer a gay-friendly perspective at Zaytuna—such as the gay Muslim scholar Scott Kugle, the author of “Homosexuality in Islam,” whose chapter about Yusuf in another book Yusuf recently called the best thing anyone’s ever written about him. (Whether he admits or not, it seems that Yusuf has already managed some evolution on the question of homosexuality; over a decade ago, Alternet quoted him as saying, “If one considers it acceptable in Islam, then he or she is not considered to be a Muslim by consensus of the scholars"—and it’s unlikely that he’d have praised Kugle if he still felt that way.)
If Yusuf refuses to cross his line, there’s no doubt that he’ll remain safely within the mainstream of current orthodox Muslim thought. But it will also mean that Zaytuna will remain marginal among American liberal-arts colleges. If Yusuf had wanted to create a school that’s a Muslim equivalent of Bob Jones University, he wouldn’t have any problem—there’s a long tradition of intolerant American religious colleges that Zaytuna could fit into. But few of them have the élite academic reputation Zaytuna aspires to. One notable exception is Wheaton College, a Christian Evangelical liberal-arts school in Illinois, which has repeatedly been ranked the least L.G.B.T.-friendly college in the United States by the Princeton Review, but which is also highly regarded for the quality of its undergraduate teaching. It’s clear, though, that its anti-gay reputation is a matter of concern to Wheaton. In February, in response to activism by gay students, the school endorsed an L.G.B.T. support group as an official campus organization for the first time. “We want Wheaton College to be a community where people can wrestle with these issues,” its provost said.
It’s inevitable that Yusuf, and Zaytuna, will have to argue over the lines he’s drawn. And that’s a good thing—good for Zaytuna, good for America, and good for Islam. But it will only go well if Zaytuna is willing, as Wheaton College has been, to be open to the debate. If that’s going to happen, then, as at Wheaton, the students will have to take the lead. As Korb points out, Yusuf himself once said in a lecture, “Sometimes standing for the truth means standing against the Muslims.” And when it comes to one of the most difficult questions in Islam and America today, Yusuf’s students may find that they have to stand against the best teachers they’ve found.
