The spirit of Azhar continues to bridge different worlds

H A Hellyer

• Last Updated: June 17. 2009 9:50PM UAE / June 17. 2009 5:50PM GMT

So, an American politician – we all know who – went to Egypt recently. Cairo University, a secular institution, as well as the Azhar University, hosted him. The former is a century old, while the latter was founded a millennium ago. Yes, a millennium. In that time, the Azhar has become the premier Muslim institution of learning for the Muslim world – and not just for the many thousands that enter through its doors every year from around the Muslim world.

The Azhar has not just established itself as a university that draws people in, but also as an accreditation body for other institutions. In the UK, there is a postgraduate educational institution in London that used to be headed by the late Zaki Badawi (an Azhar graduate). Singapore has long had ties between madrassas there and the Azhar in Egypt, which is similar to the case in Brunei and many other countries.

The popularity of the Azhar approach, rooted in tradition but open to the world, is why the Azhar itself has become so widespread in its influence over the last thousand years. It prides itself on being a normative, Sunni institution. It’s graduates are commonly expected to respect the four rites of Sunni Muslim law, establish themselves on Ash’arite speculative theology and have sympathy for the spiritual tradition of Islam known in the West as Sufism.

A new college has just been launched in the United States that will also be seeking Azhar University recognition – but with something of a twist, both for Muslims they educate, as well as for the education they will provide. This is not the only new institution influenced by the Azhar approach.

The new American college, the Zaytuna College in California, an outgrowth of the Zaytuna Institute founded in the mid 1990s, will definitely be within that open but rooted spirit of Azhar. The two scholars that have worked so hard for it to become a reality, while not Azhar graduates, were trained at the hands of people who would respect that normative Sunni approach. Hamza Yusuf Hanson, an American convert who founded the college, is well known to UAE audiences. Hanson first studied Islam in Al Ain before going to other countries in the Arab world, and continues to be invited to the UAE as an honoured guest. He is perhaps the most famous of Muslim western scholars.

Zaytuna’s other founding personality is Zaid Shakir, also an American convert, who first studied Islam in Egypt with Azhar graduates, before continuing his studies in Syria and Morocco. Both Shakir and Hanson are widely recognised as authentic Muslim scholars who are able to articulate an Islamic vision in America, and an American narrative for Muslims.

It’s perhaps that “American ingredient” that makes the Zaytuna College distinctive. Yes, the Azhar accreditation will be important to establish Zaytuna’s “normative credentials” as Islam has no “church”, and academic institutions are vital in validating teachings as being grounded in the historical and academic tradition of Islamic teaching.

The reputation of the Zaytuna Institute, as being a place where Islam was being taught in the same manner as it had been for centuries in the seminaries of the Muslim world, was key to its success among a Muslim American community that wanted to maintain the spiritual authenticity of its religion. But its efforts in invigorating a Muslim American identity was also key, and absent in many other institutions until Zaytuna began the trend.

The Zaytuna college promises to be a next step in that regard: alongside the Quran, legal theory, theology and Arabic, there will also be an emphasis on studying history, literature, philosophy, political science, economics and sociology. To that end, the Zaytuna College is seeking recognition from American educational institutions. The aim is to produce Muslim scholars who are equally comfortable in dealing with modernity as they are with passing on the traditions of normative Islam.

How to properly engage with modernity from a religious paradigm is a complex problem. Zaytuna College has chosen simultaneous education as a solution. In the UK, another model is underway. Timothy J Winter, also a Muslim convert, otherwise known as Abdal Hakim Murad, studied Islam with some of the most well-known of Azhar scholars in Cairo before studying with other normative Sunni scholars in Jeddah. He is now the Sheikh Zayed Lecturer, a post sponsored by the UAE, in Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge, and has been known for years as the pioneer in articulating an indigenous Muslim message in the West.

The UK is a different kettle of fish from the US. There are plenty of seminary graduates in the UK, but their training did not include the humanities component that Zaytuna College is intent on providing. Mr Winter has come up with a solution, the Cambridge Muslim College, which provides an overview of what seminary graduates would need to know about western thought in order to minister effectively to Muslim Westerners in the UK.

The one-year Cambridge University diploma will provide seminarians with a western academic qualification that can then lead them to full time degree programmes at regular western universities. Considering that Muslim seminary qualifications are not usually recognised by Western universities, it’s certainly a bonus.

Both programmes have, in their own way, the same goal – the production of a new generation of Muslim westerners who are as indigenous in the West as their non-Muslim counterparts, who can legitimately claim the mantle of “inheritors of the Prophets”, as Muslim scholars are referred to within the Muslim canon. Such people will be a continuous bridge of understanding between the Muslim world and the West, perhaps more significant than a dozen speeches from American presidents.

Dr HA Hellyer is fellow at the University of Warwick in England and director of the Visionary Consultants Group