From The New Yorker Magazine
by Rollo Romig
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 Caryllast 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.”
