I think the founding of the Zaytuna College is an excellent initiative.
NEW YORK: This is with reference to your report of November 22 titled “Muslim university takes root in Berkeley, California”. I think the founding of the Zaytuna College, a spin-off from Imam Hamza Yusuf Hanson’s Zaytuna Instititue, is an excellent initiative. Islamic scholars like Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Chair of the Islamic Studies at Cambridge University Sheikh Timothy Winter are an incredible source of pride for contemporary Muslims.
I think a major problem that Muslims face today is that their traditional religious leadership cadre draws itself from the most underprivileged and intellectually weakest segments of society, which limits their understanding of religion. At the Ivy Muslim conference in Yale this year, I was very fortunate to meet Sheikh Yasir Qadhi, an American of Pakistani origin pursuing his PhD in Islamic Studies after spending years in Saudi Arabia studying at the Islamic University of Madinah.
Several times he suggested that young, intelligent and highly-educated Muslims should take up the leadership mantle and bring a balance to the office of a ‘khateeb’. In the past, madrassas have been engines of great scientific discovery, such as the observatory in the Uluqh Beg Madrassa. Similarly, Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian convert to Islam, was an Islamic scholar and an inventor and brought the first printing press to the Muslim world. In fact, in earlier times, many Ottoman officials were both religious scholars and held other prominent positions in various facets of professional life — Haalet Effendi, a diplomat in Europe sent by the Sultan, for instance, comes to mind.
Taimur T Malik
Columbia University
Published in The Express Tribune, November 26th, 2010.
