In an article written for Campus Watch and posted today at American Thinker, Stephen Schwartz demonstrates that in spite of numerous media claims that Zaytuna is “America’s first Islamic college,” it is in fact neither first nor much of a college; that title belongs to the American Islamic College in Chicago. Schwartz examines Zaytuna’s radical founder, Hamza Yusef Hanson, and the school’s meagre offerings:
With the beginning of the 2010-2011 academic year, it was doubtless predictable that mainstream media as well as the educational trade press would resume its biased and inaccurate publicity, only lightly presented as reportage, on Zaytuna College. Based in Berkeley, California, Zaytuna is an effort to establish an “Islamic university” headed by the American Muslim preacher Hamza Yusuf Hanson.
Much coverage of the Zaytuna scheme unquestioningly accepts descriptions of it as “America’s first Islamic college.” That, for example, was how it was described in a September 9, 2010 feature published by StateUniversity.com, a website and print directory of public colleges, titled “First Muslim College Opens in United States.” The description is inaccurate in that the American Islamic College (AIC) in Chicago was established in 1981 as “a private, not-for-profit, four-year college offering programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies.”
