PLAINSBORO, N.J. — A group of American Muslims, led by two prominent scholars, is moving closer to fulfilling a vision of founding the first four-year accredited Islamic college in the United States, what some are calling a "Muslim Georgetown."
Advisers to the project have scheduled a June vote to decide whether the proposed Zaytuna College can open in fall 2010, a major step toward developing the faith in America.
Imam Zaid Shakir and Sheik Hamza Yusuf of California have spent years planning the school, which will offer a liberal arts education and training in Islamic scholarship. Shakir, a California native, sees the school in the tradition of other religious groups that formed universities to educate leaders and carve a space in the mainstream of American life.
"As a faith community our needs aren't any different than the needs of any other faith community," Shakir told the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals, as he sought donations at a recent conference near Princeton, N.J. "As Muslims, we need to develop institutions to allow us to perpetuate our values."
Others have tried to start Muslim colleges around New York and Chicago, but those schools remained obscure or quickly folded.
Shakir and Yusuf are thought to have a better chance than most to succeed.
Shakir, an African-American Air Force veteran, and Yusuf, a native of Washington state, are converts who spent years studying with Islamic scholars in North Africa and the Mideast. They speak flawless Arabic and have become widely respected teachers. Yusuf draws thousands of people to his talks and tens of thousands of viewers to his online lectures.
In 1996, Yusuf founded Zaytuna Institute, now based in Berkeley, Calif., which is dedicated to classical Muslim scholarship. Zaytuna means "olive tree" in Arabic.
The institute expanded to provide distance learning, workshops in multiple cities and conferences with prominent scholars. Shakir, a Zaytuna teacher for six years, ran a pilot seminary program from 2004 to 2008, partly to test the viability of a school. An intensive Arabic language summer course, in its second year, has doubled its enrollment.
"It is far and away the single most influential institution that's shaping American Muslim thought," said Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "On the one hand they speak so much about being American. On the other hand, they have also plugged these American Muslim students into the global Muslim curriculum, that has all the rigor of traditional Islamic scholarship."
In earlier years, Shakir and Yusuf had made some anti-American statements, but that rhetoric is not part of their teaching. Zaytuna Institute has clips on its Web site of a lecture by the two scholars called "Curing Extremism." Following a White House meeting with President George W. Bush soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Yusuf made the now widely repeated comment, "Islam was hijacked" by the terrorists, and he has condemned the attackers as "mass murderers."
A working motto for the school: "Where Islam Meets America."
Zaytuna College will start with two majors: Arabic language, and Islamic legal and theological studies.
It will not be a seminary, although some graduates could become prayer leaders, or imams. Most U.S. mosques are led by imams from overseas, considered an obstacle to Islam's development in America.
