Letters of admission went out last month to the approximately 20 students who will make up the inaugural freshman class of Zaytuna College, which founders hope will become the nation’s first accredited Muslim institution of higher learning.
The founders of the college, which is scheduled to open in Berkeley, Calif., this fall, say Zaytuna will be a Muslim liberal arts college in the same tradition as other sectarian liberal arts colleges that operate in this country. In its early years, Zaytuna will offer bachelor’s degrees in Islamic law and theology and Arabic, according to Dr. Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of the college and chair of its academic affairs committee. As the college grows, he says, it will add majors.
“We are trying to graduate well-rounded students who will be skilled in a liberal arts education with the ability to engage in a wider framework of society and the variety of issues that confront them,” says Bazian. “We want them to have many possibilities in front of them. Those who want to pursue a master’s or Ph.D. or pursue other fields would have that ability. We are thinking of how to set up the students for success. We don’t see any contradiction between religious and secular subjects.”
Bazian, who teaches Near Eastern and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, says the college’s co-founders chose the Bay area because of the large Muslim community there and several leading universities. The other two co-founders are Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir. Although they are not professors, they do teach at the college.
The college is open to men and women of all faiths, college officials say. They expect both traditional and nontraditional students in the freshman class.
“We are getting a nice mix of our student body,” Bazian says. “We will have a more diverse class both in terms of gender and age distribution.”
For its first three to five years, the college will use a rented facility near the UC Berkeley campus. Bazian says the college has raised enough funds to carry Zaytuna through the first year and is trying to raise money for a permanent physical structure and to drum up enough financial support for a sizable endowment.
